Thou Shall Deceive Thyself: On cognitive hallucinations and mind's prime directive

I am often asked if psychedelic or meditative insights have inspired my philosophical views, or at least confirmed them in some way. They did, but not in the way—or for the reasons—that most people would imagine. Indeed, I have a very ambiguous, dubious relationship with first-person revelations. I think they are very useful in a certain way, but should seldom be taken on face-value. This is what I want to talk about today.

I have often come across people who developed intricate metaphysical views after returning from rich trance states, be them induced by psychedelics, intense prayer or other meditative techniques. They regard their experiences in those states as revelations of 'The Truth' that underlies the illusion they then consider our ordinary lives to be. Complex mythologies emerge, involving demiurges, aliens from the Pleiades, transcendent entities with intense interest in humanity and intricate plans for our future, invisible backstage activity that allegedly maintains the veneer of the physical world, and so on.

I sympathize with these, for I know, from personal experience, how compelling—vivid, internally consistent, structured, familiar as childhood memories—those insights can be. They come accompanied by a sense of hyper-reality that is difficult to describe or shake off. It is as if they constituted a deeper, more original, primordial and authentic layer of experience than our ordinary lives. Therefore, I am not surprised at all that many buy into those insights wholesale. They do feel like something you once knew, then forgot, and now remember again. You say to yourself, "Of course! How could I have forgotten this? This is what is actually going on, I know it." These are powerful experiences that do convey important and true insights; just—perhaps—not the insights one initially thinks they do. Indeed, the disposition and power of mind to deceive itself is unfathomable, something a recent series of dreams has reminded me of.

As many of you know, I was born in Rio de Janeiro and spent my childhood there, before returning to the ancestral lands of Europe, the "mother of all demons," as Jung once put it. I've had what can only be described as an idyllic childhood, in contact with the extraordinarily rich nature that surrounds the city. Yet, I haven't been back there for about 25 years now—and even then, last time I visited I spent only a few days there.

The death of my father, when I was still quite young, sliced my life into two seemingly irreconcilable parts, completely alien to one another. My child self not only lived in a different place, but also thought different thoughts in different languages. As such, from the point of view of my adult self, my childhood has acquired the quality of a fairytale, a numinous myth that unfolded in an exotic land of dreams. It feels so unreal that sometimes I catch myself wondering if it actually happened; if it wasn't all just a familiar dream I grew so used to that I now take for granted.

Strangely, given enough time, reality can feel just as much like a dream as a dream can feel like reality. But I digress.

Recently, something—I no longer remember what—prompted me to reminisce about my strange, alien, yet wonderful childhood and the places where it unfolded. I suddenly realized how disconnected I have become from it, how long it has been since I re-visited those places, how estranged from an early part of myself I have become. And so I started wondering whether I shouldn't just hop into a plane—something I've done so regularly throughout my professional life—and go back there for a week. This may sound easy and trivial, but for me it isn't: I am an alien in my birth country; literally indeed but, most importantly, figuratively. I never really fit in, which was OK when I was a child but, as an adult, it can be confrontational, especially because Brazilians expect me to be and act Brazilian. And so I was struggling with the emotionally-charged question of whether to visit the city once again or not.

It was then that my 'obfuscated mind'—my preferred term for what Jung and Freud called 'the unconscious,' the matrix of dreams—responded to my emotional ambiguity and stress with a remarkable series of dreams.

In the first dream, I was back in Rio de Janeiro, as the adult I am today, walking around the city and wondering whether I might be just dreaming. "No," I said to myself; "this is real, I am really here at last; it's happened!" Soon enough, however, I woke up and realized it was indeed just a dream.

A couple of days later, another dream: again I was in Rio, ridding a bus this time, looking out the window and watching the people and buildings go by. While in the second dream, I remembered the first dream, as well as the fact that the first dream had been... well, just a dream. And so I wondered: "Some time ago I had this very realistic dream that I was back in Rio, and so maybe this, right now, is also just a dream; maybe I am not back at all." But after looking around more carefully, feeling the seat and the inner walls of the bus with my hands, I convinced myself that now, this second time, it wasn't a dream; that I was really there, in Rio, after all these years; that it had finally happened! And then, I woke up.

