Mind from the Inside

[Mudhammam]

Yes, absolutely, there's tremendous value in the different kinds of experiences you mention, for example, meditation. Some of the most illuminating experiences that I have had in terms of understanding myself, and the reality that the mind is so fluid, flexible, and fragile, have involved tweaking its chemistry via hallucinogenics or a drug like ecstasy. Nothing that I could have gleaned from a purely 'materialistic' or 'mechanistic' explanation could have conveyed the drastic alteration that feeling unified with your surroundings, or other minds--as though the self were dissolving into nothingness, sometimes to my great horror while at other times to my utter elation--actually entails, as a mind, rather than as a mind simply apprehending someone else's experiences, in the abstract.