The Psychedelic Nietzsche

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What is the role of psychedelically induced mystical experiences in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche?

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University of Amsterdam Thesis 

By Ricky Williamson 

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Contents:

Introduction

Part 1  - Legitimacy, precedence and Nietzsche on drugs

Part 2  - Schopenhauer, Knowledge and the problem of life as meaningless suffering

Part 3 - The Un-knowable nature of the Mystical Experience

Part 4  - The Denial of the Will as a means to The Mystical Experience

Part 5 - Nietzsche on Art and the value of Truth

Part 6 - On how to Internalize External Truths

Part 7 - Christian Morality

Part 8 - The Mystical Experience versus Christian Morality

Part 9 - Overcoming the Truth of Life as Meaningless Suffering

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

The mystical experience has been thrown out of modern, mainstream culture. Rational, materialist scientism has reigned as the worldview of choice for contemporary man following the Enlightenment; such a worldview leaves little room for anything ‘mystical’. Events are no longer the ‘will of God’, but acts of cold, dead matter. It was Friedrich Nietzsche who famously proclaimed the ‘death of God’ and he is largely regarded as the harshest critic of Judeo-Christian culture. Nietzsche played a key role in the destruction of the religious foundation at the heart of Europe. It was Nietzsche’s assertion that the death of God was a catastrophe, the effect of which would be felt around the world for millennia to come. With God gone, our belief in Him made untenable by the Enlightenment, Nietzsche felt that man had no right to any of the morality of the Judeo-Christian teachings and would inevitably be thrown into nihilism. The Judeo-Christian worldview provided a mode of being for mankind for almost 2000 years, so the destruction of this worldview could not occur quietly. It stands in time as an event of boundless magnitude. Where do we go from here? Satisfactory solutions to this modern problem are hard to come by. Having dismantled religion, Nietzsche himself set out to replace it. He placed emphasis on the role of the individual. One should not, Nietzsche suggested, follow religious dogma or secular moral laws; instead, one should follow one’s own individual path. It is my contention in this work that a re-introduction of the mystical experience into our culture is able to aid in this deification of the individual by removing fixed-truth structures. Although Nietzsche rejected the decadent form of religion he saw in his contemporary Europe, Nietzsche is far from a militant atheist, or rational materialist. I will argue that Nietzsche’s so-called Dionysian experience refers directly to what we now call the mystical experience. Thus, although for Nietzsche, God is dead, the mystical is alive and kicking. Furthermore, I will show that Nietzsche seems to have known that the ancient Greeks took a psychedelic drug in order to bring about the mystical experience during their Eleusinian Mysteries. Indeed Nietzsche comments, “Might visions and hallucinations not have been shared by whole communities, by whole cult gatherings?”[1] Nietzsche’s admiration of ancient Greek culture is well documented. However, the role psychedelic drug-induced mystical experiences played in the reason for this admiration is largely ignored. With a psychedelic renaissance currently taking place, we must return to one of our most influential philosophers in order to examine what he has to say about these substances and these most peculiar of experiences, as well as the effect they will have on people and culture. Recent psychedelic studies have shown that the mystical experience is reliably producible under scientific conditions – God, or what people for centuries have called ‘God’, is reliably producible under scientific conditions![2] Thus, even those adherents of rational, materialist scientism can no longer hide away from the possibility of the mystical experience. European culture has thrown the baby out with the bath water, we have rejected the mystical experience with our rejection of religion; let us now recover the mystical. 

The mystical experience we are discussing here is clearly defined; thus there can be little confusion about what counts as the experience. The classical mystical experience is defined by the following features; Unity, Noetic Quality (objective insight or truth is revealed), Transcendence of Space and Time, Sense of Sacredness, Deeply Felt Positive Mood, Paradoxicality and Ineffability.[3],[4],[5] People describe the mystical experience as one of “Ultimate Reality”, “Cosmic Consciousness”, one of ‘union with God’, or nirvana, depending on their culture and preferred terminology, yet the phenomenology of the experience, as listed above, is the same.[6],[7] The strangeness of this experience cannot be overstated. The phenomenological aspect that is vital to understand for the purposes of this work, is that the mystical experience offers an, at least apparent, experience of mystical illumination, a mystical truth is revealed; yet, once the experience is over, this truth, and feeling of truth, is necessarily lost and forgotten. This classical mystical experience has been shown to occur during recent psychedelic studies. In these studies, questionnaires have been used in order to discover whether the classical mystical experience occurred, or whether simply peculiar experiences occurred.[8] Thus, not just any experience counts as the mystical experience here, it is well defined and discounts many other out-of-the-ordinary experiences that one may, in everyday language, describe as being mystical. The following is not an attempt to fully explain the psychedelic experience, which can include phenomena other than the classical mystical experience, or even to explain the whole contents of the classical mystical experience itself which, we will find, may be unknowable.

To begin this work I will outline Nietzsche’s problem, our problem. This problem is man’s core problem, it may be our only problem: life is meaningless suffering. I often wonder whether the philosophers who grapple with this problem are merely isolated depressives, whether life for the majority isn’t all that bad. In all seriousness; were our famous philosophers clinically depressed? Speaking from my own experience, lasting happiness has proved sufficiently elusive for me to conclude that the philosophers in fact represent the few who are honest. In support of this conclusion, one may also note that suffering is the central tenet of much of the world’s religion. The Bible begins with Adam and Eve being thrust out of paradise and ends with a crucified Messiah. Buddhists explicitly define life as suffering. Finally, our focus on suffering can be justified by simply looking around; it is sickness unto death. (Admittedly I wrote this when I was in a state of depression, life often appears quite good to me; too much of life is mood.[9] However, I will continue on, for we ought to address our hardest, most evil, problems.) The formulation of the problem of suffering that we will work with here comes from Nietzsche’s educator Schopenhauer. Thus, to begin, Schopenhauer’s pessimistic worldview will be outlined. Following this, Schopenhauer’s response to the problem of suffering will be examined. Schopenhauer recommends a denial of the will to life, a denial of desire. This prescription, Schopenhauer claims, if taken to its absolute, leads to the mystical experience.[10] This claim will be examined and shown to be accurate with reference to research into meditation and psychedelic drugs leading to mystical experiences – meditation and psychedelic drugs representing, I will argue, methods for denying the will. This denial of the will to life, which can be thought of as a prescribed rejection of life, an anti-life philosophy, is also, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche claim, the core teaching of Judeo-Christian morality as well as Buddhism. The mystical experience, produced by the denial of the will, may be the inspiration at the core of many religions. In line with this, Tom Roberts realised, following a psychedelic-induced mystical experience, that, “Religion really is about something. It’s about an experience people can have” – a profound realisation to the rational materialists of today who often reject religion out-of-hand.[11] Religious mysticism is widely documented and is a key area of study in the history and philosophy of religion.[12] Religion and mysticism appear to be clearly related, although it is clear many do believe in religious dogma without ever having the classical mystical experience. Outlining the relationship between these two areas nicely, Henri Bergson stated that “Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.”[13] Schopenhauer’s life-denying morality then, is not exclusive to him, but is also the dominant message at the heart of the world’s religions. Although this denial of the will, if completed properly, leads to the mystical experience, it is important to note that this is not always the case – some denial of the will can take place without the mystical experience following it. A person can live ascetically for some time and nothing much could happen. Nietzsche rejects this denial of the will to life as the correct solution to the problem of suffering, placing himself in direct opposition to Schopenhauer and religion. Schopenhauer’s solution requires a turning away from life and rejection of it; Nietzsche takes issue with this. Thus, following the outlining of Schopenhauer’s formulation of and solution to the problem of suffering, I will examine Nietzsche’s rejection of this proposed solution. Nietzsche argues that the denial of the will to life stems from a weakness, from an inability to bear suffering as a necessary aspect of life and continue on living nevertheless. However, Schopenhauer’s, or more specifically, religion’s solution has been drilled into man via 2000 years of conditioning, thus the inclination to deny life is strong in man – including modern man who has apparently rejected religion, and yet, for Nietzsche, continues to live by religion’s life-denying morality. Thus, in order to overcome the denial of life, we must overcome the moral teachings ingrained in us over 2000 years, as well as, we will find, the lessons ingrained in us over the course of our individual lives – such as patterns of behaviour learned due to past traumatic experiences and the like. I will argue that the mystical experience can aid in the overcoming of this life-denying dominant mode of being. This overcoming is achieved in three ways, with the central motif being the rejection of truth and the will to truth, being replaced by a will to art. The mystical experience, I will argue, leads to the rejection of (1) internal (psychic) and (2) external (worldly) authorities, leading to (3) a final affirmation of individuality – the overcoming of authorities synonymous with the overcoming of fixed truth-structures. Instead of denying the will to life, as prescribed by Schopenhauer, we ought instead to deny the will to truth, as prescribed by Nietzsche. Having the mystical experience through psychedelic intake, instead of ascetic practice, can play a key role in this change from the denial of life to the denial of truth. 

The ancient Greeks routinely partook in festivals during which a psychedelic drug was taken. The effects of routinely having the mystical experience through psychedelic means played a role in inspiring this ancient culture that Nietzsche so admired. With a surge of recent research into the effects of psychedelic drugs having largely positive results, it will not be long before psychedelic drugs are reintroduced into our culture, leading to the simultaneous reintroduction of the mystical experience. The effects of reintroducing the mystical into our rational materialist culture are unpredictable. We need to study the mystical experience and we need to educate people about it. Thus, we need an examination in all areas of study of the mystical experience in order for its coming resurgence not to come as a shock to the system, as may have been the case in the 1960s. Away from all reasons, the mystical experience represents a profound wonder that ought to be at the very least discussed! Such a discourse is largely missing from the mainstream; this absence is partly responsible for man’s current spiritual disenchantment. Mainstream philosophy, in its apparent love of wisdom, must cease its rejection and ignorance of the psychedelically induced mystical experience, the experience that may allow man’s only real access to the highest wisdom and to truth as such. 

The significance of this work is wide reaching. We live in a world in which half the population writes off God as a fairy-tale, and the other half worship Him as though he were a sky-tyrant, and even continue to kill in His name. This split between rationalists and fundamentalists leaves two incommensurable groups talking past each other. The reliability with which the mystical experience, which often includes an experience of God, can be brought about under scientific conditions, provides an opportunity for these two sides to understand and empathise with each other to a far greater extent. It’s the hippie dream, but maybe world peace is only an LSD tab away. As well as the killing currently taking place in the name of God, much of the killing that took place in the 20th century, it is often theorized, occurred due to the lack of Him.[14] The Nazi and Communist genocides occurred when God was replaced by the deification of the State. Man’s need for purpose, lost through the death of God, was replaced by men who imitated God. The mystical experience, reintroduced into our culture by psychedelic means, represents the opportunity for us to chemically re-birth God, following his death, not as a sky-tyrant, or state-tyrant, but as part of an individual’s experience. Finally, the role that psychedelic induced mystical experiences played in the thinking of one of our most influential philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, is a topic that has been unjustly ignored. It is my claim in this work that such experiences are central to his philosophy and central to bringing about the deification of the individual, which he prescribed. 

Legitimacy, precedence and Nietzsche on drugs

Legitimacy

Having met expected resistance towards this topic, I feel it is necessary to defend this work’s legitimacy, explain the precedence set by past and present research into mystical experiences and psychedelics, and also show Nietzsche’s connection to this subject which is largely ignored and unknown. First, legitimacy. In modern society, drug use is associated with criminal behaviour, jumping out of windows, stupidity, laziness, insanity etc. The view is almost wholly negative. Thus, I must quickly say a few things in order to repair this image. After years of newspaper headlines and scare stories, this will take some effort, and it is likely the reader will still be left unsure, which I can and do understand. I first would like to remove the assumption that any experience, which occurs on drugs, is in some way nebulous. The thought is something like, “well, it was just the drugs”. You have ingested something that has temporarily, or, as is often thought, permanently, ruined your brain-function[15] and thus all experiences on drugs are superficial. However, this thinking is mistaken. Firstly, psychedelic drugs are extremely well tolerated by the body and brain; hence, concerns regarding body or brain damage taking place are misplaced. Moreover, one is mistaking the cause, ‘I took drugs’, with the effect of the cause, the experience. The reason I had the experience, the drugs, does not explain the experience itself. But this is exactly the thinking when one says, “it’s just the drugs”. Yes, the drugs caused this effect to happen, but this cause of the effect does not explain or negate the effect itself. I know this is all very simple, but this explanation seems to be required which speaks volumes towards the confused thinking around drugs in our culture. This argument also helps to remove the assumption that all drugs are good for is stupidity and jumping out of windows. In fact, the vast majority of people don’t jump out of windows after taking psychedelic drugs, the experiences that actually occur are much more varied. By focusing on the experience rather than the drug taken, we can begin to focus on the actual effects of these substances, instead of the negative connotations, which have been built up around the substances themselves. Now, moving onto a problem much of society is unaware of, including eminent scientists whom society goes to for its wisdom in the modern world. I am speaking of the mind-body problem and the hard problem of consciousness. In much of society, it is often thought that mind, or consciousness, emerges from the brain, from matter, as an epiphenomenon. However, we do not know this to be the case; it is a wildly misplaced assumption. A feeling or an experience cannot be reduced down to explanations referring only to matter. One cannot explain the experience of pain by referring only to the firing of C-fibres.[16] My feeling of pain may occur at the same time C-fibres are firing, however, the pain I feel is much different to your physical description of this pain. One can describe the feeling of pain in all sorts of ways; however, one will not know what pain feels like until pain is felt for oneself. Scale this thinking upwards and one finds that all experiences, consciousness itself, cannot be explained by references to matter. You could conceivably collect all the physical data relating to another person and still not know if that person is conscious. There is an explanatory gap. The only being that one can know for sure is conscious is oneself. You are conscious, but with regards to anybody else, you can’t be sure. Other people may appear to be conscious, and they may have bodies like your own, however, one cannot know whether others are conscious, as explaining everything about them physically tells us nothing about their consciousness. Consciousness is what it feels like to be you. You cannot know what it feels like to be someone else, therefore, you cannot know if they are conscious, because consciousness is what it feels like to be you, and you are not them, and cannot become them. It seems to be the case though, that consciousness, although not caused by brain activity, is at least correlated with brain activity. If one experiences a brain injury, for example, one’s conscious experience often changes. Thus, it does seem that the physical structure of the brain is related, in some way at least, to consciousness. To go back to drug use then, it is unsurprising that by introducing a new chemical (a drug) into one’s system, thus temporarily changing the physical structure of the brain, one can alter one’s consciousness. When one realises that all consciousness is correlated with some form of physical brain structure, one ought not to discredit forms of consciousness occurring due to drug use, merely because brain structure has been altered in some way. ‘Normal’ brain structure is just one particular structure correlated with one particular ‘normal’ form of consciousness. Drug-induced brain structures differ from the norm, and the form of consciousness they induce too differs from the norm; but things outside of the norm are not automatically nebulous. People often discredit experiences occurring under the influence of drugs, claiming, “it was just my brain creating this stuff”. However, explanations for conscious events referring only to the brain, as we have found, are bad, vastly incomplete, explanations. Therefore, one cannot discredit these experiences with reference to the brain, as this leaves the whole of consciousness itself out of the explanation. Consciousness is not reducible to brain-activity; and thus, neither are drug-induced experiences. By ending the out-of-hand rejection in our culture of drug-induced experiences we will see, I predict, improved thinking regarding the mind-body problem. Drug-use has been documented across the world for millennia in many different cultures; our modern European all-out rejection of drug-use (at least in the mainstream) is, in fact, a relatively rare phenomenon.[17]

