Sciencing the mystical: the trickery of the psychedelic trip report

Psychedelic researchers have begun using laboratory settings to reliably induce 'mystical experiences' quantified along dimensions like unity and transcendence. Drawing on ethnographic data and Walter Benjamin's concept of the threshold, this analysis identifies apophatic narratives of trickery that contrast with the positive knowledge typical of scientific accounts. Reading psychedelic trip reports as apophatic labor reveals that the significance of mystical encounters lies not in their transformative efficacy but in the doubts, contradictions, and aporias involved in writing out those experiences.

Study at a glance

Abstract

ABSTRACT Science has caught wind of mysticism once again. Operationalising metrics from the writings of perennial philosophers, psychopharmacologists are using psychedelics in a laboratory context to reliably induce ‘mystical experiences’. These experiences are scored along such dimensions as unity, noesis, transcendence of space–time and ineffability. How are we to read this moment? I draw on data from an ethnography of psychedelic science and take cue from Walter Benjamin's treatment of the threshold in Convolute O of The Arcades Project, to identify apophatic narratives of trickery that contrast with the positive knowledge prominent in the sciencing of the mystical experience. Read as apophatic labour, psychedelic trip reports reveal how the significance of the mystical encounter lies not in its point-like efficacy in transforming the subject, but in precisely the doubts, contradictions and aporias involved in the writing out of their experiences.