Stephen Asma: My father’s experience with morphine in hospice showed me the healing joy of altered states – Chicago Tribune

My father died this year of cancer. In the end, he was brought home from the hospital to die with his family around him, and Im grateful for that. He was resigned to his inevitable end, and we were able to say goodbye.

Under the careful ministrations of hospice nurses, my father experienced his final day on a morphine-fueled trip that would have made psychedelic pioneer Timothy Leary jealous. As far as I know, it was his first and last extended psychedelic experience. None of the health care providers ever mentioned to us (or to him) that hed be visiting the origin of the universe, seeing God and reliving his emotional childhood. But thats what seemed to be happening as we sat around his bed.

Some research suggests that DMT (N, N-Dimethyltryptamine) is produced inside the dying brain and sparks a hallucinatory near-death experience including feelings of transcending your body, traveling through alternative realms, communicating with sentient entities and so on. Its unclear whether the morphine or the DMT is more responsible for the final magic carpet ride.

If the psychedelic experience is transformative and I think it is then it seems a cruel irony to have it at the end of your life. Thankfully, though, we dont have to wait for our near-death trip or ask our shady friend to score some LSD or even travel to lick the psychotropic skin of the Colorado River toad. We need only to pay closer attention to the weirdness of our nightly dreams and our daily imaginings, which are also psychedelic to varying degrees.

In what ways can the psychedelic imagination be transformative? The science of psychedelics is having a renaissance, and the research is helping us understand the mind better and provide fresh therapeutic options. Psychotropic substances engender psychological and philosophical states that reveal important features of the self and consciousness. They can reduce the vigilant executive functions in the frontal areas of the brain and release the mind into the involuntary sphere of free association and mind wandering what neuroscientists call the default mode network, or DMN. These altered states loosen the tyranny of task-based consciousness, and they also suspend the egos usual dominance letting us feel connected to everything.

Research at the MIND Foundation in Berlin and the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research is revealing that psychedelics are better than many antidepressants for treating certain kinds of depression. But even healthy people can benefit from psychedelic experiences.

After the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, the West came to see nature as a giant machine and human beings as fungible cogs. We stopped thinking about nature as symbolic, purposeful or infused with drama. Great advances came from this mechanistic model, of course, including medicine and technology. But something was lost in the disenchantment of nature and mind. Some poetry and meaning seemed to slip away.

Psychedelic imagination can reenchant nature and self, activating purposeful and even poetic perspectives that were expunged by modernism. Such experiences may also help us find universal hidden grammars of imagination. Are there common archetypes uniting us all throughout the ages from the shaman painters in Frances Lascaux caves to writers Dante Alighieri, Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick?

Altered states are surprisingly common ground for artists and religious people, though they rarely notice the connection. As piano great Bill Evans once said, art should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. Its easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art, you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed.

Instead of anxiety about the weird parts of our psyches, our culture should teach us to grapple with them and integrate them starting at an early age. Tripping balls is not just for bohemians. Your conservative grandma is probably going on a magical mystery tour, too, whether she wants to or not.

If I had known that my father was going to rocket across the universe at the end of his life, we could have talked to him and helped him prepare. Hearing him spontaneously cry out in wonder, fear and joy was difficult. My brother looked at me at one point and said, Hes on one hell of a journey now. I felt some comfort at the idea that he wasnt having random pleasures and pains but maybe making some kind of pilgrims progress.

Since his passing, several people have confided in me that their loved ones also had a psychedelic end. Its far more common than we think. Your loved ones and you, too, may be on that same journey one day. It would be better if we had a more open-minded and honest way to prepare for it.

Stephen Asma is professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of The Evolution of Imagination, On Monsters and Why We Need Religion, among other titles.

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.

More here:

Stephen Asma: My father's experience with morphine in hospice showed me the healing joy of altered states - Chicago Tribune