Precedence

Now, we move onto the precedence for this examination into the effects of the mystical experiences on truth and the will to truth. Recent research into psychedelics is suggesting that having the mystical experience is allowing people to break out of their habitual, fixed modes of thinking – suggesting fixed truths are being overcome. A study by Katherline Maclean (et al.) reported that participants in their study reported a significant increase in the Big Five personality domain of the trait Openness – Openness refers to the willingness to try new things, be intellectually curious, imaginative, creative etc.[18] Thus one can see that an increase in this trait seems to suggest a higher willingness to break out of one’s fixed-truth structures. In line with this, people with high Openness are commented to be “permeable to new ideas and experiences” and “motivated to enlarge their experience into novel territory”.[19] Personality traits are mostly fixed by the age of 30 and the trait of Openness typically decreases as one gets older – as one becomes ‘more stuck in their ways’. This increase in Openness then is quite unprecedented after a singular event in a controlled study. In part, this work is an attempt to explain why this increase in Openness takes places. The only other experimentally controlled change in personality traits in healthy adults, as will become important for our work here, occurred in a study involving hundreds of hours of solitary meditation over the course of three months.[20] In both experiences, it will be my contention, one learns not to automatically believe one’s own thoughts. Psychedelic studies, in which mystical experiences reliably occur, although small, are also showing that these drugs are helping people with depression, anxiety, OCD and addiction. Two trials from Johns Hopkins University and New York University gave cancer patients suffering from depression and anxiety doses of psilocybin in conjunction with psychotherapy. 80% of the patients given psilocybin showed clinically significant reductions in depression and anxiety symptoms and reported increased quality of life – showing much greater success rates than other treatments. Furthermore, in both trials the intensity of the mystical experience correlated with the degree of the reduction in depression and anxiety.[21],[22] Thus, it seems it is the mystical experience in particular, not the therapy, that helps to relieve these patients. The overcoming of depression and anxiety relates to the overcoming of fixed truths because each refer to a mode of being in which the sufferer is fixed and can’t escape – for, if one is depressed and anxious, if one could choose not to be so, then one would surely choose this option. Thus depression and anxiety are modes of being that a person is stuck in; similarly, when one feels something to be true, one is stuck with this feeling, as the truth of the feeling precisely requires it. This relates to the overcoming of internal (psychic) authorities mentioned previously. The depressed and anxious mind is one that offers thoughts such as “this is hopeless” or “there is danger here”. One often becomes stuck in this mind-set and thus associates with these thoughts; believing them true. Thus, with the mystical experience seen to be able to help treat depression and anxiety, I will go on to argue, that this is caused by a realisation that one need not necessarily believe their thoughts to be true – one overcomes the feeling of truth related to one’s own thoughts. In line with this, psychedelics have been shown to help people overcome OCD and addictions (smoking, alcohol)[23],[24],[25] – two conditions which are, similarly to depression and anxiety, characterized by being stuck in patterns of thought and behaviour. One can use brain scans done on people under the influence of psychedelics to help to explain this. As noted earlier, brain activity does not cause consciousness, but it is correlated with it. Thus, we can use brain activity to help in part to explain what is going on in the mystical experience and its effect on truth, although this explanation, as suggested, cannot do all of the work. With this in mind; recent studies conducted by Robin Carhart-Harris show that “psychedelics reduce the stability and integrity of well-established brain networks[26] and simultaneously reduce the degree of separateness or segregation between them;[27] that is, they induce network disintegration and desegregation.”[28] This altered brain activity following psychedelic intake results in a correlated change in consciousness; the reduced stability of brain networks resulting in the reduced stability of consciousness, possibly explaining some of the phenomenology of the mystical experience (this will be explored later). Often reported in psychedelic studies is ego-dissolution (one’s sense of self disappears, one feels unity with the universe) and altered meaning[29] (“some unimportant things acquired a special meaning” and “things in my surroundings had a new or alien meaning”)[30]. One can see already that this relates to overcoming fixed truths as one is removed from one’s ordinary consciousness to a conscious state out-of-the-ordinary, leading to new insights, new truths. If what one considers to be true is correlated with one’s normal brain-state, then by getting out of this brain state, and seeing even its contingency, one can come to new truths through seeing the relative nature of even the form of their consciousness – all this will be more closely argued in what follows. For now, these studies are presented to give precedence to this examination of the ability of psychedelics to overcome fixed truth structures. Psychedelics are helping people overcoming depression, anxiety, OCD and addiction. Brain scans taken during psychedelic sessions are showing the destabilisation of well-established brain networks. What one takes to be true relates to fixed habits of thought and the well-established brain structures they are correlated with. It would not be a mistake to regard this work, in part, as a philosophical examination into the reason these studies are having the results they are. Instead of the focus being on the physical brain, as is the case in these scientific studies, here we are beyond and behind science, and thus I will be examining these psychedelic effects from a philosophical standpoint. The focus in society on brain-imagining studies is misplaced. I contend it is predominantly the experience, not the physical effects, which cause the results we see in psychedelic research. This type of ‘psychedelic philosophy’, it will now be shown, was also an important, yet ignored, aspect of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. 

Nietzsche On Drugs and the Psychedelic Dionysian 

First of all, Nietzsche used drugs. It is well reported that Nietzsche suffered from various ailments during his life and spent much of his life in ill health.[31],[32] Less well reported is the fact that Nietzsche used an array of drugs in order to deal with these ailments and that the drugs he used are known to have psychoactive effects. It is known Nietzsche used, at the least, opium, potassium bromide and chloral hydrate.[33],[34] These drugs can induce intense hallucinations[35]; to claim that these drugs had no effect on his consciousness would be to claim that Nietzsche was extremely out-of-the-ordinary. Indeed, there is an account of Nietzsche hallucinating “an abundance of fantastic flowers… constantly growing and changing forms”[36] – inspiration for his philosophy of the eternally in-flux, forever creating will to power, perhaps? (we will get on to such topics). Nietzsche himself even credits taking a “huge dose of opium” for allowing him to “come to reason”.[37] Comically, Nietzsche often acquired his drugs by pretending to be a medical Doctor, using his title as an academic Doctor as cover.[38] Here then we have the biographical evidence of Nietzsche’s drug use – for more on this see Peter Sjostedt-H’s essay on this subject titled ‘Anti-Christ Psychonaut’, which I must credit for the collection of the above research.[39] Nietzsche’s drug-use throughout his life, I will now make the case, almost certainly made its influence felt in his philosophy – yet, even if biographically Nietzsche had never taken drugs, the references to drugs and the important role they play in his philosophy would remain undeniable. Nietzsche’s works contain many references to Dionysus and the Dionysian. Dionysus is the ancient Greek god of madness, religious ecstasy, intoxication and the union of paradoxes.[40] The god Dionysus thus has much in common with features of the mystical experience; in both there is religious ecstasy and the union of paradoxes.[41] In Nietzsche’s examination of Dionysus and the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy he includes further suggestions that the Dionysian experience is the mystical experience. Nietzsche speaks of the Dionysian revealing the “Oneness amidst the paroxysms of intoxication”[42], and in the Dionysian experience there is a “complete forgetting of the self”[43]. Here again there are clear parallels between the Dionysian and mystical experience; the “Oneness” refers to the Unity in the mystical experience, there is the union of paradoxes, there is the ego death of the mystical experience or the “forgetting of the self”[44]. Elsewhere, Nietzsche comments that, “In Dionysian intoxication there is… the retardation of the feelings of time and space”[45], again this echoes the transcendence of time and space in the classical mystical experience. With the focus by Nietzsche on intoxication it too seems clear that Nietzsche knew that drugs were a possible means to attaining the Dionysian/mystical experience. In line with this he states, “Under the influence of narcotic potions hymned by all primitive men and peoples… those Dionysiac urges are awakened”.[46] Since Dionysus is also the god of wine, it may be argued that Nietzsche is talking about alcohol here, and one does not usually associate alcohol with the mystical experience. One may argue that Nietzsche is talking about standard alcohol-induced drunkenness, not a psychedelic mystical experience. On the other hand, although as stated we don’t usually consider alcohol to be mystical, William James, studier of religious experiences, does claim that alcohol intoxication is a mystical state. James claims, somewhat in line with Nietzsche’s life-affirming philosophy, that “drunkenness expands, unites and says yes”.[47] The complete mystical experience, as defined in recent psychedelic studies, however, is rarely achieved through alcohol consumption alone. Furthermore, Nietzsche is known to have had a distaste for alcohol.[48] Nietzsche’s descriptions of the Dionysian are much more in line with some kind of psychedelic intoxicant rather than alcohol; “one dreams and at the same time experiences the dream as a dream”[49], “nature discloses itself in pleasure and suffering and insight all at once”[50], parallels again here with the mystical experience, paradoxes and the ‘noetic quality’ of the mystical experience, where ‘noetic’ refers to the feeling that a mystical insight is gained. Finally, it is now widely accepted that the ancient Greeks in their Eleusinian mysteries, in which the god Dionysus was celebrated, consumed, not alcohol, but kykeon, a substance with psychedelic properties, which would have been able to produce the mystical experiences Nietzsche describes in The Birth of Tragedy.[51] It is this ancient Greek culture that Nietzsche pays homage to in The Birth of Tragedy, and it is the Greek god Dionysus that runs through his whole philosophy as a central theme, thus it seems that the mystical experience, and psychedelic drugs, played a key role in Nietzsche’s thought. Nietzsche, writing mostly before William James coined the term ‘mystical experience’, instead called it ‘the Dionysian experience’. The experience itself, though, refers to the same experience, which we now call the classical mystical experience. 

The Dionysian against the Christian

The following will be an examination of how psychedelic-induced mystical experiences allow one to overcome fixed truths, particular the fixed truths of Christian morality, rather that a textual examination attempting to prove that Nietzsche held the same view – although it is my contention that he did indeed hold this view. Hints of this feature throughout his work, to provide some evidence for this thesis, which some may find controversial, I will now offer brief textual evidence to support this claim. Above we have textual evidence showing that the Dionysian experience is the psychedelically induced mystical experience. In line with the view to be argued in this work, Nietzsche, on several occasions, sets up in opposition Dionysus and the Dionysian against Christianity. The most notable of these occasions occurs at the end of Nietzsche’s autobiography (of-sorts) Ecce Homo, in which he signs off, “- Have I been understood? – Dionysos against the crucifed”[52]. Nietzsche here is almost summing up his philosophical career as the process of setting up the Dionysian against Christianity, taken in the form of Christianity’s crucified messiah. Elsewhere Nietzsche states, “the Christian doctrine for the counter doctrine to the Dionysian”.[53] Again, it is clear that Nietzsche finds Christianity and the Dionysian mystical experience to be directly hostile to each other. Once more, it is my aim in this work to argue why the Dionysian, why psychedelically induced mystical experiences, are hostile to Christianity; not to argue that Nietzsche held this same view. However, one can see from the brief outline above, that the opposition between Dionysus and “the crucified”[54] was central to Nietzsche’s thinking, and given his placing of this opposition at the end of his autobiography Ecce Homo, this opposition may even sum up his whole philosophy. 

Schopenhauer, Knowledge and the problem of life as meaningless suffering

The Problem

Now that this introductory work is complete, we can move onto the bulk of this work proper. The problem we are addressing here is the problem of life as meaningless suffering. For Schopenhauer, the essential nature of reality is the will to life. Everything in existence is constantly striving to survive and secure its survival. We know this most inner nature of reality, for Schopenhauer, because, we are it; we are in bodies, thus we have inner access to reality. This provides us with access to knowledge of the will to life, because we can feel this will to life as that which we ourselves are. Life, it is clear through this inner access to reality, is characterized, for Schopenhauer, by will, or, in other words, desire. This essential character of reality leads to suffering, which is a similarly core feature in Schopenhauer’s worldview. Desiring something is only possible if we lack something, and this lack is the cause of suffering. We are without something we desire and thus we suffer. Furthermore, once we gain something we lack, it soon becomes boring and dull to us, thus we begin desiring something else, leading to more suffering. Or else we lose something we have, good health for example, and thus begin desiring to have it back. This desire takes the form of an endless cycle, there is no final goal, no final desire which if quenched would put an end to the suffering of the world. This lack of a final goal is that which makes the suffering essentially meaningless. Life, man’s suffering, is not for anything, hence it is meaningless. Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, offers a fitting description of man’s predicament. Sisyphus, representing man, is damned to push a rock up a hill, only for that rock to roll back down again; this is repeated eternally.[55] This represents man’s meaningless cycle of desire. A desire is striven for, the rock is pushed up the hill, only for a new desire to appear, the rock rolls back down. The cycle of desire, and the suffering it brings, is perpetual. The problem of suffering is also central to the world’s religions – here we will focus on Christianity and Buddhism. The Bible begins with the fall of Adam and Eve out of paradise, due to the advent of self-consciousness via the eating of the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Thus, man is a fallen creature; a creature which lacks the ideal state of paradise, and is instead thrown into the suffering of the world as punishment for Adam and Eve’s original sin. Buddhism similarly focuses on suffering as a central tenet of its religious teachings. In line with this, the First Noble Truth of Buddhism states that life is “incapable of satisfying”.[56] There are clear parallels with Schopenhauer’s thought, then. For Schopenhauer, Christians and Buddhists, the essential character of life is suffering. 

Schopenhauer and Religion’s Proposed Solution 

Schopenhauer’s proposed solution to the problem of suffering is the denial of the will, the denial of desire. If the suffering of life is caused by desire, then in order to put an end to this suffering, one need only put an end to desire. This ending of desire is the denial of the will. Denial of the will to life is achieved, for Schopenhauer, only through knowledge.[57] It is man’s self-consciousness, his self-knowledge, and therefore, knowledge of the will as the will is his self fundamentally, which allows him to deny the will, deny himself. Instead of chasing one’s desires, such as sexual urges, one ought to reject desire and live ascetically. This proposed solution through the means of ascetic will-denial, is also a central feature of Christianity and Buddhism. In both of these religions sexual abstinence, fasting and meditation are core practices.[58],[59] Each of these techniques represents a rejection of core human desires; the desire for sex, for food… and, what is meditation rejecting the desire for? This final practice appears more complex; this will be explored shortly. For now, one can see the proposed techniques put forward by Schopenhauer and religion for the overcoming of the meaningless suffering of life. Life is characterized by desire, thus one ought to reject life, deny desire, and thus one is liberated from suffering. As Schopenhauer says, “Resignation… removes its owner for ever from all anxiety”.[60]

The role of Knowledge

The role played by knowledge here is important for this work. Schopenhauer claims, “The will to life cannot itself be suspended except through knowledge”.[61] By knowledge, we mean here the human intellect. That capacity, apparently exclusive to our species, which allows us to create concepts, create abstract thought and create judgements with truth-values. What is seen to be true in this work will be judged in line with the correspondence theory of truth. That is, something is true if it corresponds with reality. Simply, “to say of what is, that it is… is true”.[62] For example, if I say there is a cup in front of me, and there is a cup in front of me, my statement is true. For Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche[63],[64],[65] the capacity for knowledge relies on the subject-object distinction; for there must be a knower (a subject) and something to be known (an object). The subject, however, is considered to be the primary source of possible knowledge. For Schopenhauer specifically, the world is only ever “in relation to something… the one who conceives [it]… which is himself”.[66] Thus, one starts with one’s self, and then has ideas about the world through the world’s relation to one’s self – the subject here being the self and the object being the world. Notice, this reflects the correspondence theory of truth, as for this theory to work there must be some correspondence between at least two things (subject and object) taking place. The human intellect, thinking in Darwinian terms, is a means for survival; that is, a means for the increased efficiency of the will to life. By virtue of this intellect, mankind has risen to the top of the food chain and secured that place dominantly. The will to life, one can notice, is normally blind (not self-conscious) in nature; this blind will can be seen in microorganisms and animals. However, the human intellect, through the development of self-consciousness, is no longer blind; the will has, in man, achieved the capacity for knowledge. Importantly, for Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, it was self-consciousness first, before the knowledge of other objects. One must have recognised oneself as an object, before being able to recognise other things as objects. This is similarly due to the relation previously mentioned, that all objects are objects for a subject. Without any recognition of the subject there can be no recognition of objects, for how could one posit something other than oneself without knowing where oneself begins and ends? In a state of non-self-consciousness, I am effectively at one with the world – this state of non-self-consciousness is present in children, what Freud calls the oceanic state.[67] Therefore, in order to recognise objects in the world, and even to recognise the world as an object separate from myself, I must first achieve self-consciousness, in order to have any sense of what ‘separate from myself’ means. The intellect, as stated prior, acts as a weapon against the rest of nature, acting as a subordinate aid to the will to life. However, in mankind, the intellect has achieved the ability to detach itself from this subordinate position in relation to the will to life, and thus, it is through the intellect, through knowledge, that the will can be denied, as knowledge no longer has to answer blindly to the will to life. Instead of using the intellect to achieve the aims of the will to life, the intellect has gained the ability to turn against life, making asceticism, the rejection of the will to life, possible. One rarely sees ascetic animals,[68] humanity however, through knowledge, can be ascetic; thus Schopenhauer’s claim that it is only through knowledge that the will can be denied.   

