Peak Experiences Lead to Spirals

You’re placidly living your life until your experience escalates. You become aware of more things than you can process. Your eyes have been wide open and while in that uncontrollable chaos you instinctively grab all you can. Because intensity has strong salience signal. Once your state stabilizes in the ordinary experience you’re left with something. You can’t unsee the grandness of what you lived.

Because of how the nervous system works even one very strong reward can lead one to seek it again. And because you couldn’t see it whole, it feels like it was something much bigger than you. Curiosity has the best of us, we can’t hold back and we go seek it again.

But i suspect there is something other than mere curiosity. It has to do with what we find in these experiences. We come out of them either enthused or terrified. But they both inspire novel action. What we find is inspiration.

Inspiration is none other than guidance. A vision was impressed in us. We start comparing the world with this promised land of how things should be. The guidance manifests in the form of recognition. That’s good! keep it and work with it. [1]

It’s very easy to idealize these states and create a narrative to explain them in hindsight. you may get attached to this narrative. I think it can be positive, because it drives changes in behavior. It changed your beliefs and who you are, which then changed your habitual actions.

Action produces information, and as you progress in your search to materialize the ideal you expand further in the topic. You develop what is akin to an obsessive interest, an infatuation. Going deep in it is a real adventure. It is fulfilling and generative. It feels like an ascending spiral that leads to realization, discovery and creation.

Some time after we have actualized the vision the effects of these experiences diminish. You’re left with are the their memory, the changes in yourself and the work you pursued because of them. But they no longer are the great driver they once were. They have been explored and reused countless of times.

This is the time we may encounter boredom. The return to ordinary baseline. there is little to go after other than keeping the system stable and balanced.

The solution is to seek the peak experience. Once you plan for them you’ll be on the lookout and try to see the peak in any state change. Inhibiting the complete loss of control needed to experience the peaks.

But the real loss of control is scary and feels risky. What may be revealed to you is uncertain. You can’t know in advance what is waiting for you. so you would involuntarily be playing it safe, never letting go.

The problem is that they can’t be planned for or induced. These losses of control can only happen spontanously. Living life in exploration with no expectations. But always being open and receptive is the important part.

But we all know that even though we may know that we will still go after them. When we finally encounter something that resembles a peak experience we get hooked. We don’t see the contents, because there are no contents. No vision was deployed.

But this experience mimicked the sensation of the peak. This is no longer a peak but a supernormal stimuli. It never resolves itself because it makes you need more of it, to find something in it. Each time the effect is lessened.

Eventually we forget we what we were looking for and we just go after the sensation. We now want to re-live it, we are chasing the high. We are now just seeking intensity, not meaning. We have entered a hedonistic spiral. It is essentially a false adventure.

Notes

[1] I realized later that this was inspired by Plato’s myth of the winged chariot. I wanted to reinterpret it in the piece but I couldn’t find a way that I liked so I’ll report here the similarities. I saw the peak as Plato’s realm of forms. The pure soul goes through the peak experience mimics death. So you become the chariot that experiences the realm of truth and forms. Once you reincarnate you don’t learn, but rather recognize the imperfect reproductions of the perfect forms you saw in the realm of forms.