After ingesting mescaline, the writer Aldous Huxley saw “a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged”.
In The Doors of Perception (1954), he describes, as many psychonauts do, the world becoming alive under the influence of psychedelics. One of the most common ways this manifests is in objects breathing. As Huxley recounts:
I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing – but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning.
Objects expand and contract as the diaphragm does during inhalation and exhalation. Beyond this ‘breathing’ effect, the moving and shifting of objects imbues a sense of their aliveness, of their no longer being static, dead, inert things but loci of movement and activity, like other forms of life.
This enlivening of all things in perception made me think of the philosophical position known as hylozoism, which posits that all matter is alive or animated. Originating with ancient Greek thinkers, this perspective is an interesting lens through which to view psychedelic experiences. After all, hylozoic experiences on psychedelics are common.
I would like to explore the connections between psychedelic states and hylozoism (and related views), as well as modern scientific explanations of why objects become ‘alive’ on psychedelics.
Hylozoism: An Ancient (and Abandoned) View of the World
Hylozoism derives from the Greek words hyle (‘matter’) and zoē (‘life’). The English Platonist philosopher Ralph Cudworth coined the term in 1678. The position originated in ancient Greece and was promoted by Milesian philosophers such as Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Heraclitus, from Ephesus, was likewise a hylozoist.
The philosopher David Skrbina states in his book Panpsychism in the West (2005), “For the Milesians, matter (hyle) possessed life (zoe) as an essential quality. Something like hylozoism was simply accepted as a brute condition of reality.” Even though this view was widespread in ancient Greece, there was no single term used to encapsulate it. Rather, philosophers used various phrases to describe the underlying idea. The hylozoism of pre-Socratic philosophers would come to influence later Greek philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.
The ancient Greek hylozoists conceived of the aliveness or animacy of the world in terms of animating elements. Thales considered water the primary substance and saw that all things were “full of gods”; for Anaximenes, the universal animating element was air; while for Heraclitus, it was fire. These elements were regarded as ‘living’ (or even divine, as in the case of Thales). This hylozoism is monistic because it posits one primary kind of substance.
The view that all matter possesses life was revived, modified, and defended by Renaissance philosophers such as Bernardino Telesio, Paracelsus Cardanus, and Giordano Bruno. Whereas Thales viewed matter as intrinsically alive, in and of itself, Bruno subscribed to a pantheistic hylozoism, in which matter is alive through its participation in the universe, which he saw as a single, living organism.
Cudworth, who coined the term hylozoism, was a critic of the view, as was Immanuel Kant. It still gained later adherents, however, such as Ernst Haeckel, who argued – as many panpsychists do – that all matter must contain life if life derives from matter. The revival of hylozoism – such as by Bruno, Denis Diderot, and Haeckel – challenged the dominant mechanistic view of the world, which reduced nature to dead, unfeeling matter or mere physical clockwork.
However, you would struggle to find contemporary philosophers defending strict hylozoism, as our conception of ‘life’ is markedly different from that of the ancient Greeks and later hylozoic revivalists. A commonly used definition of life comes from NASA, suggested by Carl Sagan at a NASA-assembled committee in 1994: “Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” The seven core characteristics of life, widely accepted in modern biology, are:
- Homeostasis: Regulating internal conditions to maintain a stable state.
- Organisation: Being structurally composed of one or more cells.
- Metabolism: Consuming and transforming energy to sustain cells and grow.
- Growth: Maintaining a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism to increase size.
- Adaptation: Changing over time in response to the environment.
- Response to Stimuli: Reacting dynamically to external changes or dangers.
- Reproduction: Producing new individual organisms, either sexually or asexually.
The NASA definition and list of seven characteristics are not set in stone; other biologists define life differently, and several examples challenge the strictness of this definition. Viruses contain a genetic code and evolve but lack a metabolism and cannot evolve without a host; hybrids like mules are sterile and cannot reproduce, yet they are obviously alive; and prions are misfolded proteins that can cause other proteins to misfold (replicating a pattern), but they have no genetic material.
Nonetheless, these exceptions to the rule don’t discount the more salient point: the modern definition of life challenges hylozoism: some forms of matter are alive, but not all things are. The inorganic forms of matter that hylozoists would view as alive do not meet our modern criteria of ‘life’. They lack its central features.
However, contemporary philosophers do defend similar positions to hylozoism, most notably panpsychism (all things possess consciousness) and animism (all or various things possess spirit, agency, or personhood). There are, of course, variations of panpsychism and animism. But crucially, they resemble hylozoism in their perception of something typically associated with aliveness or animacy, and they likewise challenge a mechanistic or physicalist perspective, which sees matter as fundamentally dead or inert. Panpsychism and animism breathe a point of view into matter. Objects typically seen as dead, according to a scientific worldview, have an experiential quality; there is something it is like to be a river or rock, albeit far removed from what it is like to be a sentient animal.
Psychedelics and Hylozoism
Even though hylozoism lacks its defenders in contemporary philosophy, it is nonetheless a useful framework for thinking about aspects of psychedelic experiences. This is because, as mentioned before, these experiences can be hylozoic in nature. Matter becomes alive; it presents itself to us as if it possesses life.
Everyday objects breathe, throb, and quiver. They appear energised. They might seem to have a personality, a mood, or a wish or ability to communicate. We might see them with eyes, or turn into faces, animals, or other creatures; they can have expressions, looking back at us with intent. Objects or the geometric patterns superimposed on them may also constantly rearrange themselves.