Meditation as the Denial of the Will to Truth

As previously discussed, examples of ascetic practices include sexual abstinence, fasting, and meditating. In the first two cases it is quite clear which desire is being denied (food and sex), but the situation is not so clear regarding the latter, meditation. However, with our examination of knowledge behind us, I would like to suggest that it is man’s intellect, one’s desire to acquire knowledge, which is being rejected in meditation. The key, common feature of meditation practices, it is my claim, is the rejection of the intellect. In meditation practices, one’s judgement-forming mind is either disassociated from (through a change in attention) or drowned out (by using a mantra or chanting). The aim is “a specific non-judgmental awareness of present-moment stimuli without cognitive elaboration”.[69],[70] Thus, I argue that it is the desire for knowledge, the will to truth, which is being rejected in meditation. The intellect, thinking Darwinianly, uses the judgment of present-moment stimuli and cognitive elaboration as a survival technique. For example, if the present-moment stimulus is the sound of a breaking stick in the foliage behind me, then the intellect makes a judgement about what the stimulus is (a predator creeping up on me perhaps). This ‘perhaps’ is a recognition of the possibilities of what the breaking stick could indicate. I use my imagination, my “cognitive elaboration”,[71] in order to mentally scan the possibilities of what the breaking stick could be, and if these possibilities involve some danger, I must take defensive measures to defend myself. The scanning of possibilities is a search for the truth, knowledge, of what the stick breaking indicates. My chances for survival are much better if I know what it is I’m up against, for I can use defensive measures better suited to the specific danger. Thus, finding the true (in the correspondence sense) danger is much more useful than reaching a false conclusion about what the danger is. If I think the predator is a bear, but instead it is a snake, then my defensive measures will be extremely inappropriate for the danger at hand. This shows how the intellect is used as a weapon for defence (and in many cases attack) against the threats of the world. Present-stimulus is taken in, runs through the intellect, one diagnoses the situation, possibilities for action present themselves to the intellect, and then a decision is made as to which action to take in line with that diagnosis. The possibility for successful action is strongly correlated with a successful (true) diagnosis of the circumstance. In a Darwinian sense, this is what the intellect is doing all of the time. Every day-dream is a possible future scenario, used to scan the environment for possible modes of action. Every remembering of past events is a scanning of some lesson to be learned from the past to be used in future action. This search of the environment for knowledge is in a sense always active, we are always thinking, we are caught up in thought. The only time the intellect is deactivated from this search for knowledge – is meditation. One no longer scans the environment and searches for modes of action (mantra or chanting), or one still does this scanning, but merely disassociates from the process (change in attention). The desire to find and use truth for the benefit of the will to life is denied. Meditation is the ascetic denial of the desire for knowledge; the denial of the will to truth. 

Positive and Negative Knowledge

The denial of the will is achieved through knowledge, and an ascetic will-denying practice (meditation) is the denial of the will to knowledge. If we are denying the will to knowledge, how can knowledge be used to deny the will? There is no contradiction here, although there may appear to be one at first glance. In order to rid ourselves of this apparent contradiction we, along with Schopenhauer, must differentiate between negative and positive knowledge.[72] Negative knowledge refers to the knowledge we have of concepts and that knowledge that can be expressed in language. Thus, Schopenhauer’s whole philosophy as laid out in The World as Will and Representation, for example, is a form of negative knowledge. We have words on a page, representing concepts, which transfer these concepts into our own minds via the act of reading, giving us negative knowledge of these concepts. Positive knowledge, on the other hand, is the knowledge gained with direct experience of something. For example, I can gain negative knowledge of the taste of chocolate via someone describing to me what chocolate tastes like. However, I can only gain positive knowledge of the taste of chocolate by experiencing eating chocolate myself. Negative knowledge of pain can be known through reference to C-fibres, positive knowledge of pain can be known when I experience pain for myself. This distinction between negative and positive knowledge helps us to sort out the apparent contradiction above. We can edit the assertions leading to the apparent contradiction above: The denial of the will is achieved through positive knowledge of the will, and an ascetic will-denying practice (meditation) is the denial of the will to negative knowledge. In meditation, one attempts to gain “non-judgemental awareness” and stop “cognitive elaboration”. Cognitive elaboration and making judgements are forms of acquiring negative knowledge. In the normal mode of thinking, one is abstracting from the “present-moment stimuli”, sorting out and rearranging concepts and thoughts in one’s head (cognitive elaboration), attempting to acquire negative knowledge through this process of sorting out and rearranging these abstractions and concepts.[73] However, in meditation, as previously discussed, this process of acquiring what we now call negative knowledge is denied. On the other hand, when Schopenhauer claims that the denial of the will is only achievable through knowledge, he is speaking of positive knowledge. This is clear because the denial of the will is not achieved through a process of sorting out or rearranging concepts. One cannot play any language-game and thereby achieve will-denial. Instead, practices are required (sexual abstinence, fasting, meditation), the will must be actively denied, will-denial must be experienced for oneself. Will-denial cannot be known second-hand, through negative knowledge; it must be experienced, known through positive knowledge. That is not to say, however, that negative knowledge does not provide the basis for beginning ascetic practices. In fact, such knowledge, as discussed above, appears necessary (animals are not ascetic as they have no capability for negative knowledge). The human ability for concepts and abstraction (negative knowledge) allows for the understanding that the denial of the will is possible and, for Schopenhauer, preferable. Will-denial itself is only achieved, however, through ascetic practices which lead to positive knowledge of the denial of the will. However, as we are about to find, the form of positive knowledge gained with the complete denial of the will is unlike any other form of knowledge. 

The Un-knowable nature of the Mystical Experience

Schopenhauer states that positive knowledge of “what philosophy can only express negatively as [complete] denial of the will” can be gained through “that state experienced” which has been given names such as “’ecstasy’, ‘rapture’, ‘illumination’, ‘union with God’”. However, this experience “cannot properly be called knowledge, because it has no longer the form of subject and object”.[74] One can recall from previously, that knowledge requires a subject in relation to an object, thus, when this subject-object dichotomy breaks down, so too does the capacity for knowledge. Hence, Schopenhauer claims that this type of positive knowledge of the mystical experience “cannot properly be called knowledge”.[75] The breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy refers to the ‘Unity’ feature of the classical mystical experience – as well as the ego dissolution or ego death feature noted previously. The subject and the object (one’s self and the world) are unified in the mystical experience; thus, one can no longer decipher where one begins and ends as one’s feeling of being a separate subject in a world of objects has broken down. One becomes both subject and object inseparably. Knowledge requires a knowing subject and a known object; without the subject-object dichotomy there can be no knowledge. Thus, we are left in the position of positive knowledge of the mystical experience not really being knowledge at all, as usually defined. 

Ineffability 

The idea that the mystical experience cannot be something known in a standard understanding of knowledge is central to this work. As shown above, the breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy means that knowledge of the mystical experience is impossible, as knowledge requires the subject-object distinction. The notion that the mystical experience is un-knowable extends to the ineffability and paradoxicality features of the mystical experience. Schopenhauer claims that the mystical experience is only “accessible to one’s experience and cannot be communicated at second hand”[76] – hence the phrases above (ecstasy, rapture) are only placeholders. No language can properly communicate the experience. This ineffable aspect of the mystical experience can also be explained by the breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy. Language is used to make reference to something. For example, by the word ‘cup’, I refer to the cup next to me. However, if, as is the case in the mystical experience, myself and the cup are one (subject-object unification), then there is nothing to refer to as the possibility for reference has broken down. Reference requires a two-ness, the thing referring, and the thing referred to. However, when the thing referring and the thing referred to are one and the same, no reference can be made and thus no language can be used, hence the ineffability feature of the mystical experience. P. Appleby argues against the notion that the ineffability feature of the mystical experience is due to the breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy.[77] He argues, for example, that during sexual intercourse, or when one is focused on an activity, self-consciousness too breaks down; yet, one rarely claims that sexual intercourse is ineffable. In response to this, we must highlight that the mystical experience is much different to any other experience (sex or being lost in the moment) in which self-consciousness may be lost. Sexual intercourse is never described as ‘union with God’, for example.[78] Sexual intercourse never leads to the ‘transcendence of space and time’ either (except on occasions when a sexual encounter leads to the mystical experience itself). During sexual intercourse, it is true that one may be less self-aware than usual. However, in the mystical experience, the self is “completely forgotten” and one merges with the “primordial Oneness”.[79] Thus, Appleby’s argument doesn’t work because it underestimates the extent to which the subject-object dichotomy breaks down in the mystical experience versus merely experiences with lessened self-consciousness. There is a huge difference between losing some self-consciousness and the subject-object dichotomy breaking down completely, the subject becoming united with the object. It can be noted that, in a certain sense, everyday experience is ineffable. Language is a signpost to something; ‘the cup’ indicates the cup in front of me. However, the word ‘cup’ is not the cup itself, and does not encapsulate all that the cup is (a collection of atoms, a thing for drinking from etc.) However, rarely is the claim made that everyday experience is ineffable. This suggests that the ineffability of the mystical experience is of a different sort to the ineffability of experiences like sex. Not only is the experience hard to describe, the very ability to describe things (which relies on the subject-object dichotomy as suggested) breaks down. The ineffable nature of the mystical experience means not only that it cannot be known, but also that it cannot be described in language or communicated to anyone second-hand.

Paradoxicality

We can now move on to the paradoxicality feature of the mystical experience adding further to the un-knowable nature of the experience. As described by William James, “It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness… were melted into unity”.[80] One cannot know, in any standard sense, a paradox. In fact, it is often by deducing paradoxes from arguments that we show such arguments to be false.[81] Knowledge requires that we know some particular information, over and above another possible piece of information. For example, ‘the cup is in front of me, therefore, it is not behind me.’ I can have knowledge of this statement; there is a world with a cup in front of me that corresponds to this statement. However, when two contradictory things are apparently united, ‘the cup is both in front of me and behind me’, my ability for knowledge of this statement breaks down due to the paradox. The cup, in any standard sense, cannot both be in front of me and behind me. Thus, there is no way for me to know that the cup is in front of me and behind me, for there is no standard reality for this to correspond to. If something is impossible, then I cannot know it, for the possibility of the thing is required for any knowledge of the thing in the first place. If something is impossible then there is no corresponding reality in which that thing is taking place, and thus our correspondence view of truth breaks down. Hence, the paradoxicality feature of the mystical experience is another feature that makes the contents of the experience unknowable. 

The Noetic Quality

Yet, in addition to these arguments suggesting the mystical experience is unknowable in any standard sense (subject-object breakdown, ineffability and paradoxicality), a key feature of the mystical experience is the noetic quality (a mystical truth is revealed) – this feature is shown in the term ‘illumination’ used by Schopenhauer. Thus, we are left with the (appropriately) paradoxical situation that, in the mystical experience, a mystical truth is revealed and yet cannot be the subject of knowledge. In the mystical experience one feels as though one is receiving illumination of truth as such, and yet once the experience is over, this truth is forgotten and lost. It must be addressed that people often come out of psychedelic and mystical experiences claiming to have had some knowledge imparted on them, and that religious conversions can even take place following these experiences.[82] Thus, is this not knowledge of the mystical experience? I argue it is not. I do not contest that psychedelic and mystical experiences can lead to novel new ideas; in fact this certainly appears to be the case.[83] Furthermore, following the mystical experience, in which God may be experienced, religious conversion certainly can and does occur due to this experience. Instead, my claim is that knowledge of the central truth, or feeling of truth, that features in the mystical experience is that which cannot be known. Thus, some truths can be come to through the insight and change in thinking which mystical states can lead to, but the truth of what the mystical experience itself is and shows is that which cannot be known. Hence, we are indeed left with the circumstance that the mystical experience shows us a mystical truth, but this mystical truth cannot be the subject of knowledge. 

The Denial of the Will as a means to The Mystical Experience

It is quite clear that Schopenhauer is talking about the classical mystical experience at the end of his work, The World as Will and Representation. Thus, his claim is, that if the complete denial of the will to life is achieved, the classical mystical experience occurs. The terms Schopenhauer uses to describe the mystical experience, and the phenomenology of the experience he describes (no subject-object dichotomy, illumination), match the definition of the classical mystical experience as used in recent psychedelic studies. For example, the term ‘illumination’ refers to the noetic quality (a mystical truth is revealed) of the mystical experience. The transcendence of the subject-object dichotomy refers to the feeling of unity in the mystical experience (the unity being between the subject and the object). Further, the fact the experience “cannot be communicated at second hand” refers to the ineffability feature of the mystical experience. Finally, Schopenhauer’s claim that the denial of the will is prescribed by the world’s major religions appears legitimate, when we note that religious people in both Christian and Buddhist traditions have reported having the mystical experience following periods of ascetic practice.[84],[85] Schopenhauer’s description of the mystical experience also uses the same terms that Nietzsche uses to describe his Dionysian experience, giving further weight to the claim that the Dionysian experience is the classical mystical experience. Schopenhauer calls it “ecstasy”, Nietzsche describes “blissful ecstasy… prompted by the fragmentation of the principium individuationis”[86]; this latter part – “fragmentation of the principiumindividuationis” (meaning the fragmentation of the feeling of being an individual, a subject) refers once more to the breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy and the feeling of unity. Nietzsche, it appears evident, claims that the mystical experience can be caused by psychedelic intake, or as he calls it “narcotic potion”[87] intake, and yet for Schopenhauer the mystical experience is achieved through the denial of the will to life through asceticism. Therefore, due to the same resulting experience, the question can be asked: is taking psychedelics a means to the denial of the will to life? 

Denial of the Subject

Here, I will argue that psychedelic intake is a means, other than asceticism, for the denial of the will. Firstly, however, why does the denial of the will to life lead to the mystical experience? The mystical experience, as we have found above, is characterised by the breakdown of the subject-object distinction, the breakdown of one’s feeling of being a separate self in a world of objects. The subject and the object are brought together in a unity. Why might the denial of the will to life lead to this breakdown of the feeling of being an individual? I argue, because it is precisely the individual will to life, which is being denied. When partaking in an ascetic practice as Schopenhauer recommends, one is not denying anyone else’s desire for sex (sexual abstinence) or food (fasting) or knowledge (meditation); one is only denying one’s individual desires. How could I even go about denying the desire of another? If I starve someone, for example, I do not remove his or her desire for food as in fasting. Instead, I just remove the food, and their desire for food remains. Thus, it is only the desires of the individual that can be denied by the individual. The mystical experience occurs with the complete denial of the individual will, because the subject-object dichotomy breaks down with the complete denial of the individual, the subject. With the individual denied, we are left only with the whole, hence the unity in the mystical experience. 

The Psychedelic Denial of the Will

Psychedelics have been shown to produce this same breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy, the same classical mystical experience. Therefore, does taking psychedelics lead to the denial of the will as ascetic practices like meditation? To show that the two do indeed lead to the same denial of the will, we can first turn to brain scans taken of people having taken psychedelics and the brain scans of meditators. As discussed prior, brain scans offer insight into the correlating brain states of subjective experiences. Thus, if the brain scans are similar in psychedelic takers versus meditators, when the same subjective mystical experience is taking place, this will support the claim that taking psychedelics and meditation are doing similar things – that is, denying the will. It turns out that in people after taking psychedelics and meditators both display lowered brain activity in the default mode network (DMN), the network associated with one’s sense of individual subjectivity.[88],[89] Thus, we here have evidence that psychedelics and meditation have similar effects on the brain matching their similar effects on consciousness and ability to produce the mystical experience. It is clear how meditation and ascetic practices are practices that are denying desires, denying the will; it is less clear, however, how taking a psychedelic denies desires. In order to understand how could be the case, we must return to an evolutionary, Darwinian framework. One can understand that the structure of the brain has evolved over millennia into its current structure; the current structure being optimized for survival in the environment. Thus, the will to life, the desire to be alive, is best fulfilled by the brain in its normal state. Therefore, by introducing a foreign chemical, a psychedelic, which alters this brain structure, the optimum structure for survival is changed and made non-optimum. In this way, the denial of the will is achieved through taking a psychedelic because the will to life is correlated with a particular brain structure that has evolved over time. By reducing the activity in the DMN the brain is altered in such a way that the will to life no longer functions as it does in a non-altered brain. Of course, not all chemicals lead to reductions in optimum brain function for survival. Caffeine, for example, may help us to survive in many situations. Thus, it is not so much that the psychedelic changes our normal brain state away from optimum, as some changes may actually increase brain-function for survival; rather, it is the psychedelics change brain function which is important, not just that a change takes place. Therefore, we must move away from physical descriptions and move to phenomenological ones. In caffeine intoxication, one becomes more alert; hence, it’s possible increase in the optimisation of the will to life. On the other hand, psychedelics, when taken in doses necessary for the classical mystical experience, lead to a phenomenological change involving such features as paradoxicality and hallucinations. As discussed earlier, one’s chances of survival are correlated with a true diagnosis of the circumstances; this true diagnosis of the circumstance can hardly take place when one’s circumstance is full of impossible paradoxes and hallucinations. The attacking bear can not be defended against if I am hallucinating that the bear is in two places at once or that the bear is really an angel; for my diagnoses of the danger is widely mistaken, hence my defensive measures will be widely misplaced. Hence, it seems that the psychedelic affects the brain in a way that throws off the optimum brain structure, and thus mode of consciousness, which allows for the will to life to be affirmed. With the will to life denied, the subject-object dichotomy breaks down, as, once more, it can only ever be precisely the individual will to life that is being denied. Ultimately though, it is difficult to know the particular reason why psychedelic and meditative brain structures are so similar and why each can similarly lead to the complete denial of the will that the mystical experience requires. The similarity between the two though is clear; both regarding psychical brain structure and the phenomenological possibility of the mystical experience taking place. Thus, psychedelics, it seems, are a means to the denial of the will to life. The complete denial of the will to life leads to the mystical experience, as psychedelics have been shown to reliably lead to. 