Another few days go by and I have a third dream, during which I remembered the first and second dreams, as well as the fact that the first and second dreams had been just... well, dreams. And so I wondered, "Could it be just another dream now as well? No, this time it is real. The very fact that I remember the previous dreams as dreams proves that I am lucidly awake right now..." And so on. You get the picture. This happened no less than five times during a period of perhaps two weeks. Each time I remembered all the previous ones, and knew that they had been just dreams. Yet, each time I convinced myself anew, without a shadow of a doubt, that that time it wasn't a dream; that that time it was for real.

There are two things my obfuscated mind was trying to tell me in its own more-than-allegorical language—the only language it can speak—with these dreams. The first is this: I am always in my Rio, for my Rio exists in me. I never left, for I carry it with me wherever I go. I really am in my Rio already right now, so why struggle with the question of whether I should fly there or not? The question misses the point entirely and arises from a misunderstanding of what is actually going on. My Rio is not a point in space; not even a point in spacetime; it's a state of mind. The series of dreams was the insistence of my obfuscated mind that I really am in Rio. Each time I dismissed this conclusion the obfuscated mind conjured up another dream, very explicitly addressing my specific doubt and taking the whole thing one meta-level up. It's amazing: the dreams were brilliantly designed to deal precisely with my ego's tendency to dismiss dreams! After so much insistence, how could I ignore the message? Only when I understood it, did the dream series stop.

The second message is a mirror image of the first: in insisting that the dreams were true, the obfuscated mind was indirectly insisting that the truth is dream-like; that our sense of reality, right now, is as much internally conjured up by mind as my sense of reality was during the dreams. In other words, our sense of reality isn't derived from objective observations, but arises endogenously instead; it's a phenomenon of mind, in mind.

And this, I think, is the take-home message from hyper-real trance states: that we so strongly believe them to be literally real during the trance—whereas we know, afterwards, that they couldn't have been so—tells us something crucial about our impression, right now, that our ordinary lives are literally what they seem to be. If mind can conjure up that kind of robust certainty during a purely mental event—even when explicitly and repeatedly confronted with sceptical questions about the reality of the event—how can we be sure that it isn't doing precisely the same right now? If it is, then this ordinary reality, too, is mind-made; this, too, is real in the same sense that my glorious return to Rio was real five times: it is mentally real, and that's all there is to it and anything else.

As such, the message from trance states is not that the demiurges and aliens from the Pleiades are realities outside mind; to conclude that is to invert the meaning of the metaphor, to get things backwards. The message is, instead, that this waking reality, too, is not outside mind; for in both cases our sense of reality is endogenous—a cognitive hallucination, or a hallucination of beliefs and reasoning, as opposed to perceptions—not an external, objective fact.

Nonetheless, our sense of hyper-reality during trance states is justifiable: yes, the aliens and demiurges are indeed true. And our subsequent skepticism is also justifiable: yes, the demiurges and aliens are indeed just mental creations of mind. Do you see the point? Common and tempting as it may be, the dichotomy between the qualifiers 'mental' and 'real' is a false and unhelpful one, a culture-bound logical fallacy. It is precisely in their hallucinatory nature that the aliens and demiurges are as true as our ordinary lives (notice that I'm leaving aside the question of how consensual these hallucinations may be, which is an important question I've addressed in my books, but which is outside the scope of this essay). Both embody the metaphorical language of the deeper, transpersonal layers of the obfuscated mind, forever busy talking to itself through self-deception. Just as my series of dreams, it will only stop when it gets itself.

Self-deception is mind's way to talk to, and make sense of, itself; for it can only express itself to itself through the production of inner imagery.

Stronger yet, mind's prime directive is to deceive itself, for only through self-deception can reality—any reality—be conjured up into existence and thereby evoke enough affection. Parmenides already hinted at this at the very birth of the Western mind. Peeling the layers of self-deception is like peeling an onion: at the end, nothing is left other than the mere potential for experience. The demiurges and aliens are all, indeed, just mind-made hallucinations; but so is this, right now. If you can wrap your mind around that, you will see the world with very different eyes.