Beyond Reason #37 - Beyond Reason

From Bach to Lewis

‘I don’t believe in God, but I believe in Bach.’ That was my answer to the vicar who was interviewing my wife and me to decide whether she would get us married or not, a year and a half ago. She—still?—ended up marrying us.

My mind has changed since then. At the time, I was reading The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus. His thesis is fairly famous: the universe is absurd, and utterly indifferent to our need for meaning. His solution is ‘heroic defiance’: Sisyphus must be happy because he continues to push his rock despite the futility. It felt... better than nothing, but neither very persuasive nor very helpful.

I was also reading The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker, who lays out in writing a terrifying paradox we all try not to think about too much: that man is a symbolic god—capable of writing symphonies, travelling the universe, and imagining the infinite—yet we are housed in a body that shits, decays, and eventually dies. In his own words, ‘humans are gods with anuses’.

​Becker uses Kierkegaard to argue that the only way to bridge this gap between our infinite spirit and our decaying flesh is a ‘leap of faith.’ At the time, I found that statement unfounded and, frankly, unconvincing. ​I found myself more aligned with Pascal. In his Pensées—which I had not read at the time—he warns of the danger of jumping that gap prematurely or unconvincingly. Pascal understood better than anyone the ‘misery of man without God,’ but he also knew that ‘the heart has its reasons that reason does not know’.

At the back of those ontological readings, my wife and I went for a psychedelic retreat in Amsterdam. Not the recreation type: the therapeutic one. Think wooden communal houses in the forest, vegetarian meals, yoga... all of it surrounded by professional therapists. After a couple of days of mental and spiritual preparation, we swallowed a ‘hero dose’ of psilocybin infusion, put on our blackout masks, and lay down on our individual mattresses, still surrounded by therapists.

The literature on the subject often mentions that ‘patients’ compare such a single introspective psychedelic journey to tens—if not hundreds—of therapy sessions. The first part of my journey clearly met those expectations, but is a bit too personal to share here. The second part of the journey led me to change my perspective on life.

I experienced what is called ‘ego death’, which is a phenomenon where the part of the brain circuitry responsible for the identification with the ‘self’ gets completely repressed. It is fairly impossible to describe in words, but imagine a situation where one can no longer wonder whether ‘I’ exists or ‘I’ does not exist, because ‘I’ makes no sense anymore. No more ‘I think therefore I am’, since ‘there’ is no ‘I’ any more.

I experienced what felt like eternity, i.e. absolute timelessness: no beginning, no end, no ‘billions of years’, just... no time at all. Always having been and never having not been, but at the same time no self whatsoever. In that state, contemplating Camus’s question of the meaning of existence vs. non existence—which I had been asking myself for quite a long time before reading Camus—obviously takes a completely different dimension. That boundlessness felt very difficult to tolerate, and it felt that any ‘boundlessness’ would seek to experience ‘boundedness’. That the ‘everything’ would crave experiencing the ‘other’.

When I started coming back to reality, i.e. experiencing boundedness again, both in a (physical) space and time dimension, my sense of ego/self was still nowhere to be found. I remember moving my own hands in front of me, and ‘it’ thought ‘it’ can move those hands.

As ‘it’ started to convince ‘itself’ ‘it’ existed as a self, the most obvious thing that came rushing up were memories of being a self... only for them to immediately go down the drain: too unreliable a foundation to rebuild one’s understanding of reality when one’s brain doubts its own bounded existence as an individual self, both present and past.

Then, as a well-trained French engineer, came physics. Physics failed me as well. To put it simply, if one doubts that one’s own bounded reason arises from reality, how can one trust rules of reality that can only be inferred/derived from reality by reason? Again—so much for ‘I think therefore I am’...

Then came maths. Mathematics is a beautiful construct—the most beautiful construct—because it is pure and self-sufficient. But a self-sufficient construct of the mind which does not need reality to ‘exist’ cannot possibly help with justifying reality, since it remains... a construct. Damn! It was getting really tricky to believe my own bounded self...

Once my left brain had exhausted all its ideas, it finally threw in the towel, and my right brain finally got the opportunity to chip in. What it came up with was ‘what about love?’ Now, I imagine we all have this mental image of 1960s hippies on LSD hugging each other and more (LSD having similar effects on the brain as psilocybin). So, before you dismiss my next paragraphs, I must disclose that both my wife and all my closest friend would find the qualifier ‘not a hippie’ sufficient to describe most of my personality, if not all.

I also need to remind anyone still reading—what’s wrong with you?—that my existential issue was to accept that being an instantiated, bounded self made more sense than being (part of) an uninstantiated, boundless (both in space and time) ‘existence’ that some might call God.

And that’s where my right-brain and left-brain thinking finally met: a boundless entity would want to experience instantiated boundedness because it would be the only way to experience love. The unlimited ‘lacks’ the limited.

Don’t get me wrong: that still led to a series of other existential crises—I’ll skip on those as they are more personal—but the crux of the ‘existence’ problem was behind me. A couple of hours later, I was crying on the tree-surrounded porch while slowly coming back to ‘normality’.

I need to be crystal-clear here: this experience in itself, as mystical as it was, did not make me believe in God. It was entirely experiential, and too right-brain for my tyrannic left brain to accept pure experiences as a given. But it certainly opened my reflections about consciousness and the experience of life in a way that led me to research, think, and debate the question more or less incessantly since then.

It feels like I have been searching for exactly what to write to all of you about in this newsletter, always just touching subjects I found moderately intriguing and worth sharing without ever feeling that it was ‘right’. Probably because most of them felt 99% left brain, rather than a healthy balance of both reason and intuition.

I have now had enough fascinating conversations about consciousness, rationality, and spirituality with some of my dearest friends to know this is the topic I want to write to you about in this newsletter. At least for the foreseeable future. (Incidentally, I am re-baptising said newsletter to ‘Beyond Reason’ to reflect this newly-found... clarity.)

I have about a dozen short essays already planned in my head to explore this journey together, and to hopefully get your own insights and experiences. Stay tuned, and have a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year ahead!

Val