The Value of the Solution

For Schopenhauer, as well as in Christianity and Buddhism, the denial of the will to life is the answer to the problem of meaningless suffering. Life is meaningless suffering, and therefore, the will to life, desire itself, ought to be denied. If this denial of the will is achieved completely the mystical experience occurs. As we found, the denial of the will is only possible through negative knowledge – mankind has gained the ability to use the intellect against life. Positive knowledge of the complete denial of the will is found in the mystical experience. However, as suggested by Schopenhauer, and argued for here, this kind of knowledge cannot really be called knowledge due to the breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy, as well as the ineffability and paradoxicality features of the mystical experience. Yet, in the mystical experience, as expressed by the ‘noetic quality’, a mystical truth is revealed. This leaves the situation in which there can be no knowledge of the mystical truth revealed in the mystical experience. All we have are words that attempt at a description, ‘ecstasy’, ‘illumination’, ‘union with God’ – yet these terms do not really get at what the mystical experience is. We have this ignorance of the mystical experience, and yet, the denial of the will, which leads to the mystical experience, is the basis of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, religion and, if we agree with Nietzsche, has been taken as the “value of values”, “the positive as such”[90]. Nietzsche takes issue with this value structure, and attempts to transform it.

Nietzsche on Art and the value of Truth

Nietzsche takes the philosophy of Schopenhauer as his starting point. It would not be overstating the case to say that Nietzsche’s whole philosophy is an attempt to overcome the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer, which as we have found, recommended the denial of the will to life, culminating in the mystical experience, as the answer to the problem of meaningless suffering. If we accept the truth that life is meaningless suffering, as we have in this work, finding a solution to this problem other than Schopenhauer, and religion’s, prescribed rejection of the will to life is extremely difficult. Nietzsche’s task is not an easy one. Schopenhauer’s solution to the problem of life as meaningless suffering requires a rejection of life and a turning away from a life fully lived, in place of an ascetic life; hence, this solution is a problematic one. The solution Nietzsche comes to is that in order to overcome the truth that life is meaningless suffering, we must not reject life (as is Schopenhauer’s prescription), instead we must reject truth. The ingenuity of this solution should not be lost in its apparent simplicity. Nietzsche questions: why should truth be our highest value? “Why not rather untruth?”[91]We often regard truth to be a value in-itself and more valuable than anything else. However, Nietzsche questions this and finds that the value of truth is far from indisputable. In fact, for Nietzsche, truth has only come to be so highly valued due to the emphasis that Christian morality places on it. By rejecting truth as being unquestionably valuable, the truth that life is meaningless suffering loses its power, as we no longer take truth to be of great value. In place of truth, Nietzsche emphasises the value of art. That is, art expanded to its broadest sense to include all aspects of existence viewed in a purely aesthetic sense, viewed as “appearance”[92]. As Nietzsche claims, “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified”.[93] This thought is expressed elsewhere; “we possess art lest we perish of the truth”[94] and “pessimism, or… nihilism, counts as “truth”. But truth does not count as the supreme value”.[95] This is Nietzsche’s response to the truth of life as meaningless suffering; art. Art taken as that which uses illusion and good aesthetics to justify life. However, in order to reach this valuation of art over truth, we must first overcome truth. This is no easy feat. As stated prior, Christian morality has emphasised truth as the highest value. We have had a “two-thousand year training in truthfulness”.[96] Thus, our high valuation of the truth is ingrained – I will go on to show how this process of training in the truth took place. It will be my claim that the mystical experience allows one to overcome this training in truthfulness and this high valuation of the truth in three ways. I alluded to these three forms of truth in the introduction to this work; internal (psychic) truths, external (worldly) truths and finally, being truthful to oneself, which is synonymous with individuality – these terms are a creation of my own. By internal truths I here refer to the beliefs held by an individual. By external truths I refer to truths imposed on individuals from outer authorities – which can in turn become internal truths due to them being incorporated by individuals. It is both internal and external truth structures and the valuation of these truth structures that I argue the mystical experience allows one to overcome. The overcoming of truth is shown in psychedelic studies, which show that having the mystical experience increases Openness, and allows people to overcome depression and addictions. These results suggest truth structures are overcome by the mystical experience (depression and addiction characterized by a habitual mind-set based on fixed truths i.e. ‘life is not worth living’ or ‘I should smoke a cigarette’). Nietzsche states, away from truth, we must become sceptics regarding the value of life. He writes, “One must reach out and try to grasp this with astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated”.[97] The valuation of life being meaningless suffering is true, in the correspondence sense of truth, this judgement corresponds to the way reality appears to human subjects. For we die; our cycle of desires move towards no final goal. However, as we will go on to find, human subjects do not have access to truth as such, reality as it is independent of our own subjectivity, hence we can not know the true value of life, only the value of life as it appears to us. Hence, Nietzsche’s claim that we must remain sceptical about the value of life. The modern rational materialist scientism view of the value of life on earth is something like ‘we are a tiny speck of dust in a vast universe, therefore, the earth is of little or no value in the scheme of things’. This value judgement is widespread and frankly ridiculous. It bases the value of a thing on the size of a thing! Earth is of no value because it is small? Seriously?! Is an elephant more valuable than your mother because the elephant is bigger in size? We have to be more sophisticated than this.[98] And ultimately, we have to be more sceptical. We must extend our scepticism to the question of life’s value. The mystical experience, it is my contention, offers an experience which results in a kind of learned scepticism, due to the true feeling of the experience (noetic quality), combined with the necessarily unknowable and forgettable nature of the truth revealed. Once more, this is somewhat scientifically proven, with the mystical experience offering reliable increases in the trait Openness; a trait almost interchangeable with a sceptical attitude. Truth as such is experienced and, if one examines the phenomenology of the mystical experience as we have here, is seen to be unknowable. Thus, scepticism is the result; since truth cannot be known, why value it? And, why search for it? Before addressing why this overcoming of truth takes place, we must first understand why truth has come to be so highly valued in the first place. 

The Value of Internal Truths

Firstly, truth is valued because it helps us to survive. This form of truth was described above with reference to Darwin during the exploration of the human intellect, knowledge and the example of the breaking of a stick indicating danger. We learn certain truths that help us to navigate the environment successfully. Thus truth is valuable because it works in the support of the will to life. To return to the example, I may hear a stick breaking behind me and not react. However, the breaking stick may turn out to be a bear coming to attack. Due to my inaction, the bear may severely injure me. Through this experience, it enhances my chances of survival to learn the ‘truth’ that a breaking stick indicates an attacking, dangerous bear. This is an example of a truth learned through experience. This form of truth is valuable because it enhances my ability to survive, as I am able to learn from my experiences and react better in avoiding danger next time there is a threat. One can notice, that a breaking stick may not always indicate a bear, it could just as easily indicate something else, a benevolent animal or just a fallen branch. Therefore, there is room for error in what we call a ‘truth’ here. Such instances of danger give rise to man’s will to truth, his desire for knowledge, because knowing more about one’s environment allows one to better navigate away from dangers, towards prosperity. As suggested prior, the human intellect, understood Darwinianly, is constantly thinking, searching for truths, which may aid the will to life. The truths learnt through past experiences, such as the ‘breaking stick = attacking bear’ example, are examples of internal truths, because the experience is always the experience of an individual subject. Even if this subject is part of a group having a similar experience, and learning a similar truth from that experience, experience itself is inherently an experience for an individual subject. One is locked in subjectivity in a sense (the exception being the breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy in the mystical experience). Thus, truths learned from one’s past experience are internal truths, as experience itself is always the experience of an individual. In a sense, all truths are internal fundamentally because of this necessarily individual nature of experience. This is the case because, as discussed prior, knowledge (that is, knowledge of truths) requires a subject (an individual) and an object (a world). 

The Value of External Truths

This necessity of truths to be fundamentally internal, that is truths are always truths held by an individual subject, may leave one wondering what then we mean by external truths. By external truths, we mean truth structures fixed by groups and outer authorities, not the individual. For example, there are external truth structures fixed by the Christian church. The ‘truth’ that sex before marriage is wrong, for example. This ‘truth’ is fixed by an external authority. Some external truths remain external. An authority, Donald Trump, may claim the ‘truth’ that climate change isn’t real, and yet, I, myself, can reject this ‘truth’. Thus, this external truth does not become an internal truth, as I do not internally believe it. Internalization of external truths does occur however, when I imbed an external truth into my internal truth structure. That is, I come to believe the truth myself, that was originally put in place by an external authority. If the Christian church claims the truth that sex before marriage is wrong, and I then come to agree that sex before marriage is indeed wrong, then I have taken an external truth and internalised it. Internal truths, as suggested above, have value because they can allow one to navigate an environment better, helping us to survive. What though is the value of external truths? External truths are valuable for the authority that imposes them. An authority can gain power over individuals using external truths, if individuals internalise the external truths. For example, if I do not want you to have sex before marriage, then by fixing the external truth that sex before marriage is wrong, I gain the power to prevent you from having sex before marriage if you go on to internalize this truth. My power over you is not physical, it is psychological, because I have imbedded my way of thinking into your way of thinking. Thus, external truths have value for those that create and impose external truths over individuals because they allow the external authority to have power over individuals. External truths can also be valuable for individuals who incorporate them into their truth-structures. Firstly, the individual will have less conflict with external groups if he or she has the same truth-structures as the group; we will not argue and we will easily be able to interact with each other and work towards similar aims. If I agree with your truth structure there is no further need for you to impose that truth structure on me. I instead come to self-impose the truth structure. This can be valuable for the individual, as it reduces conflict with the external authority. Secondly, external truths can be valuable to an individual because they can provide the individual with a form of group wisdom. Sir Francis Galton observed that the average answer to a question taken from a crowd is often closer to the truth than any individual’s answer.[99] This suggests that groups are often more knowledgeable than individuals within that group. Thus, external truths may be more true (as in, more in correspondence with reality) than internal truths. If this is the case, and correspondence with reality is our aim, then it is of value for the individual to incorporate external truths to improve accuracy. Thus, both internal truth and external truth can have value for individuals and for groups. 

Internal and External Truths within the Categories of Positive and Negative Knowledge

With both our examination of negative and positive knowledge and now our examination of internal and external truths behind us, we can explore how these categories fit into each other. Internal truths can take the form of both negative and positive knowledge. An individual can believe a statement in the form of language and concepts (negative knowledge) and can gain truths through experience (positive knowledge). However, external truths can only ever take the form of negative knowledge. This is the case because, as suggested previously, an experience is necessarily an experience for an individual (a subject). Thus, groups can never have positive knowledge because a group cannot have an experience, and positive knowledge requires experience. Even experiences that are shared by a group contain only, and necessarily, the experiences of individuals within that group. Furthermore, external truths are necessarily truths from outside; external to a subject. For a subject to come to know an external truth, that is, internalise it, one must come to this truth through language or concepts, for one can not come to it through experience. Thus, external truths must be a form of negative knowledge because they must take the form of language and concepts.

The Value of the Mystical Experience

We have seen why internal truths and external truths might be valuable. However, there is another kind of truth, that is the experience of truth in the mystical experience, that Nietzsche claims is also seen as valuable in Schopenhauerean and Christian philosophy. Nietzsche even suggests that the mystical experience is taken as “the value of values” and as “the positive as such” within these philosophies.[100] As explained prior, the truth, or knowledge, from the mystical experience is a form of positive knowledge, because the mystical experience is always an experience of an individual. However, as also noted previously, knowledge of the mystical experience cannot really be called knowledge, as we lose the subject-object dichotomy. Why might this form of truth, the mystical truth as viewed in the mystical experience, be seen to be valuable? As “the value of values”?[101] If we return to the starting point of this work, that life is meaningless suffering, then we may get a clue to our answer. With all experience, all life as we know it, taking the form of subject-object, and the mystical experience breaking down the subject-object dichotomy, one can notice that in the mystical experience the conditions for life itself break down. The mystical experience is one in which life, as we know it, disappears. Thus, Nietzsche claims, people have given value to the mystical experience because it offers relief from life, which is meaningless suffering. Schopenhauer explicitly argues for the value of the denial of the will, which culminates in the mystical experience, offering it up as the answer to the problem of life as meaningless suffering – the religions, we found, also recommend this answer.[102] Thus, the truth as experienced in the mystical experience gains value, for Schopenhauer, and the religions, because it offers relief from life via the breaking down of the subject-object dichotomy and by offering the transcendence of time and space and alike, which are necessary features of life (in our normal experience of it). 

The Value of Truth Concluded

Thus, we are left with an understanding of why truth might be seen as valuable. Internal truths have value because they help an individual navigate the world. External truths are valuable for the group that imposes them as they give power over an individual. External truths are valuable for an individual who incorporates them due to decreases in conflict with the group in power and by possible wisdom of the crowd. Finally, mystical truth, as viewed in the mystical experience, is valuable because the mystical experience offers an escape from the conditions of life. This experience of mystical truth though, is of a very different kind than internal and external truths, which can both be forms of negative or positive knowledge. The mystical experience cannot be the subject of knowledge at all.

On how to Internalize External Truths

As argued, external truths are valuable for those that impose them, as the imposers gain power over the individuals imposed. If I want you to not have sex before marriage, it is in my interest to make you believe that sex before marriage is wrong, as this will deter you. With this is mind, how might one go about imposing external truths on individuals? One method, one might suggest, is persuasive argument. One can argue one’s case for the truth in question. I can give you a reasonable argument as to why sex before marriage is wrong. Then, if you agree with this argument, you will be won over to hold the same belief as the external group imposing the position. This may be one method by which to internalize external truths. This mode of internalizing truths, however, takes for granted man’s capacity for reason. For a reasonable argument to work, we first require reason; without reason, reasonable argument would have no effect. However, what is reason? Reason is the ability to objectively work out a problem using logic. Thus, reason requires an individual to align oneself with a non-individual, objective, external framework; namely, logic. Reason is in some sense an authority – albeit an abstract authority (we will say more about abstract authorities shortly). One must abide by the rules of logic, the laws of reason. Therefore, if our task is to internalise external truths, we cannot make the initial call to use reason, because reason itself is the use of an external framework. Thus, our method of internalising external truths cannot involve reason, or else we are left with a circular argument. How else may external truths originally come to be internalized then?   

Internalising External Truths using Pain

Nietzsche suggests that external truths have come to be internalised through the use of pain. One can recall above that internal truths are fixed by an individuals experiences. If I have the experience of hearing a breaking stick and then a bear attacks me, I come to learn the ‘truth’ that a breaking stick equals an attacking bear due to the pain of the injury the bear causes. The internal truth is fixed in order to aid in the advancement of the will to life, and avoiding pain and injury is a key aspect of this, for the bear could just as easily have killed me. Thus, the will to life uses internal truths in order to help navigate the environment. Nietzsche suggests that an external authority can manipulate this drive of man to avoid pain, in order to impose external truths on individuals. The individual, following pain, looks for the cause of the pain, and thus creates the connection between that cause and pain itself. There is the pain of the bear attack, and thus one looks for the cause of the pain, which, at first indication, was the breaking stick. In the same way, an external authority can internalise a truth into an individual by making him associate pain with a certain cause. For example, if I cause an individual pain after he has had sex before marriage, and I explicitly tell this individual that the cause of his pain is that he had sex before marriage, then he will come to the internal truth that ‘sex before marriage = pain’, and thus should be avoided. In effect then, the external authority takes advantage of an individual’s desire to avoid pain, by associating pain with certain truths that the external authority desires to impose. Nietzsche describes punishments of the most cruel and painful kinds, used in order to fix external truths into the individual; such as “the excision of a pound of flesh from the torso” and “boiling the… [person] in oil”[103] and alike. Pain is used to brand in a memory, an “I will not…”, a fixed-idea.[104] For Nietzsche, “only that which hurts incessantly is remembered”.[105] Thus, here we have our method of imposing external truths on the individual. The external authority manipulates the individual’s ability to learn from painful experiences, by making him or her associate pain with the rejection of a truth that the external authority wants to be imposed. 

How we came to ’see Reason’

As discussed prior, reason is the ability for an individual to abide by an external framework, meaning reason could not initially be used to internalise external truths, as reason presupposes the ability to internalise external truths. However, we now have our method for an external authority to internalise a truth; through the use of pain. Nietzsche suggests that it was this use of pain which allowed man to “’see reason’”.[106] By causing an individual pain when he breaks an external truth, a law imposed by an authority, the individual comes to learn that in order to avoid pain he ought to always abide by external authority. Thus, the following of the external truth in one particular case, such as no sex before marriage, leads to the expanded idea that in all cases, there is a proper (in line with an external authority) course of action. Reason is the attempt to completely remove one’s internal truths, what one individually takes to be true, and instead, take a purely objective stance. Objectivity, in theory, removes subjectivity from the picture. This is an attempt to remove the biases of the individual, allowing for a more accurate picture of what reality is really like, using something like a perfected version of the wisdom of the crowd. Thus, reason becomes an external authority in itself. However, it is an abstract authority, for there is no person or group imposing the laws of reason on the individual. Instead, the laws of reason are self-imposed, with reference to an all-seeing, all-knowing, abstract external authority that includes as its members all possible subjects, providing the optimum in all objectivity. This can be valuable for the individual, because, as he learns that pain follows any deviance from the truths of the external authority, if he can align himself with an abstract, all-seeing, all-knowing, external authority, he can, in principal, perpetually avoid pain. 

