The Vast Unknown of Consciousness
Inspired by a 3rd-person view of subjective experience
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How I understand the "trip" part of psychedelics is similar to the astronaut floating around a spaceship. In this scenario, sober, ordinary reality is the astronaut in the spaceship doing astronaut things.
A suitable dose of LSD, DMT, psilocybin, peyote, ketamine, or MDMA, and you've donned your space suit to venture out into the vast unknown of consciousness.
Cue the experience of oneness: seeing yourself not as a person on Earth (the astronaut with daily responsibilities), but as a cell actively participating in the organism of all existence. The simple fact that you are everything is so obviously true that we overlook it in day-to-day life. To see from this perspective is to glimpse enlightenment.
Living as the awareness of everything around you (rather than as a distinct "other") requires us to forget everything we've been told is important in life. I highly recommend it as the balance to daily maintenance, and it's possible through years of dedicated meditation, without arbitrarily illicit substances.
As with any new perspective, psychedelics shift your behaviour and, with the right mental and spiritual preparation, may leave you with clarity about and momentum towards your idea of "the good life" (assuming your mindfulness interrupts the automaticity of consciousness).
However, if you venture too far away from the spaceship, you risk psychosis (meant here as a spectrum from, "flawed world view" to, "crazy" as you think of it).
Moving further into the void (and further into unity, from the perspective of oneness) slowly weakens your connection to this life on this world. Eventually, you lose touch with the baseline reality of, "if hungry, eat." We cut the tether to our animal nature.
Once your grip on realit(y/ies) has loosened, it's harder to integrate yourself back into the default reality we wake up in. So, yes, you are but a humble cell in this universal being, but you are ALSO a human person here and now, reading this, with hopes, fears, and plans.
Different perspectives evoke different emotions, and language is one of our ways of expressing those experiences to ourselves and others - language shapes reality.
The stories we tell ourselves about our experiences (from any reality) are only as true as we believe them to be, implying that every story is equally true. So, to unhook ourselves from any one perspective, we must reconcile the concurrent truths of every possible reality.
Language is conceptual, but reality (in the binary sense of being or not being, as compared to the subjective reality of cognitive life) is literal. So, semantics will, at some intersection of meanings that independently make sense, give rise to a paradox that our minds weren't built to comprehend. The intersection, however, is, nonetheless, real in the most literal sense.
As far as I know, telepathy is the only way to communicate and wholly understand entire states of being without encountering linguistic contradictions. My friend and I call this higher-dimensional understanding, The Beyond.
This gap between language and reality leads to frustration because we instinctively trust that our labels for reality are reality. They are, and they're not - that tree really is out in the world, and the ridges of its bark are as brittle as they look. However, that tree as it stands does not, in and of itself, imply all the conceptual baggage we associate with the word, "tree" (ecology, the paper industry, canoes, etcetera). This is true of the Self - you're both you and the universe.
Many of our problems arise from instinctively and wholeheartedly believing our own thoughts and definitions.
This automatic response to life leads us into the cycle of circumstance. Inner peace gets us out of it, and you can read more about that here.
Reality will always, to some degree, remain a mystery to our biologically grounded three-dimensional cognition. The best we can do is continue questioning our ideas of what is, and could be, real. Hilariously, it's all because the word "fan" is not a literal fan, humming away in the background.
So how does this apply to virtual reality (VR)? VR is another method of straying away from the metaphorical spaceship of morning's sober awareness.
For example, Japan's population is in decline, and 25% of people under the age of 40 are single and virgins.
I speculate that the phenomenon is localized to Japan because the island is further ahead in the field than any other country.
We, as humans, do everything we do to fulfill our conscious and unconscious needs in positive, negative, or neutral ways.
Downstream, why spend time going out into the world and risk facing rejection when you can put on a pair of goggles and experience the human-like intimacy of dating from the comfort of home?
The introduction of VR to mass culture has already changed the human experience.
The individuals making up these statistics have been had by VR in the same way as someone who's done too many drugs consistently over a long time. They continually saw away their tether and are destabilized, landing somewhere in between this reality and another.
So, they end up looking to fulfill their human needs in an inhuman environment. That's not to say the automaticity of our being is all wrong - life would be stupidly complicated and most of us wouldn't exist if we had to think our way through every microbiological thing the body does every day.
Virtual reality offers an unprecedented tool for changing our labels and narratives. Every tool is inherently neutral, and it's up to us to decide how to apply it. I think technology's rewards may be worth the risk.
Take a war veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, for example. With virtual reality, we can fundamentally alter their approach to life, overwriting the post-traumatic truth with a kinder one. The human brain can be rewired – mindfulness and meditation have shown us that. Research is ongoing, but I think VR introduces new dimensions to the phenomenon.
The 1960s birthed Steve Jobs, Aldous Huxley, Jimi Hendrix, and others who have - to this day - marked our collective identity. These are profound and lasting cultural shifts. Psychedelics were the reality augmentation of the '60s and headsets are the augmentation of the 21st century. I think we can expect another cultural evolution once virtual reality reaches the masses.
Psychedelics show us that any idea of "real" reality is malleable. Virtual reality allows us to choose our reality. I think we should, but cautiously.
And if it's possible to get lost in an alternate reality, why do we assume we're not lost in this one?