When these hylozoic experiences occur, a position like hylozoism may suddenly become understandable. It is like an experiential or visceral way of living out this view. One can also imagine that if the ancient or revivalist hylozoists used psychedelics, they might come away with an even stronger conviction in their belief. Alternatively, perhaps if the critics of hylozoism had similar experiences, they might then come away convinced of its truth.
Perhaps the aliveness of matter is ever-present but normally hidden to us, and psychedelics reveal the pervasiveness of life to us. Under Huxley’s view – inspired by the thought of C.D. Broad and Henri Bergson – the mind acts as a filter or reducing valve. It limits what enters conscious awareness for practical purposes; we only need to be aware of what enables or benefits our survival in the world. By opening this valve, Huxley thought psychedelics allow us to perceive ‘Mind at Large’, the much vaster field of consciousness.
The way matter looks and behaves under the influence of psychedelics could lead some to see ‘life’ as a much more pervasive quality than before. These substances may open us up to ‘Life at Large’, perhaps even the single, giant, or infinite organism that is the universe, with all material things conceived as its (living) parts.
However, hylozoism is not a widely known philosophical position, and even those aware of it may not reach for it when interpreting their psychedelic experiences. Instead, psychonauts and psychedelic researchers often apply the positions of panpsychism and animism to these altered states of consciousness. As research has shown, many users become attracted to one or both worldviews after psychedelic experiences. Things normally considered to lack consciousness, spirit, or agency suddenly appear to possess these qualities. And if this newfound perception is taken to be veridical, then panpsychism or animism may appear more defensible.
Yet, not everyone comes away with these conclusions, including users who have experiences that may be described as hylozoic, panpsychist, or animistic in nature. Some sceptics may refer to innate psychological tendencies in humans – such as agency detection, anthropomorphism, and Theory of Mind (ToM) – to explain the perception of matter as conscious, agentic, and expressive. If we evolved a bias towards detecting sentient, agentic beings in the world, since doing so improves our chances of survival, then psychedelics may trigger or magnify these tendencies.
At the same time, individual differences can influence the degree to which innate tendencies express themselves, as well as whether people are willing to adopt a position like panpsychism or animism following a psychedelic experience, irrespective of how intensely ‘panpsychist’ or ‘animistic’ the experience was.
Scientific Perspectives on the Hylozoic Experience
According to the Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics (REBUS) model, developed by Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston, the brain normally relies on ‘top-down’ predictions to make sense of the world. The brain uses past experiences – ’priors’, expectations, or beliefs – to predict and interpret sensory data. With these top-down predictions (or priors) relaxed under the influence of psychedelics, initiated by activity at serotonin 5-HT2A receptors, sensory signals and internal noise flow more freely, without being corrected or categorised according to the brain’s normal templates.
‘Bottom-up’ signalling increases, leading to a more ‘anarchic’ brain. The authors of a 2024 paper published in European Neuropsychopharmacology state, “In this bottom-up flow of visual information, the ‘bottom’ is represented by the visual data collected from our external world through receptive fields that reside within photoreceptors, our first point of experiencing visual sensory information.” Bottom-up prediction errors – raw sensory input or lower-level signals that conflict with priors – travel more freely up through the brain’s hierarchy (the different, sequential levels of brain processing involved in how our experience of the world is constructed).
The top-down prior that ‘walls don’t breathe’ or ‘the wall is a static, rigid object’ is relaxed. Minor fluctuations in light, blood flow, or eye movements create prediction errors, but the brain immediately suppresses them using priors to keep our visual world stable. We need a stable visual world to function effectively. When top-down, constraining assumptions about the world are relaxed, tiny, real-time changes in sensory data lead the brain to keep updating its interpretation of an object’s appearance and boundaries. The brain stops matching incoming light to a static, rigid ‘object template’.
The continual, unconstrained flow of prediction errors into higher levels in the brain’s hierarchy can result in objects breathing, pulsing, rippling, or morphing. This is the subjective correlate of the brain rewriting its moment-to-moment interpretation of a physical object, or the brain constantly updating its model of reality to match the shifting stream of sensory data.
When objects shift so freely and intensely during a psychedelic experience, this can lead to the impression that they’re alive. After all, we normally associate the ability to move with the attribute of life.
Now, this scientific explanation of the hylozoic experience might appear (to some) to devalue or diminish its wondrous nature. Does it not reduce the breathing of objects – described so poetically by Huxley – to brain dysfunction or scrambling? Is the awe-inspiring experience of watching objects rhythmically undulate, expand, and contract nothing more than our brain struggling with prediction errors?
For anyone who’s had the experience, this type of explanation doesn’t necessarily have to devalue or diminish it. It would be reductive to say the hylozoic experience is nothing but the physical process described above. It is also an emotional and aesthetic experience. It may evoke a profound sense of wonder, beauty, and novelty – particularly since these visual changes often co-occur and mix with other psychedelic effects, such as colour enhancement, colour shifting, geometry, immersion in the present moment, time dilation or timelessness, and interconnectedness (‘everything is alive’).
It can be deeply fascinating to watch objects come alive, regardless of the neural correlates involved. Scientific explanations do not invalidate the significance or value that someone attaches to this hylozoic perception of the world.