Contact and psychedelic trips

Hi, I just wanted to share that the story and the themes of Contact make perfect sense from a psychedelic standpoint, and probably resonate with anyone who has had an intense psychedelic experience. There are so many similarities between Ellie's trip and people's reports of DMT/Ayahuasca trips that I would be amazed if the script was not directly inspired by psychedelics.

I have yet to try DMT, but I have had a lot of experience with LSD. Over the course of about two years, I went on about 30 LSD trips of varying intensity. I had grown up a very scientific-minded person, and was a self-labelled atheist. Despite my skeptical attitude, with my very first LSD trip I realized that every single thing I thought I knew about the world, about myself, about the mind, about reality, about experience -- everything -- had to be reassessed, seemingly from the ground up. It was only many trips and many months later that I was exposed to Eastern modes of thought and spiritual practices. I began learning about and practicing Zen Buddhism in particular, and it allowed me to make sense of and to some extent articulate what I had experienced on my many psychedelic trips. But due to the dualistic, tensed nature of language, it is literally impossible for it to describe experiences that transcend dualism and time. And so here we have the intense frustration by anyone who has had a transcendent, or what you might call a religious, experience. The most we can say is things like, "I realized that everything is perfect and has always been perfect, and can only ever be perfect," or "I no longer existed as a separate self; I was everything, I was the universe, and realized that we are all one self," or "I realized that there is no difference between life and death -- what we truly are is eternal and unconditioned and can never die," etc. etc. etc. We come back from these mind-blowing experiences, and all we want is to share these realizations of infinite beauty and profundity and love with everyone in the world, but translated into words these experiences and realizations lose all their power and fall on deaf ears.

And this, it seems to me, is precisely the power of the final scenes of Contact. There is nothing Ellie can say to convince the skeptics (at least with psychedelics, we can say, "You just have to try it for yourself, and then everything that I cannot articulate will be revealed to you"). And at the same time, there is nothing wrong with being skeptical. The Buddha, for example, never says, "This is how things are, just take my word for it," but on the contrary always says, "Here are my instructions. Try it for yourself and see what happens." As a true scientist, Ellie combines healthy skepticism with imagination. She demonstrates the courage needed to follow the evidence, but she also retains faith in her own experience. Following that transcendent experience, she returns to the mundane world of ideologies, of dogmatic Western scientific materialism, of reputations, politics, media, and scandals. The great and noble task now set before her is not to prove to the world that what she went through was "true" -- an impossible task -- but simply to learn from the undeniably transformative nature of the experience, to grow not by presuming to know, but by continuing to imagine and question and wonder, and in this subtle way to continue the work begun by who-knows-who, who-knows-when: the work of expanding our minds, of opening ourselves, of transcending boundaries, of learning more deeply to appreciate the beauty, the awe and the mystery of our own being.

So, bravo to Ellie the psychonaut on her first real trip!
Good movie!