God, Reason and lack of objective Truth

An all-seeing, all-knowing, external authority… one can see where this is going. This abstract, external authority becomes the idea of God. God, the all-knowing, all-seeing. The idea that one ought to follow an external authority at all times, leads to the creation of the idea of this perfected external authority, and thus we are given the idea of God. Individuals then attempt to align themselves, all their internal truths, with the external truths of God, and thus attempt to live a painless life by avoiding behaviour that would warrant punishment by the external authority. Our idea of reason, as an external framework independent of the subject, it seems led to the idea of God. Mankind can clearly reason, thus, does reason offer us the viewpoint of God, a purely objective viewpoint? One can see, in mathematics for example, that 1+1=2, and that this is apparently so for every possible subject. Thus, it seems, reason really is the wholly objective viewpoint. This, Nietzsche argues, was the thinking of Plato shown by his love of reason and rationality, and this led to the notion “that God is the truth, that the truth is divine”[107]. However, is reason really this powerful? Is reason really the viewpoint of God, of pure objectivity? Nietzsche argues that it is not. First of all, even though reason claims to remove the subject altogether, leading to a purely objective viewpoint; reason is still always reason used by a subject. If there is a reason-er, then there is a subject. Therefore, reason does not completely do away with the subject as one might claim it does. One can recall, that knowledge requires, by definition, the subject-object dichotomy; thus, even when using reason, this law applies. One can make reference to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason here, in which he suggests particular categories that a human subject necessarily sees the world (the object) through. Kant argued that the subject does not experience reality as it is independently of the subject – which is to say that what reality is for us, does not correspond to what reality is really like independent of us. Instead, the subject brings certain characteristics to experience necessarily, and without such categories experience would not be possible in the first place. These categories include, for example, space and time and cause and effect. Without space and time, Kant argues, experience itself would not be possible, for experience requires a space to happen in and a time to happen during.[108] Thus, these can be said to be necessary aspects of experience brought into the world by the subject, aspects added to the world by the human mind. Therefore, reason does not allow the subject to see the world as it is, because the subject necessarily brings with him or her the categories of space and time and cause and effect etc. Indeed, reason seems to require cause and effect, a category added to reality by the subject in Kant’s view (1+1 causes there to be the effect 2). These categorises are necessary features of subjective experience, however, it is unknown whether these categories are features of the world as it is independent of the subject. Reason, it is often claimed, is this view independent of the subject, however, it cannot be known whether reason itself is merely a category imposed upon reality by the subject. Nietzsche, in line with this, claims, “Rational thought (reason) is interpretation according to a scheme we cannot throw off”.[109] The idea here is that rational thought in the form of mathematics, for example, may appear to function well for us in every case. But why ought we presume rational thought represents how the world is independent of the subject? The world independent of us may not be rational at all. We may bring rationality to the world through our subjectivity. We ought to change the claim to something like; mathematics works in every human case. Thus, no subject, not even a subject using reason, can have access to the all-knowing, all-seeing, abstract, external truths of God or pure objectivity. These considerations leave us with the impossibility of objective truth; knowledge of truths necessarily requires subjectivity. Yet, the whole rational materialist scientist framework of the modern world presumes such objective truth exists. Thus, although we are in some sense, as human subjects, stuck in the rational framework of reason, as Nietzsche suggests, this framework does not offer us insight into objective truth. All we can say of rational, scientific insights is that they are humanly true. Humanly true, as we have found, does not mean the same as objectively true. Thus, reason does not offer us knowledge of God as an objective, all-knowing, external authority. 

The Mystical Experience as Knowledge of God

There might be one other way that a subject can come to know the external truths represented by God, however. One can recall that the mystical experience can be described as a ‘union with God’; many people having had the mystical experience indeed claim to have witnessed God or recall being united with Him.[110] Furthermore, the noetic quality of the mystical experience (that mystical truth is revealed) seems to suggest that the experience may be revealing the purely objective viewpoint we have been looking for. Thus, might knowledge of the external truths of the all-knowing authority God be known via the mystical experience? Indeed, one may assert, it is precisely the removal of the subject, as occurs in the mystical experience, that we have been requiring for the pure objectivity of the external truths of God. This view is mistaken however. As we showed earlier, knowledge of the mystical experience is impossible because of the breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy that takes place in the mystical experience. We can agree in part that the subject-object break down might give us access to pure objective knowledge, and that this break down may indeed be the very reason for the noetic quality of the mystical experience. However, there are two problems here. Firstly, as already suggested, with the subject-object break down, even if mystical truth is revealed in the mystical experience, and even if this is precisely due to this subject-object break down, the truth revealed still cannot be known, as knowledge requires a subject and an object. Furthermore, we are looking here for the external truth of God. External truths, as discussed, must take the form of negative knowledge, which means that they must be communicable through language and cannot be formed through an individual’s experience. However, the mystical experience is only “accessible to one’s experience and cannot be communicated at second hand”[111] (through language), therefore, the mystical experience cannot be known through negative knowledge. The mystical experience cannot be the source of external truths because it cannot be known through negative knowledge, and external truths necessarily take the form of negative knowledge. Thus, the mystical experience cannot provide the perfect framework of external truths represented by God. 

The God Experience versus The God Authority 

However, if the mystical experience does not provide knowledge of God as a framework of perfectly objective external truths, then what is meant by the ‘union with God’ in the mystical experience? Here we must separate between two notions of God; God as an abstract external authority and God as experienced in the mystical experience. The first notion of God imagines God as an external authority, of the kind we have been examining above. This God is viewed as some kind of supernatural dictator in the sky, punishing those who go against his external truths, and rewarding those who align themselves with these truths. The Christian church has used this notion of God as a framework of external truth to punish people who went against the teachings of the Church. Alfred North Whitehead sums up this idea of God as a dictator, commenting that "the Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.”[112] We will discuss the Christian church shortly. Our second notion of God, as suggested, is the idea of God as experienced in the mystical experience. As knowledge cannot be had of the mystical experience, the reasons for which we have been over, knowledge of the notion of God as experienced in the mystical experience is limited. However, what is clear is that God as a dictator is not shown in the experience. Instead, subjects report “becoming God”, “I was God”.[113] In other instances, it is the phenomenology of the mystical experience (Unity, Noetic quality, Sense of Sacredness) that people associate with and call the experience of God. Another feature of the mystical experience, ineffability, means that the word ‘God’ is in some sense a mere placeholder for whatever it is that is experienced in the mystical experience. In line with this, the word God is sometimes replaced with terms like “The Nameless” or “The Ground of Being”.[114] However, it is clear from reports, the name God intuitively seems to fit the experience.[115] Furthermore, the paradoxicality feature of the mystical experience shows that the experience cannot provide any reasonable external truths of a God as an authority, because the external truths would contradict each other due to this paradoxicality feature. Therefore, not only is the God as experienced in the mystical experience not a God of external truths or reason like the first conception, but due to the paradoxicality feature this God experienced is in direct confrontation with any coherent structure of external truths and reason. ‘The God experience’ (as this conception will now be known), as experienced in the mystical experience then, is very different from the notion of God as an authority imposing on man external truths (this conception from here known as ‘the God authority’). We are left then with two very different conceptions of God. 

Christian Morality 

We found previously that no subject can have the purely objective knowledge of the external truths that would be known by the God authority. However, the history of religion shows that many a subject has claimed to have such knowledge.[116] We will focus here on Christianity; the whole of Christian morality, it is often claimed, stems from the word of God. However, if this knowledge, as we have seen, is an impossibility, why has Christian morality developed as it has? If the central tenets of Christian morality are not in fact the word of God, where have they come from? Firstly though, what are these central tenets? Here we will focus on the central tenets key to this work and prominent in the thinking of Nietzsche, these being the notion of “equality… before God”[117] and, more significantly for our purposes, the rejection of “the instincts of life”.[118] The former can be understood by considering our modern notion that everyone ought to have equal rights – as Nietzsche comments, "The democratic movement is the heir to Christianity."[119]. The latter can be understood as the valuing of self-constraint; one ought not follow one’s instinctual, natural desires, but should practice self-denial. One should not have sex outside of marriage, for example, although clearly sex is a natural desire even when one is not married. In a sense, following any set of external truths is necessarily self-denying, as one must deny one’s individual desires (internal truths) and instead abide by a framework of external truths; Christian morality is an example of such a framework. However, Christian tenets such as sexual abstinence particularly require the restraint of natural (in line with the animal kingdom) instincts, thus this notion of self-denial and the rejection of the instincts in Christian morality is more than just an instance of following an external truth being necessarily self-denying. 

Can we Derive Morals from Reason?

Now that we have some central features of Christian morality, we can consider why these morals are prescribed, and not other or opposing morals. Let us consider the tenet that people should have equal rights. To many this appears self-evidently true. However, can an argument be found as to why the morality of equal rights is in some sense right? Nietzsche claims that the notion of equal rights came from the notion that people are “equal… before God”.[120]However, we have already seen that knowledge of the God authority is not possible. Thus, claiming equality is right by reference to the God authority cannot work; although clearly this claim has been made many times by religious leaders. Although we found that reason is not equal to this God authority, one can still argue that reason can lead to at least humanly ‘true’ answers; 1+1=2, for example, is true for every human subject, as humans “cannot throw off” rational thought.[121] Can reason be used in order to argue that equality is moral? This claim, that reason is the basis of Christian moral tenets, was argued for by Kant. Kant argued that we have a “duty” to "act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."[122] Kant claims that one ought only to act in such a way that one could will that everyone acted in that way. ‘Could’ here, means that it would be logically possible (reasonable) for everyone to act in that way. For example, it is immoral to steal in this framework, because if everybody stole, there would be no such thing as private property, yet the very concept of stealing relies on the idea of private property, thus we are left in a contradiction. Thus, stealing is morally wrong because if universalised, stealing becomes impossible. Therefore, Kant not only suggests morality can be derived from reason, but that moral acts are precisely those acts that are rational (that is, they don’t lead to a contradiction if universalised). Notice that this derivation of morals using reason leads to the notion of equality being moral; as everyone is equal before reason (1+1=2 for everybody). Thus, one can claim, as Kant did, that Christian morality, such as the belief in equality, can be derived from reason. 

Arguments against Morality from Reason 

Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were great critics of Kant’s moral views. The strongest and most obvious argument against Kant’s ethics is that his views are question begging. Kant claims that a subject ought to act in accordance with reason in all cases. But this claim presupposes that this ought exists beforehand. Why assume such an ought exists in the first place? As Schopenhauer comments, “Who told you that there are laws to which we ought to subject our actions?”[123] Kant basically argues that morality can be derived using reason, and that one ought to act in accordance with reason. However, there is no prior reason behind this claim that one ought to act in accordance with reason. Kant merely sets out to prove how we ought to orient our actions, without arguing why such an ought necessarily exists in the first place. Kant sees that moral laws exist in societies (equality is moral), then uses reason in an attempt to explain why these moral views are the correct ones, namely those that are in accordance with reason. However, this assumes that there is such a thing as a moral law in the first place and that the moral law should be reasonable, therefore assuming what he set out to prove. One requires a further reason as to why moral laws should be reasonable. In addition, and in contrast to Kant’s view, it appears that morality can not in fact be derived from reason. This is due to Hume’s is/ought problem.[124]Hume argues that you cannot get an ought from an is, only an if. Therefore, one cannot say, Harry is fat, therefore he ought to lose weight. One uses the fact that Harry is fat, to then make the claim that he ought to lose weight. However, what if Harry values being fat? Then the claim he ought to lose weight becomes false. One can only legitimately claim, ifHarry wants to stop being fat, then he ought to lose weight. The if-clause sets up a purpose that the ought-clause can then fulfil. Is-clauses, on the other hand, are merely descriptions of facts, and thus there is no purpose that an ought-clause would fulfil if added. Hence, you cannot get an ought from an is. This relates back to the inability to derive morals from reason. One can see that reason is involved when using if-ought sentences; if Harry wants to be thin, then he ought (it would be reasonable) to exercise. However, reason is not used in is-ought statements, because, as we have found, there is no logical step that can get one from an is to an ought. Morality is meant to give us oughts; ways we ought to act. However, without a purpose, without an aim, we cannot create an if-ought statement for mankind. A person does not have a purpose, a person merely is, and we have found one cannot deprive an ought from this. One may claim that mankind does have a purpose and thus, we can create if-ought statements for mankind (if you want to fulfil your purpose you ought to…), and then use reason to help fulfil this purpose. However, we have already shown that there is no purely objective standpoint from which a purpose for all of mankind could be found. Any claim that purpose is prescribed by the God authority has been shown to be false because we can not have knowledge of God. And no purpose can be derived from reason, as we run into the is/ought problem. Mankind has no knowable objective purpose, consequently, we cannot use reason to derive morality. Therefore, Kant’s views regarding the connection between reason and morality are mistaken. We cannot use reason to explain why Christian morality is the way it is, and not some other way. 

Morality of the Weak

We have found then that Christian morality cannot be derived through reference to the God authority or through reference to reason. Why then has Christian morality developed to hold in high esteem such things as equality and the denial of instinct? Nietzsche offers us a different idea for the genealogy of Christian morals. Nietzsche suggests that before Christian morality, the powerful ruled with little concern for moral laws in line with reason or alike. Instead, what the powerful said was good was good, and what the powerful said was bad was bad. Whether the good was in some sense rationally good is of no concern to the powerful, as the weak have no power to question this prescription of the good. If I am in power and I say that greed is a good, for example, then greed becomes the good, as I have power and thus I am able to define what the good is. The powerful can attribute value to things without question. What need do the powerful have for valuing reason? If I have power it matters not whether what I say is reasonable, for whatever I say is immediately put into practice by virtue of my power, not my reason. Therefore, morality does not derive from reason as Kant suggested, as there exists this morality of the powerful, before Christian morality, that has nothing to do with reason. This changes, for Nietzsche, with the rise of Christian morality. Christian morality, for Nietzsche, is a conspiracy of the weak against the powerful. The weak, being too weak to overthrow the powerful using physical means, instead use psychological means. The weak declared that the powerful, and traits of the powerful (honour, strength, beauty, cruelty), were ‘evil’ in the eyes of a God authority, the all-powerful. Thus, the powerful become subject to a judge more powerful than themselves. If the weak claim to have access to this all-powerful God, the weak gain power over the powerful through this access to the God authority. The weak then re-christen their own weakness, and the traits of the weak (pity, kindness, harmlessness), as the good before this God authority. This gives rise to the idea that certain acts and traits are good in-themselves, as God, being all-powerful, is unquestionable. The idea that one should act in accordance with this proclaimed good of the weak, with the idea of God as a fundamental component is, for Nietzsche, Christian morality. 

God and Reason provide Power for the Weak over the Powerful

One can notice that reason arrived on Earth before the arrival of Christian morality. As an example, the ancient Greeks clearly had come to ‘see reason’; they used mathematics, for example. Thus, the birth of reason preceded the notion of the monotheistic God of Christian morality. This is further evidence that reason does not necessarily require Christian morality, as reason existed prior to Christian morality. Rather, Christian morality used the idea implicit in reason that there is an external truth with which the individual ought to align in all cases. We found (due to the is/ought problem) that reason however cannot extend to the prescription of morals. Therefore, Christian morality had to invent the God authority in order to extend and apply the idea that there is an external truth to follow in all cases, to the case of morality. Instead of one aligning oneself with reason, as in mathematics, one had to align oneself with a God authority. However, knowledge of the God authority is unknowable, as we found; these moral laws were actually created by the weak that claimed to know God. We can relate this back to our previous discussion of internal and external truths. Prior to Christian morality, when the powerful ruled, the external truths of morality were the same as the internal truths of the powerful, because powerful individuals could merely state that what they thought was good (internally true) was good in-itself (externally true). The powerful, in order to keep the weak in line with the external truths, would carry out the punishments described earlier (“the excision of a pound of flesh from the torso”).[125] Then, the notion that the weak ought to follow this external truth of the powerful resulted in the idea that there was an external truth as such, leading to reason and the idea of God (this progression was explored previously). The weak then used this idea of an all-powerful external truth against those that created the notion of external truths in the first place, the powerful. The powerful were made to follow the external truths of God and reason, thus giving the weak power over the powerful. However, as we found, through God and reason we cannot derive morals. Thus, Christian morality is not really derived from God or reason, but, for Nietzsche, is derived from the traits of the weak, as the weak call themselves the good. The weak create the idea of God and reason to be used as a force against the powerful, for God is all-powerful and no amount of power can undo reason (1+1=2 for every human subject), thus giving the weak power above that of the powerful. 

