Insights from Alan Watts Regarding the Nature of LSD Hallucinations
Alan Watts' thinking on the issue of the nature of LSD hallucinations has served as my primary source of inspiration for understanding the nature of this phenomena. As you can see below, Watts quite eloquently captures important features of the psychedelic experience in such as fashion as to give us clues as to what these drugs may be doing to our brains.
Alan Watts was a great popularizer of Eastern Philosophy during the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. Watts became involved with the psychedelic movement occurring during this period and contributed many writings on the subject. Here and there in his writings he stated the idea that LSD hallucinations were literally conscious glimpses into the inner workings of our brains. Below, I have collected the quotes from Alan Watts' writings which state precisely this idea.
THE JOYOUS COSMOLOGY
This quote is taken from the Alan Watts book: The Joyous Cosmology published in 1962 by Vintage books. Click here to go to the electronic version of the Joyous Cosmology.
"Closed-eye fantasies in this world seem sometimes to be revelations of the secret workings of the brain, of the associative and patterning processes, the ordering systems which carry out all our sensing and thinking. Unlike the one I have just described, they are for the most part ever more complex variations upon a theme---ferns sprouting ferns sprouting ferns in multidimensional spaces, vast kaleidoscopic domes of stained glass or mosaic, or patterns like the models of highly intricate molecules---systems of colored balls, each one of which turns out to be a multitude of smaller balls, forever and ever. Is this, perhaps, an inner view of the organizing process which, when the eyes are open, makes sense of the world even at points where it appears to be supremely messy?"
A PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE: FACT OR FANTASY?
The following quotes are taken from the Allen Watts Essay A Psychedelic Experience: Fact or Fantasy? This essay appeared in LSD, The Consciousness-Expanding Drug, 1962, David Solomon, Editor, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York
"But the importance of careful description (of LSD hallucinations) is that it may help us to understand the kind or level of reality upon which these changes in consciousness are taking place.
For undoubtedly they are happening. The dancing, kaleidoscopic arabesques which appear before closed eyes are surely an observation of some reality, though not, perhaps, in the physical world outside the skin. But are they rearranged memories? Structures in the nervous system? Archetypes of the collective unconscious? Electronic patterns such as often dance on the TV screen? What, too, are the fern-like structures which are so often seen-the infinitude of branches upon branches upon branches, or analogous shapes? Are these a glimpse of some kind of analytical process in the brain, similar to the wiring patterns in a computer? We really have no idea, but the more carefully observers can record verbal descriptions and visual pictures of these phenomena, the more likely that neurologists or physicists or even mathematicians will turn up the physical processes to which they correspond. The point is that these visions are not mere imagination, as if there had ever been anything mere about imagination The human mind does not just perversely invent utterly useless images out of nowhere at all. Every image tells us something about the mind or the brain or the organism in which it is found...
The intensification and "deepening" of color, sound and texture lends them a peculiar transparency. One seems to be aware of them more than ever as vibration, electronic and luminous. As this feeling develops it appears that these vibrations are continuous with one's own consciousness and that the external world is in some odd way inside the mindbrain. It appears, too, with overwhelming obviousness, that the inside and the outside do not exclude one another and are not actually separate. They go together; they imply one another, like front and back, in such a way that they become polarized...
Anyone moving into completely unfamiliar territory may at first misunderstand and misinterpret what he sees...What is there in the experience of clear blue sky to suggest the structure of the optical nerves? Comparably, what is there in the sound of a human voice on the radio to suggest the formations of tubes and transistors? I raise this question because it is obvious that any chemically induced alteration of the nervous system must draw the attention of that system to itself. I am not normally aware that the sensation of blue sky is a state of the eyes and brain, but if I see wandering spots that are neither birds nor flying saucers, I know that these are an abnormality within the optical system itself. In other words, I am enabled, by virtue of this abnormality, to become conscious of one of the instruments of consciousness. But this is most unfamiliar territory...
Ordinarily, we remain quite unaware of the fact that the whole field of vision with its vast multiplicity of colors and shapes is a state of affairs inside our heads. Only eyes within a nervous system within a whole biological organism can translate the particles and/or waves of the physical world into light, color, and form, just as only the skin of a drum can make a moving hand go "Boom!" Psychedelics induce subtle alterations of perception which make the nervous system aware of itself, and the individual suddenly and unaccustomedly becomes conscious of the external world as a state of his own body."