The Uncanny Normality That Follows Mystical Experiences

A mystical experience usually feels completely “out of this world”. During and shortly afterwards, people often feel anything from going through a life-changing experience to feeling completely transformed. Even later on, many people characterize a mystical experience as one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives. Going back to “this world” after such an experience can feel very strange: the streets look the same, you still have to go to work, pay the bills, and the world keeps turning just as it did against all expectations. 

In parallel to this return to normality, you realize that the ineffability of your astounding experience prevents you from communicating it to others clearly and talking about the feelings that follow. Yet even if you take a break to figure out what happened, the world, including your friends, family, and work environment, usually signals you to “move along, there’s nothing to see here”. From your newly acquired point of view, the normal world just became uncanny. The dictionary defines uncanny as “having or seeming to have a supernatural or inexplicable basis”, “beyond what is normal or expected”. It ties it with the mysterious, and with feeling “uncomfortably strange”, fear, eeriness, or dread. This is why uncanniness is featured as a basis for horror in fiction.

A wild example can be found in episode 6 of the first season of Rick and Morty. When the planet gets infected, Rick transports himself and Morty into an alternate reality where they had just died. They would only have to bury their own bodies in the backyard and continue their lives as if nothing happened. Seeing the bodies and finding out about the existence of multiple realities, Morty goes into a severe state of ontological shock. With utter dread on his face, he walks into the house to discover an uncanny reality, where everything looks all too familiar: his home is identical to the one he knows, his parents are fighting in the kitchen, his sister Summer sits in front of the TV but looks at her mobile phone, and Rick sits next to her with a drink. The scene is accompanied by Mazzy Star’s “Look on Down From the Bridge”, ending with the lyrics “Look away from the sky / It's no different when you're leaving home”.

We can learn about how to deal with uncanniness from a similar phenomenon that happens as people move between cultures. When a person moves to another country and encounters a new culture, they often experience culture shock. Basic life features, which until then were so obvious that you never gave them a second thought, become other, foreign, strange, or unintelligible. This pertains to the public space: what’s appropriate for you to do and say, how safe it is to walk around, and the level of communication between strangers. Interpersonal and even intimate relationships are affected as well: how do people communicate with one another, including the tone, volume, and way you construct a sentence, whether touch is customary and in what ways, and to what extent people express or feel emotions. The further away the two cultures are from one another, the more differences would appear in their perceptions of reality and the values they regard as important. 

A less familiar aspect is the re-entry shock (or reverse culture shock) that happens when people return to their home country after having lived elsewhere for a significant amount of time. This is often the case with students, travellers, diplomats, and other expats coming back home. As with the initial culture shock, there is often a short “honeymoon period” of joy and excitement, which can be compared to the “psychedelic afterglow”. Yet soon enough, home becomes uncanny, and many have trouble re-adjusting to their native environment. 

The analogy has its limits, of course, because with re-entry, part of the stress relates to actual changes to one’s home country, which happened over a long period of absence. Nevertheless, an important part of what contributes to the feeling of uncanniness is… you. As time went by, and depending on your specific life situation, openness, and other factors, you may have become transformed by the new culture. You may not realize how different a person you are now. Luckily, you are spared the physical burying of your past self, but psychologically, you may have to go through with it. 

A psychedelic mystical experience can potentially go far beyond any cultural difference you may experience here on earth. You may have become one with the universe, encountered entities, experienced telepathy, discovered that trees were sentient, or met God. You may have the impression that nothing will ever be the same. Now you go back, and since you were only gone for a few hours, maybe a couple of days, everything seems dreadfully normal and mundane. The funny thing is that even with opposite expectations, you may experience the same uncanny feelings. Say you had a mystical experience during a party on the weekend. Next Monday, you go to work expecting business to be as usual, and it is. Yet as the hours (or days) go by, the normality begins to feel weird, as it is so far removed from your recent mystical experience. You didn’t take your own perspective change into account.

Freud’s concept of “das Unheimliche”, which was translated as “the uncanny”, can help us understand what is going on psychologically. The uncanny is an experience or event which feels strangely familiar – a strangeness of the ordinary. Think of wax dolls, androids, prosthetic hands, meeting the identical twin of a good friend, déjà vu, or literally walking into a room designed exactly like yours. As his follower Jacques Lacan explains, it can create anxiety since you are not so sure anymore about what is real. Indeed, Ernst Jentsch, who treated the subject of uncanniness before Freud, described it as intellectual uncertainty. 

In the psychedelic context, the uncanniness following deep mystical experiences can sometimes result in the daily world seeming meaningless or unreal. You may feel a lot of confusion and instability around your values, beliefs, perceptions of the world, yourself, and others, and around the veracity of your own experience. This uncertainty, and the anxiety that may ensue, sometimes lead people to revert to quick all-or-nothing solutions, in an often unconscious effort to regain control. For example, some reframe their own mystical experience as nothing more than brain jabberwocky on drugs; others deem reality itself unreal, a mere simulation. Emotionally, these strategies can remove uncanny feelings and reinstate a feeling of safety, but they do so at the price of waiving the “realness” of your mystical experience or the daily world.

If you don’t shy away from psychological challenges, uncanniness can be your main door into integration. Tapping into uncanny feelings as they come can reveal which behaviours, people, places, or situations bring them about. By studying them, you can become aware of specific gaps and contradictions underlying these emotions, instead of focusing only on how they make you feel. Depending on what you discover, you may want to learn more about spiritual experiences and traditions, different psychological views of the self, philosophical approaches towards consciousness, or the variety of metaphysical theories. Integration can be thought of as a bridge between seemingly separate versions of the world and yourself. As building it may take time, curiosity, learning, and reflection can supply you with a broader platform to stand on during this process. 

Annabelle is one of our community bloggers here at Chemical Collective. If you’re interested in joining our blogging team and getting paid to write about subjects you’re passionate about, please reach out to Sam via email at [email protected]