http://i.imgur.com/IL0TFb2.jpg

So.. your brain winds up staying in the same sorts of states most of the time. Often, they're sequential and related, like the way you hiccup when you cry too hard. The way you feel kinda high after running, the way you feel ramped up after an argument.

One of the things the brain does is include or exclude information for the sake of coherence. Perceptually, Escher drawings are good example, as is the necker cube. The two images aren't compatible, so switching between one interpretation and another involves including and excluding the components that make the interpretation coherent/incoherent. You can't have both at the same time.

Now, among the things that can happen to a person is that something they consider fundamental to how the world works is revealed as changeable. Belief in God is a great example, I mean, imagine if that dude literally shoved his arms through the clouds and waved. Imagine the blown minds. One thing that would happen to a lot of people is that they would be caught in a process wherein the brain has to literally re-program everything it understood previously in order to make this new interpretation coherent.

For comparison, try to note that switching from figure to ground in a necker cube illusion isn't instant. Scale it up to something bigger than perception, and you'll get something like what happens when you need to incorporate some huge, massive, new world changing fact.

Ok, so now the whole world believes in God and they've gone through the necessary reconfiguration. Their minds are blown, and they now understand their actions as observed and judged, and they all come clean to their spouses about their infidelities and start helping their communities and praying. Then, whoops, turns out Fox news got ahold of some satellites and projected the hand of God onto the sky. Goddamnit, now what?

What if it turns out it was Fox news all along, and we just never found out?

This silly little analogy tells us a bunch of things.

One: your interpretation of reality is highly contingent, and even your most sincerely held beliefs can be impinged upon.

Two: the incorporation or exclusion of a new piece of information can result in an inability to either accept what was previously accepted, or reject what was previously rejected. A good common example is what happens when a person learns about an infidelity ("Ohh my God, I totally believed you were at a conference!"

Three: it is not necessary that the new information be veridical (truth-telling) about the world, merely that you accept it as so. Hence, if God actually reached his arm through the clouds, you would be absolutely required to believe in him. You wouldn't be able not to. Even if it turned out it was Fox news. Even if you thought it was Fox news, your life would be altered because all of the other people believed it was God.

The end result: when you're on psychedelics, sometimes your brain will react to your own thoughts as though you've just been exposed to some new, foundational insight. A similar thing could occur if you (as an adult) suddenly came to terms with childhood abuse (It really wasn't my fault! crying ensues). What has occurred is a reinterpretation of the information that you already have, the sudden inclusion of a new idea, or exclusion of a new idea.

The point is, it's involuntary, and there's plenty of other more typical versions of it that all come with their own flavor. For instance, discovering that you'd won the lottery is as life-changing (and brain re-programming) as discovering that a parent had died -at least in the quantity of change and sensation you'd likely experience- but the two have radically different flavors.

Since psychedelics change the threshold parameters for this sort of cascade change, you can have experiences like "Ohh wow, the world really IS beautiful." or "Ohh my God, quantum theory really does prove that we're all one!"

The experience is jarring because you usually associate it with a cause - the introduction by the system of information to you as a passive agent. You find out you won the lottery. You find out that your wife was cheating. You can discover a key idea in a critical theory, and be left trembling at the awe of its implications completely without drugs -even if it turns out that you're wrong.

Now, it wouldn't be very useful if we were constantly going to pieces over the majesty of nature. I mean, my god, could you imagine if life was like that all the time?

Nonetheless, such experiences can really reveal just how fucking jaded we let ourselves become, and can reveal real barriers to thought, feeling, insight, exploration, growth and development in our lives, loves and relationships.

The question isn't "what was this experience", but "what can I learn from it".