Pulling the Andromeda Galaxy Out of Your Pocket: Tripping Balls with Sam Harris

“You are wading into a roiling ocean of meaning, with the proverbial thimble. What you bring back in that thimble just can’t begin to indicate the immensity of the experience, or its beauty. Or its terror, depending. Even to oneself, as an aid to memory, language is next to useless, and the fact that there are landscapes of mind this vast, lurking on the other side of a mushroom is simply preposterous. How could that make any sense? The scale of the thing is all wrong. It violates every intuition you have about what it is to have a mind and a body in a world. It’s as though we lived in a universe where, if you just reached into your right pocket with your left hand, rather than pull out your wallet, you’d pull out the Andromeda galaxy. The experience is altogether too much. It’s like a reductio ad absurdum of one’s desire for experience itself. It’s as though the cosmos were saying, ‘oh, experience is what you want? You want to see and feel and think? Okay, how’s this.’ And then what follows is a vision so blinding in its beauty and intensity that it shatters your mind. It just unmakes you. Again, I have to admit the poverty of words here. We have a word for ‘love’, for instance. But what’s the word for all the love you can possibly feel, and all the love that you recognize that you have failed to feel at every moment in your life, up until this moment? What do we call the experience of having that ocean of feeling invade you? And fill every empty space in your mind. There really are no words to describe this experience.”—Sam Harris, “Psychedelic Science,” Making Sense Podcast E177 (December 2, 2019)