Why would the Weak value equality and denial of the instincts?

Why might the weak value such morals as equality and self-denial? With regards to equality, the answer is clear. If the weak are below the powerful, and have no means of rising up the power hierarchy, the only means to be as powerful as the powerful is to lower the powerful down to the level of the weak in the name of equality. For example, if there were a race between Usain Bolt and myself, I would lose. Furthermore, let us imagine, no matter how much training I do, I can not make myself any faster and certainly not faster than Bolt (maybe I have dodgy knees, for example). In this situation, the only way for me not to lose, if I cannot get faster, is to make Bolt go slower. Bolt, as well as being faster than me, is also bigger. Therefore, I cannot use physical means to slow him down by injuring him or the like. My only option left is to use psychological means. I must make Bolt believe it is his duty to go slower, to be equally as slow as me. This provides us with the reason why the valuing of equality is a trait of the weak. The weak want equality in order for the powerful, the best, to be lowered down to equal standing. As Nietzsche comments, the prescription of equal rights leads to a “levelling down to mediocrity”.[126] Although I here argue that wanting equality is a trait of the weak, that is not to say that all civil rights movements are somehow wrong. Of course we should not go back to unfairly discriminating on lines of race or gender, for example. The prescription of equality in society however, has subtler, more obviously negative consequences as well as the positive consequences we find. The prescription of equality can lead to unhealthy conformity, for example – conformity, one can see, is an example of an individual attempting to align oneself with a given external truth structure. Furthermore, we should not, it is Nietzsche’s claim, value equality so highly that we do not discriminate by judging factors that actually matter, such as talent or the like. We need our talented people to rise to the top of their fields and provide the human race with their excellence. Equality at all costs does not allow the best to be the best due to the “levelling down to mediocrity” that takes place.[127] Thus, equality is a trait of the weak, a trait that has both positive and negative consequences. 

Why might the Weak value Self-denial?

We can now move onto self-denial and denial of the instincts as a value of Christian morality and thus a value of the weak. The weak, as we have seen, christen their own traits as the good. Thus, the weak claim that the denial of the instincts is moral, because they were unable to affirm their instincts in the first place. The inability to act is turned into not wanting to act. The inability to gain a sexual partner, for example, is turned into sexual abstinence by choice. As Nietzsche states, “the impotent failure to retaliate is… transformed into ‘goodness’”[128]. The weak do not act in accordance with the instincts of life because they are unable to, but, in order to christen themselves as the good, they have called this rejection of the instincts of life moral. Furthermore, it is an instinct of the powerful to exert their power (it is Usain Bolt’s instinct in a race to run as fast as he can) often with the weak as their victims (if Bolt runs his fastest this means I lose). By making the powerful question their instincts and show self-restraint, the weak gain the ability to prevent the powerful from exhibiting their power in ways destructive to the weak. As suggested earlier, the notion that one should act in accordance with any framework of external truths necessarily requires some form of denial of the instincts and self-restraint, because, unless the external truths are perfectly in line with one’s internal truths, one has to act against one’s individual instincts in order to act in accordance with the external truths. In Christian morality, the weak have claimed access to the external truth structure either through reason or the God authority. Therefore, the weak value self-restraint, as it allows for their framework of external truths to be followed, instead of merely the individual instincts of the powerful being acted out, which act against the weak. The weak then value self-denial and denial of the instincts (1) because they cannot express their instincts themselves, (2) in order to prevent the powerful from hurting them out of instinctual signs of strength and (3) to make it possible for their external truth framework to be followed, instead of purely instinctual internal truths being followed. 

The Mystical Experience versus Christian Morality

One can notice that this moral prescription of self-denial represents a similar prescription of asceticism used for attaining the mystical experience. Sexual abstinence, fasting and meditation we found earlier are ascetic practices used to deny the will to life in order to bring about the mystical experience. These practices represent a rejection of instinctual human desires. We have subsequently found that, as Nietzsche argues, a rejection of instinctual human desires is the basis of Christian morality, which has been derived from the traits of the weak and used in order to gain power over the powerful. Thus, the prescription is the same (deny instinctual desires) and yet the reason for the prescription appears different. In one case, instinct denial is used to reach the mystical experience, in the other case, instinct denial is prescribed by the weak in order to christen themselves, and their own forced instinct denial, as good and to limit the power of the powerful by psychological means. One possible explanation that removes the apparent confusion here, is to claim that the mystical experience is something that the weak would aim for and value. Indeed, this is part of Nietzsche’s thinking. Nietzsche argues that the weak, or as he calls them here “the suffering and fundamentally disgruntled”, regard the mystical experience as “the positive as such” and “the value of values”[129] because the mystical experience offers them the only way out of the conditions of life – those being subject-object dichotomy, time and space etc. Nietzsche claims that, because the weak suffer from life, they value the mystical experience because the experience offers, at least temporary, relief from life – he even calls the mystical experience “redemption”.[130] Thus, it appears we have explained the connection between asceticism as a means to the mystical experience and asceticism as a Christian moral derived from the weak, for the weak value asceticism both for moral reasons and because the mystical experience offers them a means to relief from the meaningless suffering of life. Let it be noted here that these two concepts are not in a hostile relationship with one another. For it is certainly possible that the weak could value asceticism as a moral tenet for both of these reasons given. Here then, we have two origins for the valuing of asceticism; one moral, one mystical. 

The Mystical claim to Power

Furthermore, it can be noticed that the bases used by the weak as key pillars of Christian morality as an external truth structure (God and reason) are also aspects of the mystical experience (God as experience and the Noetic quality). With regards to God, one could, half-legitimately, claim to know God (although this knowledge we have seen is actually impossible, hence the claim is half-legitimate) after having had the God experience, and thus use this experience as a claim to authority through God. Indeed, it is likely in my view, that the first people to claim to know God were those who had had the mystical experience. It also appears that reason, as an external authority and the noetic quality (revealed truth) of the mystical experience are connected ideas. Reason is that external framework used to come to truths; ideally, if reason were perfect, we would come to truth as such through reason. In the mystical experience, truth as such, it at least feels like, is revealed. Hence, those who had had the mystical experience, could, again, half-legitimately, claim authority using their mystical experience of truth. Although real knowledge of the truth experienced in the mystical experience, we have found, is impossible, the experience of truth provides the experiencer with a half-legitimate claim that they know this truth and they can thus act as an authority on this truth. Given reason as the tool with which, if it were ideal, truth could be reached, the fact that these authorities had temporarily reached truth through the mystical experience means that the claim that they had ideal control over reason is, although a lie, at least not based on nothing. Thus, it is clear to see how moral control over others may have been claimed by those who had had the mystical experience, due to the phenomenological aspects of the experience that seem to reveal God and truth, two key bases for claims to power, as we have found, in Christian morality. These claims are fraudulent however, as knowledge of God and the mystical experience is impossible. On the other hand, the prescription of asceticism as a way to know God and truth is not fraudulent if by God and truth one does not mean an external truth structure, but instead, the mystical experience of God and truth. If this is the case, then such authority is deserved as the ascetic mystic really does know how to bring about the mystical experience, and thus, bring about God and truth. It is my claim, here, that Christian morality has its origins in asceticism for the sake of the mystical experience, as well as asceticism as a trait of the weak, and yet we have forgotten the mystical experience, and have been left with only ascetic morality. The mystical experience, however, it will now be argued, is in fact hostile to the bases Christian morality uses to underpin its external truth structure. That is to say, that by having the mystical experience for oneself, one can overcome claims to power from others, even if, especially if, such claims to power, as we have found, have their origins in the mystical experience itself. 

The Mystical versus The Moral

The relationship between asceticism as means to the mystical experience (mystical asceticism) and asceticism as a Christian moral tenet (Christian moral asceticism), as suggested, does not end with our examination above. I aim to show that Christian moral asceticism and mystical asceticism, although each has their origin in the traits of the weak, are in fact notions in opposition. This is the case, in our first instance, because the mystical experience provides an amoral view of reality. One can recall the paradoxicality feature of the mystical experience. One component of this feature is that the contrasting notions of good and evil are one of the apparent paradoxes transcended; good and evil are in some sense united in the mystical experience.[131],[132] With this being the case, it appears that the mystical experience is in direct opposition to any possible morality which claims to know good and evil. Therefore, moral asceticism and mystical asceticism are incompatible notions as morality relies on the knowledge of good and evil, and yet the mystical experience allows for the transcendence of the notions of good and evil. One can recall that Christian morality claims that self-denial is a good, and we also know complete self-denial leads to the mystical experience. And yet, having the mystical experience falsifies this claim that self-denial is good by offering transcendence of good and evil. We are thus left with a much more complex connection between Christian moral asceticism and mystical asceticism than was shown above. It is not only the case that the weak value asceticism because it offers them (1) power over the powerful and (2) a way out of the conditions of life (subject/object dichotomy) in the mystical experience. We must add to this that the mystical experience, achieved through complete denial of the will, actually cancels out the claim that self-denial is morally good. It is important to recall here that self-denial does not always lead to the mystical experience (one can fast for a few days and nothing could happen), only complete denial of the will leads to the mystical experience. Hence, although the origin of ascetic practices lies in the morality of the weak, the results of partial self-denial (everyday self-restraint as a moral good) and complete self-denial (sustained ascetic practice leading to the mystical experience) are directly hostility to each other, because the mystical experience falsifies moral claims regarding good and evil. This provides our first instance of the central claim of this work that the mystical experience aids in the overcoming of fixed truth structures; the mystical experience is seen to overcome moral external truths regarding good and evil. 

The Mystical God versus The God Authority

Using the idea of the dual origin of Christian moral asceticism and mystical asceticism introduced above, we can explore further our notions of the God authority and the God experience. It will already be clear that the God authority is a feature of Christian moral asceticism (Christian moral asceticism is good because the God authority says so) and the God experience is part of the mystical experience (union with God). We here have another case in which an idea, ‘God’, has two related origins, as the weak are those that required the God authority as an external truth framework for power over the powerful, and the weak are also those that are ascetic and self-denying which leads to the God experience. Yet, once again, these two conceptions, in this case of God, although having similar origins in the weak, are directly hostile to one another. The God authority, as a framework of external truths, is completely incompatible with the God experience in the mystical experience. This is the case for reasons explained prior. To refresh one’s mind briefly; the God experience cannot provide a coherent framework of external truths (a God authority) because of the break down of subject/object not allowing for knowledge, the paradoxicality feature, the ineffability feature etc. Yet, without having for oneself the mystical experience, one cannot know of this contradictory version of the idea of God, as the experience is necessarily the experience of an individual and “cannot be communicated at second hand”.[133] Furthermore, although we have found previously that legitimate knowledge of the God authority is impossible due to the impossibility for man to remove himself from the subject/object dichotomy without losing the necessary conditions for knowledge, we must give importance to the historical embedding of the idea of the God authority by Christian morality, which does require overcoming. Thus, we here have our second instance of the central claim of this work; the mystical experience allows one to overcome the external truths of the God authority, by replacing the notion of God with the God experience, which is a necessarily individual experience directly hostile to the God authority as a framework of external truths. 

The Mystical Experience versus Reason Derived Morality

We previously found that one cannot derive morality from reason. Instead, the weak have used the idea that one should align oneself with the external framework of reason in order to gain power over the powerful. Thus, through Christian morality, and the notion of God as the truth, reason is another external truth framework, like that of the God authority, which has been historical embedded into man over the last 2000 years. Once more, we find that the mystical experience can aid in overcoming the external truth structure of reason, and thus, reason-based morality. This is again due to the particular phenomenological features of the mystical experience. We can return back to the paradoxicality feature, which leaves reason broken, as paradoxes cannot fit into logical arguments and are in fact derived in order to disprove such arguments. Furthermore, the ineffability feature leaves all external truth structures as non-functional as an external truth structure must necessarily be communicable in order to have sway over an individual. One may question at this stage: why cannot one merely read Nietzsche in order to reach these conclusions? Or why cannot one merely pay attention to our arguments above that show that reason cannot be used to derive morals? Of course, reasonable argument can have some effect in this regard, and we should by no means do away with reason completely as is the claim of some postmodern thought. We can regard rational and scientific enterprise as useful in many cases and at least humanly true, or ‘true enough’ in some instances, as explored above.[134] One reason as to why argument may not be enough to overcome reason-based Christian morality is that empirical evidence shows that reason is often not all that effective at changing people’s minds. Once a judgement has been reached, one often sticks to it even in spite of contradictory evidence.[135]Mercis and Sperber, echoing Nietzsche and the arguments put forth in this work, argue that reason developed as a product of social interaction, not as something that leads us to objective truth; here we have found that this ‘social interaction’ was based on pain. Thus, reason cannot lead us to truth in many cases. Another argument against the effectiveness, in addition to this empirical evidence, against reading Nietzsche alone being not as effective as having the mystical experience itself, is that, as modern humans, we are stuck in reason (one can recall Nietzsche’s claim that “Rational thought (reason) is interpretation according to a scheme we cannot throw off”).[136] This being the case, and the imperative having being embedded through millennia of Christian morality that morality is in line with reason, this ‘being stuck in reason’, being unable to throw off rationality, means that we similarly find it difficult to throw off morality, as the two have developed together. Thus, the difficulty we find in throwing off Christian morality is directly related to the difficulty of throwing off reason. The mystical experience, however, offers us this throwing-off of reason, and thus of Christian morality, due to the breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy and the paradoxicality feature. As Nietzsche comments, the mystical experience represents a “castration of the intellect”[137]. One final argument against the ineffectiveness of reasonable argument or reading Nietzsche, for the purpose of throwing off the Christian morality based on reason, is that reason was never really involved in morality in the first place. This is due to the is/ought problem described earlier, thus reasonable argument cannot be used to overcome the morality, as it was never reasonable in the first place. As Karl Popper states, “No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man [or group] who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.”[138] Morality, we have found previously, could not have originated in reason and cannot be based on reason; thus, Christian morality did not ever “adopt a rational attitude” and thus “no rational argument will have a rational effect” on it.[139] Instead, the Christian moral claim that morality should be in accordance with reason is itself not a rational claim. So, no rational argument can have an effect on this claim, as it was not based in reason in the first place. Hence, reasonable argument or reading Nietzsche is not enough to overcome the external truth structure of Christian morality. Instead, the mystical experience is needed in order for reason to be thrown off, and Christian morality with it, as Christian morality and reason, we have found, developed together. We here have our third instance of this work’s central claim, that the mystical experience can allow us to overcome fixed truth structures, in this case, through the castration of reason. 

The Mystical Experience as the fundamental truth 

The above concludes the arguments regarding the overcoming of external truth structures that the mystical experience allows. We have found that Christian morality is an external truth structure, which has three bases for its claims to authority; in moral law, reason and God. The mystical experience, we have found, allows us to overcome each of these bases for Christian morality’s claim to external truths, as the mystical experience is in direct opposition to each of these bases. Following the Enlightenment, and Nietzsche’s infamous ‘death of God’, one of these bases was thrown off by the other; reason, which, as we have found, co-developed with the idea of God, threw off God. For, without the God experience as a part of our culture, and no evidence of the God authority, there was little reason to believe in God or purely God-based morality. This led to the moral revolution seen throughout the Enlightenment and into our modern day; with relaxed views on sex, for example. Yet, it is clear to see in our modern egalitarian culture, that reason based morality and morality based on some kind of unquestionable moral law, akin to an unquestionable God authority, is still prevalent. I have argued above that a re-introduction of the mystical experience to our culture would lead to these remaining bases for Christian morality being left untenable. But, one may be asking, why this focus on the mystical experience? Why does it have such power over other phenomena which allows it to be held in higher esteem than, and thus allows it to overcome, reason or learnt moral laws, for example? Initially to answer this challenge, we can return to the idea that claims to authority in Christian morality may have originated in the mystical experience itself. The idea was that one could claim power using God and reason by referring to the fact one had had the mystical experience where God and truth are revealed. By having the mystical experience for oneself, however, one can discover that claims to authority and knowledge using the experience are fraudulent because the mystical experience is necessarily unknowable. Hence, claims to authority through the mystical experience are found to be fraudulent by having the experience for oneself and seeing that it does not provide knowledge or authority over others. Another reason the mystical experience has this power to overcome reason or learnt moral laws, I argue, is because of the noetic quality of the experience, which is a feature that makes the experience feel like an experience of truth as such; the fundamental truth at the “ground of being”.[140] Due to this feeling of the mystical experience being an experience of the truth at the foundation of reality, all other truths, such as reason and moral laws, are answerable to it. The paradoxicality feature, for example, is given the status of showing that reality itself is at bottom paradoxical, thus, attempting to base morality on reason, although possible, will not be a reflection of what reality is really like as shown in the mystical experience. People have attempted to explain away this feeling of truth in the mystical experience. For example, it has been argued that the noetic quality of the mystical experience is caused by a dysfunctional anterior insula, the part of the brain that deals with feelings of certainty.[141] We have however, ruled out explanations for consciousness relating only to the brain. It is correlation, not causation, between brain states and conscious states, thus the conscious state of the mystical experience cannot be explained away by reference to a brain state. Furthermore, it has been accepted that the mystical experience represents a “castration of reason”,[142] hence feelings of certainty may indeed be misplaced. Yet this does not undo the experience, it is merely a feature of it; or, as Nietzsche remarked, “the irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.”[143] Explanations can be given regarding the mystical experience; however, these explanations cannot provide us with knowledge of the mystical experience because, as we have already shown, it is unknowable and incommunicable, leaving all explanations as best-guesses. Even if the feeling of certainty in the mystical experience is a deception, as Carl Jung has said, “God is in the deception”.[144] The God experience does not need to make sense or be rational or explainable; in fact, as we have found, the character of the God experience is irrational, yet this does not explain the experience away. Thus, we can keep our central role of the mystical experience as having power over other phenomena such as reason and moral laws, as the noetic quality of the experience, the feeling of truth as such being revealed, cannot be explained away in a manner that is convincing. Thus, the mystical experience can overcome the external truth structures of Christian morality based on God, reason and moral law in the ways argued for above, because the mystical experience, as an experience of truth as such, takes precedence over these bases of external truths. Anyone claiming authority through reference to an external truth structure is overcome due to truth as such being unknowable and only accessible in an individual’s experience. This makes claims to authority through truth break down, as truth as such, having precedence over other truths, cannot be the source of authority or external truth structures. Furthermore, external truth structures must necessarily take the form of negative knowledge. However, truth as such, mystical truth, is necessarily an individual experience, unknowable, and cannot be known at second hand – that is, it cannot be known through negative knowledge. Thus, having the mystical experience for oneself allows one to overcome claims to power through truth, as it is shown no external truth structure could have its basis, legitimately, in the mystical experience. The mystical experience is only accessible to individuals, through positive knowledge. However, as we found, external Christian moral truths have become internalised through centuries of pain. These truths are embedded into our psyche. Thus, overcoming the claims to these external truth structures is not enough, as these external truth structures have come to be believed internally. 

