I've come to what I call the "geometric model of the psychedelic experience."
I certainly don't represent it as the end of the intellectual road, but it
is a provisional model which is the best I can do at the moment. I think
that, and it seems logically compelling to me, that consciousness as
ordinarily experienced is a human ability shaped by evolutionary pressure,
and since evolutionary threat and harm usually comes at us in three
dimensional space, this is where consciousness has been forced...to
concentrate and define itself.
Let me restate it.
Because of the possibility of being stepped on by woolly
mammoths and eaten by sabre-tooth tigers, the primitive evolving mind of
human beings concentrated on nearby space and time because that's where
threat comes from, the kind of threat that has to be immediately responded
to by running away or fighting or something like that. But...if the
psychedelics prove anything they prove that consciousness is an incredibly
plastic and malleable medium. So what happens when you take a compound
like psilocybin in silent darkness in a situation of no threat and low
anxiety and low input from the exterior world is that this function, which
is essentially in most situations a closed fist ready to strike out at
something coming from nearby, unfolds into something much more beautiful,
much more interesting, and much more true to itself. In other words, not
defined by an exterior context or situation, but defined by its own
mechanics.
» Nick Herbert and Max face the Quantum Facts
