Psychedelic literature: This can be either literature understood in the light of psychedelic experience or psychedelic experience understood in the light of literature. Here are two examples from Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue:
“He seemed to be tasting the delight of some profound and amazing sensation.”
“He felt like a swimmer who, in the midst of superhuman efforts to reach the shore, perceives that the undertow is taking him to sea. He would go with the mysterious current; he would go swiftly–and see the end, the fulfillment, both blissful and terrible.
“With this state of exaltation in which he saw himself in some incomprehensible way always victorious, whatever might befall, there was mingled a tenacity of purpose.”
Philosophy is a special kind of literature, and so is the Bible and so are Christian doctrines. This is not to say any of those are merely literature. But then great works of literature aren’t merely literature either.
In the light of remembering what an LSD trip is (was?) like, I believe that the threat of meaningless suffering is real; that is, it is something that is really experienced, it is not just a concept or a lie that someone has made up. And the fear that it could be a permanent, inescapable state and the real, horrible truth about reality is also something that is really experienced. And the threat of inescapable meaningless suffering is tied up with the threat of death as permanent unconsciousness, sheer emptiness, nothingness; because if that is our fate, then all of our suffering and all of our joy and love is meaningless. You may object, as I once did (See God Is a Symbol of Something True), that the fact that something has come to an end does not imply that it never happened; that even if I die and stay dead, it will still always be objectively true that I once lived and had exactly the life that I had.
But what good is that objective truth to me if at death I become permanently unconscious? It could matter to someone else who is still conscious, but if eventually everyone is permanently unconscious, there would be no one for whom it would matter. Suppose there is only God, and it matters to Him. When I try to understand what this might mean, I imagine what it would be like to be God, caring about the creatures to whom He gave the gift of consciousness and from whom He then took it away forever. Clearly, this is not the God of Christianity, although according to some understandings of Christianity, I suppose, God does this to some people when he condemns them to the Second Death. Anyway, I don’t really get anywhere when I try to imagine what that would be like, so it doesn’t offer much consolation to me if that is the way things are. I suppose it is a little better than it would be if not even God is conscious and there really is just absolutely nothing anybody ever experiences again.
But can I really imagine what it would be like for only God to be conscious? In such a situation, I would not be conscious, so I would need to imagine that I am not conscious. I can imagine being temporarily unconscious and then later recovering consciousness and realizing that I had missed something in the meantime. But if I try to imagine losing consciousness permanently, I don’t understand how that could be a situation in which anyone else was conscious either, for that could only mean something to me on the supposition that I could later wake up and realize that there had been someone there to witness what I had failed to witness. Sheer nothingness is impossible to imagine, for imagining is something. I don’t understand those who say that I should be amazed that there is something rather than nothing. I think they show a lack of philosophical understanding. I am amazed and delighted, rather, that nothingness is not a real possibility. I don’t doubt, however, that it is possible to fear nothingness as if it were something; for I have done it myself. But that nothingness that I fear is really something that I am imagining. That shadowy something turns out to be the loose end of a thread that leads back to everything, to the universe, to life after life in world after world. What aspired to be damnation settles for home and salvation.
In the light of remembering what an LSD trip is (was?) like, I also believe the promise of absolute safety, guaranteed victory, ever-renewed freshness, life everlasting is fulfilled, concrete and real, not empty words, not mere fantasy, the realest of the real, not vague or ambiguous in the slightest, but just out there and in here and everywhere all at once, impossible to doubt. It is true that it can fade into the background, but that doesn’t matter.