Andy Letcher - Lost for words: are psychedelic experiences actually ineffable?

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Lost for words: are psychedelic experiences actually ineffable?

A question commonly asked in psychedelic trials is whether volunteer’s experiences were ineffable, as ineffability is thought to be diagnostic of a mystical-type experience. Much rests, therefore, upon what can or cannot be spoken, and it is somewhat paradoxical that a term supposed to establish such limits has come in itself to say so much.Here I question not psychedelic experience itself, which may well be challenging to articulate, but how it is that the matter of its utterability became a reasonable question to ask. The answer is historically and culturally contingent, bound up with Western preoccupations with mysticism and whether psychedelic experience rightly falls within its purview. I trace the concern to William James, who set the stage by making ineffability (along with noesis) a diagnostic feature of mystical experience, and by allowing drug-occasioned experiences into the discussion. James, however, undermined his own argument for the centrality of ineffability, first by naming other non-mystical domains of human experience that are equally hard to put into words (such as falling in love), and second by providing examples of mystical experience from the literature that are so descriptive as to belie their supposed unutterability. So long as something is conveyed then ineffability becomes an empty trope that merely points to an extraordinary occurrence, one supposedly lying beyond public scrutiny or ordinary understanding. If ineffability is a culturally-agreed trope, then to ask it of someone is to give them a forced question which does not necessarily yield an answer with any substance. Psychedelic experiences may be challenging to put into words but they are not unutterable: in a Foucauldian sense we have, in the last fifty years, simply increased the number of ways to talk about them. My suggestion is that if we truly want to understand psychedelic experiences we need more qualitative research in which interlocutors are allowed to express themselves freely in their own terms. Researchers should pay attention not only to words but their prosody, to the body language of their informants and also to experiences that they themselves regard as exceptional or dissonant with expectation. I end with an example from my own research of a modern Druid who had an unexpected psychedelic encounter with angels.

Dr Andy Letcher is a Senior Lecturer at Schumacher College, Devon UK, where he is the Programme Lead for the MA Engaged Ecology. He is the author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom, and numerous papers on psychedelics, ecology, animism and paganism. Andy has doctorates in Ecology (from the University of Oxford) and the Study of Religion (King Alfred’s College, Winchester). His research interests focus on the contemporary use of psychedelics with a particular interest in the discourses by which people frame their experiences and by which those experiences become meaningful. He is currently researching ritual and animistic usage of psychedelics by contemporary British Druids, and the contemporary use of the Fly Agaric mushroom. An engaging speaker, he has been a guest on the Green Dreamer, Hive and Mushroom Hour podcasts. He has appeared at Glastonbury, Shambhala, Green Man and Medicine festivals. And he has given presentations at the University of Exeter Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Psychedelics, Horizons NYC, The Psilocybin Summit, the Last Tuesday Society, Breaking Convention and the Chacruna Religions and Psychedelics forum. A folk musician, he plays English bagpipes, low whistle, and Dark Age lyre.