The Mystical Experience Overcoming Internal Truths

One can recall internal truths being fixed through experiences of pain, leading to the proposed cause of that pain being fixed as the true cause. This leads to truths such as ‘breaking stick = attacking bear’ or, if an external authority wants such truths internalised, ‘sex before marriage = morally wrong’. Thus, although external truth structures have been overcome by the mystical experience, is the same overcoming possible regarding internal truths? Recalling studies cited earlier, the idea that the mystical experience can allow one to overcome fixed truth structures is already well documented. Recent psychedelic studies show the mystical experience leads to increases in the trait Openness and allows one to overcome addictions, indicating truth structures are being overcome. Openness increases may indicate that external truth structures are being overcome, as one becomes less rigid in one’s beliefs. However, addiction appears to be a much more personal, individual battle with habitual patterns of behaviour. Thus, in the case of addiction, it seems internal truths are being overcome via the mystical experience. Hence, it does appear to be the case that the mystical experience, as well as overcoming external truth structures, can aid one in overcoming internal truth structures. In line with this, there are recent studies showing the effectiveness of psychedelic drugs in the treatment of PTSD.[145] One can recall that internal truths are fixed through experiences, with experiences of pain being those most readily remembered – the ‘breaking stick = attacking bear’ was our example. This process, we have found, can be valuable, as we learn to avoid danger etc. With this in mind, one can see that PTSD seems to represent a more intense version of this learning through painful experience; however, with PTSD the experience is so painful it becomes damaging. In this light, maybe Christian morality, substantiated through the use of pain, is one long, worldwide, experience of PTSD. With psychedelics shown to overcome things like addiction and PTSD, we can explore why the mystical experience may allow for such an overcoming of fixed internal truth structures. 

Overcoming One’s Self as an Authority

The first reason as to why psychedelics seem to overcome internal truth structures, is due to the change in brain structure which occurs during psychedelic studies. As we know, brain structure doesn’t equal consciousness, but it is correlated with it, thus, we can see that this change in brain structure may allow for a change in consciousness, leading to an unfixing of certain fixed truths. However, as we know, this explanation regarding the brain cannot do all of the work. Another possible reason psychedelic studies are showing promise in overcoming fixed truth structures is to do with the memory of the traumatic experience itself. In many sessions involving psychedelics, patients have relived or reassessed the traumatic memory, and hence the truth learnt from it, and thus changed the truth associated with the experience to one less damaging to their psyche.[146] This does not relate directly to the mystical experience however, as memories can be experienced in new terms in psychedelic sessions without the complete mystical experience taking place. A complete examination into the reasons for the overcoming of internal truths seen in psychedelic sessions referring to the brain, memories, learnt behaviour and psychology would take a book on its own. Here, I will examine one particular feature of the mystical experience, which allows for the overcoming of internal truths in our context here; this being the breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy. We know by now that, in the mystical experience, the subject-object dichotomy breaks down. This translates to a “complete forgetting of the self”, of one’s own identity.[147] This forgetting of oneself, I argue, represents the overcoming of the closest authority there is, that being one’s own mind. We have seen that the mystical experience allows us to overcome external authorities; however, there is an authority in the mind, which is not our self, but that which we take to be our self. This is the linguistic mind, the one that provides self-talk. Often people identify with this internal authority as if it is themselves, and thus agree with the internal truths it offers (“you should have a cigarette”). However, in the mystical experience this internal authority is lost in the breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy, with the internal authority being the subject here. With the sense of subjectivity lost in the mystical experience and thus shown to be contingent, it is through this experience that one can learn to detach oneself from one’s own internal authority. With this detachment, one can apply many of the same arguments used to explore the role of the mystical experience in overcoming external authorities, as one’s own mind becomes not one’s self, but something separate and external to oneself. For example, we can overcome internal truths that we have based on reason by the same breakdown of reason in the paradoxicality feature of the mystical experience. This explains the similarity between meditation practices in increasing the trait Openness and the mystical experience as increasing the trait Openness shown previously. In meditation, one can recall, the aim is “a specific non-judgmental awareness of present-moment stimuli without cognitive elaboration”,[148] which represents a denial of the will to truth, because judgemental awareness of present-moment stimuli is precisely a search for the right (true) judgement; thus, non-judgemental awareness is a rejection of this process. The thinking mind, we found, is constantly scanning the environment for knowledge; meditation is an attempt to detach from this process. I argue that this detachment can similarly be achieved through the mystical experience, as one loses one’s sense of subjectivity in the mystical experience, and thus is detached from it. Furthermore, with truth as such experienced in the mystical experience (the noetic quality) and shown to be paradoxical and ineffable, the search for knowledge, the will to truth, of the thinking mind can learn from this that it should effectively give up the search for truth, give up on “cognitive elaboration” as a means to truth as such.[149] The constant search for knowledge, which the thinking mind, we found, partakes in, has as its logical aim truth as such, knowledge of everything. Yet, the mystical experience, as revealing truth as such, shows that knowledge of this truth is necessarily unknowable. Hence, the thinking mind will perpetually fail at its task to grasp knowledge of this truth. The mystical experience reveals truth only at the expense of the subject/object dichotomy. The thinking mind is this subject, thus truth as such cannot be reached via cognitive elaboration (thinking), hence internal truths can be overcome by the mystical experience as one comes to see that no internal truth can represent truth as such. Again, why is the mystical experience needed? Why can such internal truths not be overcome merely by argument? Because, without the mystical experience, similarly to how we are stuck in reason, and directly related to this, we are stuck in subjectivity. We are stuck with our sense of self as humans. In order to overcome this sense of self, and our attachment to it, it is not enough to be told that we are not this self using language and negative knowledge from external authorities. Instead, the self must be overcome through direct, mystical, experience representing positive knowledge. All negative knowledge will merely be communicated to the self, and then redefined through the filter of our subjectivity, which as we have found thanks to Kant, is a necessary process. Only by removing subjectivity completely in the mystical experience, or through the practice of meditation, can we detach ourselves from subjectivity and thus the internal truths that this subject, which is ourselves, has come to. Hence we see how the mystical experience can aid us in overcoming internal truths, as well as, external truths. 

The Deified Individual

With both external and internal truth structures overcome; what is left? The individual. Stripped of his or her truth structures, living in the mystery of existence; this represents the deification of the individual introduced in the introduction to this work. Without inner or outer truths to rely on, one must rely on oneself. Again, this is somewhat empirically proven, with 88% reporting they had an “increased reliance on my own values and judgment, less dependence on others’ opinions” after an LSD experience.[150] Without fixed truth structures in place, both those from external authorities and those learnt throughout one’s life and internalised, one is required to have an increased reliance on oneself. This reliance on oneself is not a reliance on oneself as the subject which follow internal truths that must be followed. Rather, this refers to a breaking of internal truths which have come to form habits or addictions, and instead a reliance on one’s core values and judgment. This is understood as something akin to intuition or one’s true self. Furthermore, through the mystical experience, one finds that God and truth are not external to the individual. Instead, God and truth as such are shown to be accessible only to the individual, because the mystical experience is necessarily the experience of an individual. Therefore, one finds that God is not external, but within; this again adds to the deification of individuality. Nietzsche often emphasised this reliance of individuality following the death of the God authority.[151] It has been my claim in this work that the mystical experience can aid in the overcoming of the God authority, as well as other external and internal truth structures, which leads to a new reliance on oneself. Nietzsche called this new self-reliant individual “the Superman”; it appears that by having the mystical experience we can help to bring about this self-reliant Superman.[152]

Overcoming the Truth of Life as Meaningless Suffering

We have progressed through an array of ideas above. I will briefly sum up the story told and then we can return back to our central problem; the problem of life as meaningless suffering. We found that knowledge (both positive and negative knowledge), which lead to fixed truth structures (both internal and external), are a valuable aspect of human life, as this capacity for knowledge and truth allows us to navigate the world and coexist together under a common framework. However, it was found that external authorities, most prominently the Christian church, exploited man’s capability for knowledge, and forced upon man an external truth structure based on the traits of the weak and ascetic. Although this external truth structure may have partly originated out of the want for the mystical experience, it is clear that our modern rationalistic materialistic scientific culture has forgotten the mystical experience and has been left with ascetic Christian morality alone. I have argued that the mystical experience itself is in direct opposition to the Christian moral external truth structure and can allow us to overcome it, both externally and internally. One possible route, then, would be to promote extreme asceticism in order to allow more and more people to come to the mystical experience and thus overcome Christian morality (which promotes mild asceticism), as well as other external and internal power structures. However, this promotion of asceticism is precisely what gave birth to Christian morality in the first place, and it has left us forgetting the mystical experience and being left with only ascetic morality. Thus, I argue, what we need, and what is coming, is the reintroduction of the mystical experience into our culture through psychedelic, instead of ascetic, means. There are historians who argue that psychedelics were used in early Christianity and may have given rise to it – see, ‘The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross’ by John M. Allegro, for example.[153] This particular work is controversial, but I think it likely is historically accurate that there was some psychedelic use in early Christianity. This does not undo the arguments here however, as it is clear that this psychedelic use was ended and forgotten, at least in the mainstream, and the ascetic morality discussed was all that remained. If this psychedelic use did take place in early Christianity, then one can see this work as a call for the return to this version of Christianity involving psychedelic use, rather that the ascetic moral power structure we found that Christianity later became. The reintroduction of the mystical experience into mainstream culture, as we found, and as is shown in psychedelic research, will lead to the overcoming of fixed truth structures. However, we will not be left with the ascetic moral baggage that prescribing the mystical experience through ascetic means has historically led to. Instead, as Nietzsche saw was the case with the Ancient Greeks, the mystical experience, the Dionysian experience, can be periodically, chemically induced by vast portions of society, allowing for the revitalisation of culture away from fixed truth structures and patterns of behaviour, and instead allowing culture to thrive creatively, artistically, as the production of new fixed truth structures is an art, as the art that is Christian mythology shows. Christianity as an artistic illusion that redeems life, however, has become untenable; an illusion doesn’t function if we no longer believe it. We need a new illusion. This leads us back to our central problem; the truth (in the corresponding sense) that life is meaningless suffering. This being true, and the value of truth being painfully embedded into the human psyche over centuries, makes this truth constitute a problem. In order to overcome this problem, we found, Schopenhauer, Christianity and Buddhism prescribed ascetic denial of the will to life, which done completely leads to the mystical experience. Here, I, following Nietzsche, offer the alternative, which is a denial of the will to truth, instead of the denial of the will to life. Through periodically having psychedelically induced mystical experiences, and thus not living ascetically (as this is no longer required with our chemical replacement), our culture will have genuine encounters with truth as such, and see this truth to be unknowable and unreachable via methods of negative knowledge (thinking). This allows us to deny the will to truth in two ways. Firstly, the will to truth, the desire for truth as such, is denied precisely by having the experience of truth as such. For how is a desire overcome? Precisely by reaching the object of the desire, by quenching the desire. One no longer desires water having drank it. Similarly, one no longer desires truth having witnessed it. We overcome the will to truth by experiencing truth as such in the mystical experience. This desire periodically returns, yet can be once more quenched by further psychedelic intake. Secondly, the mystical experience offers us a temporary way out of our subjectivity, thus showing us first hand that the truth of life as meaningless suffering is only a human truth, the truth of a human subject, it does not represent truth as such, which precisely appears when the subject is absent. In this way, the mystical experience allows us to give up on the will to truth as the experience of truth as such is shown to be necessarily unknowable in any standard sense, allowing for the search for truth to be given up. Hence, the will to truth is denied (1) by quenching the will, the desire and (2) by showing that truth as such is unknowable, as the mystical experience is necessarily unknowable and forgettable, thus the search for truth can be given up. So, following the overcoming of the fixed truth structures that the mystical experience allows by destroying the bases of claims to truth such as God and reason as was shown prior, we can now also give up the desire for truth as well. This is no small denial, no small concession. The will to truth, the desire to align oneself individually with the external authority of God, reason, or morality, has been the basis of our culture for 2000 years. We have been wired, originally using pain, to seek knowledge and conformity. This is a useful skill in many instances and this skill has progressed our species a great deal. However, it has also led to a diminishing of individuality and an over-awareness of the futility and pointlessness of the human condition; or, at least, as the human condition appears to human subjectivity. One can feel the tension and anxiety felt when one is attempting to solve a problem, especially one of vital importance, one of life and death, as life itself is; uncertainty hurts and makes anxious.[154] Mankind’s development of knowledge and reason, led to the positing of a transcendent truth, truth as such, the external truth structure of all truth structures, which if aligned with would lead to redemption. This truth is searched for and desired, but is necessarily unknowable. The search for an unknowable truth characterizes man’s existential problem. We want a world of order, meaning, one that makes sense to us, but we live in a world that appears meaningless, without order and which doesn’t make sense. The will to truth is necessarily one that cannot be satisfied, except in the mystical experience. Thus, the perfect state of affairs is to use reason where it applies and is necessary; for everything else, be an artistic individual. Individuality can only progress after fixed truths have been overcome, and one stops trying to align oneself with a truth structure, and instead lives as one individually sees fit. The mystical experience allows for this overcoming of fixed-truth structures, the will to truth and thus allows for an increase in individuality. Having the mystical experience via psychedelic means requires none of the asceticism associated with meditation and sexual abstinence practices that have become imbedded into our morality and require a denial of basic human desires. It is my proposition that Nietzsche knew this; possibly somewhat implicitly, but it is clearly there in his philosophy. Nietzsche’s Dionysian experience is the psychedelically induced mystical experience. Thus it is of no surprise that with his focus on this experience, he also focused largely on its consequences, these being an increase in individuality and a rejection of the will to truth. Nietzsche argued for art to be the answer to the truth of life as meaningless suffering. The mystical experience can destroy truths, and can thus promote art. This is somewhat empirically proven, with Openness to experience being correlated with creativity – and an increase in Openness leading to an increase in creativity.[155] Nietzsche argued for creativity to be the central focus of individuals in the face of life. The mystical experience can play a key role in this progression away from truth, which the mystical experience shows will never be reached, in favour of art, that is, living in affirmed illusion and justifying existence eternally as a purely aesthetic phenomenon. 

