Sources: phenomenology

The first part of the article is a bracing review of the status of reality in the mind from the perspective of philosophy — which Smith sees as hopelessly conservative, stuck in a tableau barely changed since 1950. This is a startling claim and, somehow, obviously right. His main thrust is to ask why philosophers are apparently so resistant to considering the altered mind as a source of representation of reality. A standard tactic of philosophy is to go to the pathological case when analyzing a concept in order to find the boundaries of the normal case. The assumption that the mind has a ‘normal’ state that presents a ‘normal’ representation of reality, contrasted with an ‘abnormal’ state when altered by psychedelic substance, ultimately just begs the question. The idea of ‘normal’ in minds or representations of reality is itself a metaphysical assumption that needs some attention.

The rest is a tentative, personal engagement with age and loss and the rediscovery of everything outside us that is also part of us — that is, all the other living things we are commonly encouraged to think of as merely things —, and how the object part of reality is less real and less significant than the phenomenal and social part of reality that extends through us. Or words to that effect: he does a good job of intimating with prose what is a job normally left to poetry.