In a review of Oliver Sacks' recent book, Hallucinations, T. M. Luhrmann emphasizes the spiritual dimension of altered states:
Hallucinations teach us that these odd moments of sensation are an extreme point of a continuum along which what we imagine becomes more real, more possible than the mundane, and that the continuum has power. The terror of horrible imaginings can nearly destroy us, but good moments can change us for the better.
At the end of his book, Sacks turns to the sense of presence. This is a specific phenomenological experience detectable in a brain scanner: a clear awareness that someone is sitting there, right there, even though you cannot see him or her. Perhaps this uncanny awareness, Sacks suggests, evolved over time from a constant watchfulness for predators and potential threats. But see what it makes possible, he suggests. For those willing to trust in the benevolence of the unseen, the presence becomes God. It is the point on which he ends his book.
Previous Dish on Sacks' book here.
(Image: From photographer Benoit Paillé’s LSD series, which he shot after he "dropped acid and headed into the woods, where he lit a candle and took these four-minute-exposure photos," via Judy Berman.)
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