Conclusion

We have thus reached the close of this work. It is hoped that one will come away with a new understanding of Nietzsche and the role psychedelically induced mystical experiences played in his thinking. This work was an exploration of how the mystical experience can allow one to overcome fixed truth structures, leading to a deification of the individual, rather than an attempt to prove that Nietzsche held the same view through close textual analysis. However, if one goes back and reads Nietzsche with new eyes following one’s reading here, one will see the clear signs that Nietzsche did indeed think similarly. The mystical experience offers an individual an encounter with truth as such, and with what people have for centuries called ‘God’. It is the mystical experience out of which religions originally grew. Yet, it is clear to see the mystical experience was subsequently forgotten, religion becoming a power structure of external truths that were forced, painfully, upon the masses. This led to the birth of Christian morality, a morality based on the ascetic practices of the weak. Ascetic practice, if leading to the complete denial of the will, we found, leads to the mystical experience. However, mild asceticism does not lead to this experience and is thus merely a denial of human desires, a denial of the will to life, representing a turning away from life. It has been argued above that, by re-introducing the mystical experience into culture via psychedelic means, instead of ascetic means, we can overcome Christian morality, which still holds sway in our modern world, and instead deify individuality. This was the state of affairs in the Ancient Greek culture Nietzsche so admired, with their Dionysian festivals functioning as psychedelic gatherings. By having the mystical experience one finds that God and truth are not external truth structures that can be held in negative knowledge in books or spoken language, instead, God and truth as such are experiences part of the mystical experience accessible only to individuals through positive knowledge. The mystical experience is necessarily unknowable, forgettable and non-communicable. Thus, anyone who claims to have knowledge of what the experience fundamentally is, is being dishonest. By having the mystical experience oneself, one can overcome external truth structures that claim to base their power in God, reason or morality, by seeing that the fundamental truth accessed in the mystical experience is necessarily not one that can be the basis for power. This overcoming of truth structures is no small feat. The desire to align oneself with truth, the ‘will to truth’, has been painfully embedded into the psyche of man over millennia. However, it is impossible to align oneself with truth as such, with God, due to the necessarily subjective nature of human knowledge. Thus, we are left existentially grasping for truth, and yet truth remains forever out of our reach. The mystical experience offers us the only possible encounter with this truth as such; yet we find it to be necessarily forgettable and unknowable. This encounter, however, allows us not only to overcome power structures that appear to know this truth, it also allows us to give up the will to truth. This is the case because (1) the will to truth is satisfied in the mystical experience and (2) truth as such is shown to be unknowable in reality outside of the mystical experience, allowing one to give up on the task of thinking (negative knowledge) one’s way to truth as such. Thus the will to truth is overcome precisely by witnessing truth in the mystical experience. Similarly, one might say, the desire for God is overcome by experiencing God in the mystical experience. This is somewhat speculative. The main argument put forward in this work, that the mystical experiences can allow us to overcome fixed truth structures, however, is grounded in scientific research currently taking place as part of the psychedelic renaissance. In light of this current scientific study of psychedelics and the mystical experiences they produce, we must also study these drugs and experiences in other areas; most relevantly, in philosophy. This work is one such study. Away from scholarship, and on to life as such, and more specifically; life as meaningless suffering. It certainly appears true that life is meaningless suffering; we all suffer, and then we die, with no final goal in sight, no meaning to the suffering. It has been an overarching aim in this work to overcome this truth. Schopenhauer wants us to deny the will to life, deny desire, in order to overcome this truth of life as meaningless suffering. However, this required a problematic, ascetic turning away from life. Instead, Nietzsche, and I, have offered instead a turning away from truth. This turning away occurred in several ways due to the mystical experience. Firstly, we overcome truth in the mystical experience by breaking down the fixed truths we already held. Secondly, we give up the will to truth as we discover truth as such cannot be gained through negative knowledge. Thirdly, we see that the truth of life as meaningless suffering is only a human truth; it does not represent truth as such, which the mystical experience shows to be unknowable. The value of truth, we found, has been painful embedded in the human psyche. In fact, our capacity for reason, it was found, literally arose due to the causing of pain and the subsequent desire to avoid pain by not stepping out of line. This pain, and its avoidance, offers the human psyche a powerful motivator for aligning oneself with external and internal truths, such as God, reason, morality and habitual behaviour. However, this will to truth, for the avoidance of possible pain, has negative consequences. We lack individuality. We have inherited traits of the weak, who seek to align themselves with an imagined God authority. We deny our desires, conform and hide behind morality. Too, we search for a posited transcendental truth, which cannot be reached with the normal tool of thinking, and so are forever frustrated, forever existentially lost. We have gained too much faith in our ability to ‘see reason’. Yes it has led to new technologies, but our faith in reason has also led to disenchantment and a rejection of the unknown. The problem with rational materialist scientism is that it thinks it has a good grasp of what reality is like, but in fact such certainty is radically misplaced. The psychedelically induced mystical experience offers us a way to overcome all of this. We can overcome ascetic, weak morality. Overcome the God authority and the search for transcendental truth. We can overcome our faith in reason, in materialist scientific rationalism. By re-introducing the Dionysian into our culture, by re-introducing the psychedelically induced mystical experience, we can live with the tragic cheerfulness of the Ancient Greeks that Nietzsche so admired. We can overcome truth, the value of which has been embedded with a training in truthfulness, and instead we can live as artists. For what are we doing here? A day comes and you wake up, you exist. You are thrust into an existence that appears to you meaningless and which necessarily hurts, which is necessarily filled with suffering. How can we justify this suffering in the lack of any final goal, in the lack of a meaning for it? The claim put forward here is, and I mean this seriously; make it look good. Live with style, with exuberance. This is not art for art’s sake; it is art for life’s sake! Justify the world eternally as a purely aesthetic phenomenon. Imagine there is an audience, and put on a show. Make it look good! Forget truth, this is art.

Appendix: A Caution

I will add a brief warning that psychedelic drugs should not be taken without first partaking in proper research into them, an understanding of the dose-response relationship of the particular drug taken and the understanding that these drugs are not necessarily fun or enjoyable. Psychedelic intake can lead to disturbing and difficult experiences. It is best that these drugs are taken in a safe place in the company of someone sober that can look after you. The negative effects of psychedelic drugs have been widely overstated, however, there are real dangers that one should make oneself aware of. Nonetheless, it is a human right to affect our consciousness however we see fit. The current criminalization of drug takers is an affront to human freedom. People ought to be honestly educated about the range of possible human experience. The mystical experience in particular represents one of the wonders of a person’s life. People in recent psychedelic studies have ranked the psychedelic experience among one of the top five most meaningful and profound experiences of their lives; up there with the death of a parent or the birth of a child.[156] It is one of the great injustices of our time that we imprison people for possessing these drugs. Once more, it is a human right to affect our consciousness however we see fit.

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[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy – Attempt at Self-Criticism, Penguin Books, 1886, p7

[2] R. R. Griffiths et al, “Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance”, Psychopharmacology (Berl) 2006 Aug;187(3):268-83; discussion 284-92. 

[3] Dr Ben Sessa, The Psychedelic Renaissance, p21-23, Muswell Hill Press, 2012

[4] B. Richards and W. Pahnke, “Implications of LSD and Experimental Mysticism”, Journal of Religion & Health, Vol. 5, 1966, pp. 175-208.

[5] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pantianos Classics, 1902

[6] William A. Richards, Sacred Knowledge, Columbia University Press, 2016

[7] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1819, Everyman, 1995, p261

[8] R. R. Griffiths et al, 2006

[9] Taken from Milo, “Too Much of Life is Mood” (a rap album) 

[10] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Idea, p261

[11] Tom Roberts, The Psychedelic Future of Mind, Park Street Press, 2013, p62

[12] William Ralph Inge, Christian Mysticism, 1899, BibloBazaar, 2006

[13] Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1932, Andesite Press, 2015, p204

[14]Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self: The Problem of the Individual in Modern Society, 1957, Routledge, 2002, p24

[15] As is the mistaken view of top scientists, as is shown in this interview with Avi Loeb, a Harvard professor. http://www.duncantrussell.com/episodes/2017/5/31/avi-loeb , 2017

[16] Joseph Levine, “Materialism and qualia: The Explanatory Gap”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 October:354-61, 1983

[17] Robert A. Halberstein, “Medicinal Plants: Historical and Cross-Cultural Usage Patterns”, Annals of Epidemiology. 2005 Oct;15(9):686-99

[18] McCrae R. R., John O. P, "An introduction to the Five-Factor Model and its applications". Journal of Personality, 1992 Jun;60(2):175-215. 

[19] DeYoung CG, Peterson JB, Higgins DM. “Sources of openness/intellect: cognitive and neuropsychological correlates of the fifth factor of personality”. Journal of Personality, 2005 Aug;73(4):825-58.

[20] Sahdra BK, MacLean KA, Shaver PR, et al. “Enhanced response inhibition during intensive meditation training predicts improvements in self-reported adaptive socioemotional functioning.” Emotion. 2011 Apr;11(2):299-312

[21] Ross S, Bossis A, Guss J, et al. “Rapid and sustained symptom reduction following psilocybin treatment for anxiety and depression in patients with life-threatening cancer: a randomized controlled trial”, Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2016 Dec; 30(12): 1165–1180.

[22] Griffiths R, Johnson M, Carducci M, et al. “Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trial.” Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2016 Dec;30(12):1181-1197.

[23] Francisco A. Moreno, M.D et al, “Safety, Tolerability, and Efficacy of Psilocybin in 9 Patients With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder”, Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 2006, 67: 1735-1740.

[24] Garcia-Romeu A, Griffiths R, Johnson M. “Psilocybin-occasioned mystical experiences in the treatment of tobacco addiction.” Curr Drug Abuse Rev. 2015; 7(3): 157–164.

[25] Johnson M, Garcia-Romeu A, Griffiths R. “Long-term follow-up of psilocybin-facilitated smoking cessation.” Am J Drug Alcohol Abuse. 2017 Jan;43(1):55-60.

[26] Carhart-Harris RL, et al. “Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin.” Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Feb 7;109(6):2138-43.

[27] Roseman L, Leech R, Feilding A, Nutt DJ, Carhart-Harris RL, “The effects of psilocybin and MDMA on between-network resting state functional connectivity in healthy volunteers.” Front Hum Neurosci. 2014; 8: 204.

[28] Carhart-Harris RL et al, “Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging”, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Apr 26;113(17):4853-8

[29] Ibid.

[30] Kapur S, “Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience: A framework linking biology, phenomenology, and pharmacology in schizophrenia.” Am J Psychiatry. 2003 Jan;160(1):13-23.

[31] Hemelsoet D et al, “The neurological illness of Friedrich Nietzsche”, Acta Neurol Belg. 2008 Mar;108(1):9-16.

[32] Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, W. W. Norton & Company, 2003

[33] Letter to Lou Salome and Paul Ree, mid-December 1882, quoted in Peter Sjöstedt-H, Noumenautics, 2015

[34] H Goring, Conversations with Nietzsche, in Sander L. Gilman, Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries, Oxford University Press, 1991

[35] Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations, Picador, 2013

[36] H Goring, Conversations with Nietzsche

[37] Letter to Lou Salome and Paul Ree, mid-December, 1882

[38] H Goring, Conversations with Nietzsche

[39] Peter Sjöstedt-H, Noumenautics, Psychedelic Press, 2015

[40] Walter Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, Indiana University Press, 1995

[41] Dr Ben Sessa, The Psychedelic Renaissance, p21-23

[42] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p1

[43] Ibid.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Vintage Books, 1968, §799

[46] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p1

[47] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p132

[48] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 1895, Penguin, 1968, §60

[49] Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Dionysian Worldview” (1870), Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 13, 1997, p82

[50] Ibid. p83

[51] Wasson and Hoffman, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, North Atlantic Books, 1978

[52] Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Home, 1908, Penguin, 1979

[53] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §1051

[54] Nietzsche, Ecce Home, p104

[55] Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, Penguin, 1942

[56] Samyutta Nikaya LVI, 11

[57] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, p253

[58] Elizabeth A. Clark. Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity, Princeton University Press, 1999

[59] Hajime Nakamura, Indian Buddhism: A Survey with Bibliographical Notes, Motilal Banarsidass, 1980

[60] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, p245

[61] Ibid. p253

[62] Aristotle, Metaphysics, Penguin, 1998, Book IV, Part 7

[63] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, 1781, Pacific Publishing, 2011

[64] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will as Idea

[65] Nietzsche, The Will to Power

[66] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will as Idea, p3

[67] S. Freud, Letter to Romain Rolland, 1927

[68] However there may indeed be some cases of ascetic animals and animals committing suicide. http://www.oddee.com/item_98725.aspx

[69] Sara W. Lazar et al, “Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness”, Neuroreport. 2005 Nov 28; 16(17): 1893–1897.

[70] Goldstein J, Kornfield J. Seeking the heart of wisdom: The path of Insight Meditation, Shambhala Publications, 1987

[71] Ibid.

[72] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Idea, p260

[73] Sara W. Lazar et al, “Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness”, Neuroreport. 2005 Nov 28; 16(17): 1893–1897.

[74] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, p260

[75] Ibid. p260

[76] Ibid. p260

[77] Peter Appleby, “Mysticism and Ineffability”, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, September 1980, Volume 11, Issue 3, pp 143–166

[78] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, p260

[79] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p1

[80] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p388

[81] I.e. Russell’s paradox

[82] William A. Richards, Sacred Knowledge, p33

[83] James Fadiman, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, Park Street Press, 2011, p132 quoted in Tom Roberts, The Psychedelic Future of Mind

[84] William Ralph Inge, Christian Mysticism

[85] Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, Wisdom Publications, 2000

[86] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p17

[87] Ibid. p17

[88] Brewer J et al, “Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity”, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2011 Dec 13;108(50):20254-9.

[89] Carhart-Harris RL, et al. “Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin.” Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Feb 7;109(6):2138-43.

[90] Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, 1887, Oxford University Press, 1998 p112

[91] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, Vintage Books, 1989, p1 

[92] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §853

[93] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p32

[94] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §822

[95] Ibid. §853

[96] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, p134

[97] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1889, Penguin, 1990, p40

[98] Jordan Peterson, Biblical Series lectures, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdrLQ7DpiWs , 2017

[99] Galton, F, “Vox populi”, Nature (1907), No. 1949, Vol. 75, 450-451.

[100] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p112

[101] Ibid.

[102] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea

[103] Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, p42

[104] Ibid. p43

[105] Ibid. p42

[106] Ibid. p44

[107] Ibid. 127

[108] The idea that space and time are added to reality by the human mind is given credence, as by chemically disturbing the human mind in psychedelic states, space and time are transcended, possibly showing their reliance on the human mind. 

[109] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §522

[110] William A. Richards, Scared Knowledge, 2016, p41

[111] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, p260 

[112] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1929, The Free Press, 1978, p404

[113] William A. Richards, Scared Knowledge, p63/64

[114] Ibid. p41

[115] Ibid. p41

[116] Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, Touchstone, 1976

[117] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §765

[118] Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, p55

[119] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p125

[120] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §765

[121] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §522

[122] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 1785, Hackett, 1993, p30

[123] Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morals, 1840, Hackett, 1995, §4

[124] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739, Project Gutenberg, 2010

[125] Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, p42

[126] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1887, Vintage Books, 1974, §377

[127] Ibid.

[128] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p31

[129] Ibid. p112

[130] Ibid. p111

[131] Ibid. p111

[132] William A. Richards, Scared Knowledge, p26

[133] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, p260 

[134] Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, ‘What is True?’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gdpyzwOOYY , 2017

[135] Mercier and Sperber, The Enigma of Reason, Allen Lane, 2016 

[136] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §522

[137] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p99

[138] Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945, Routledge, 2002, §24

[139] Ibid.

[140] William A. Richards, Scared Knowledge, p42

[141] Picard, Fabienne, "State of belief, subjective certainty and bliss as a product of cortical dysfuntion", Cortex. 2013 Oct;49(9):2494-500.

[142] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p99

[143] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, 1878, Penguin, 1994, §515

[144] Carl Jung, The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition, W.W Norton & Company, 2009, p480

[145] Michael C Mithoefer et al, “The safety and efficacy of  3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine- assisted psychotherapy in subjects with chronic, treatment-resistant posttraumatic stress disorder: the first randomized controlled pilot study”, J Psychopharmacol. 2011 Apr; 25(4): 439–452 (whether this study applies to us here is questionable as MDMA does not regularly bring about the classical mystical experience. There are reports however into other psychedelics that do bring the mystical experience about and also help people with PTSD, such as ayahuasca.)

[146] Stan Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious, Independent Voices, 1975

[147] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p1 

[148] Sara W. Lazar et al, “Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness”, Neuroreport. 2005 Nov 28; 16(17): 1893–1897

[149] Ibid. 

[150] James Fadiman, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, 2011, quoted in Tom Roberts, The Psychedelic Future of the Mind

[151] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1891, Penguin, 2003

[152] Ibid.

[153] John M. Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross, Gnostic Media Research & Publishing, 1970

[154] K Buhr and M.J Dugas, “The intolerance of uncertainty scale”, Behaviour Research and Therapy, Volume 40, Issue 8, August 2002, Pages 931-945

[155] Zhou, Jing et al. “When openness to experience and conscientiousness are related to creative behavior: An interactional approach”, J Appl Psychol. 2001 Jun;86(3):513-24

[156] RR Griffiths, “Mystical-type experiences occasioned by psilocybin mediate the attribution of personal meaning and spiritual significance 14 months later,” J Psychopharmacol. 2008 Aug; 22(6): 621–632.