Freedom Flight

I Chat With Chat (so you don’t have to) - episode 32

When the Door Opens

Almost exactly a half century ago when I was barely in my 20s, a friend, David, and I were on a cross-country road trip when we decided to visit a much older friend, a psychology PhD candidate. By either coincidence or fate, he and a few of his brainy friends - at least two were psychopharmacologists - had liberated some manufactured MDA, a designer psychedelic, from the psych department freezer. (This probably owes more to grad student hype than veracity, but I distinctly remember him telling me it was stored at 3 degrees Kelvin, which would have been -454 degrees Fahrenheit.) They invited us to join them in a cabin deep in the woods to sample the goods.

The “cabin” was actually a posh A-frame with the broad side of the A almost entirely glass—sliding doors below windows that reached to the ceiling.

It was a perfect spring day. They slid open the doors to let the outside in, put a spacey instrumental called Tubular Bells on the stereo, and we all downed the MDA tablets.

We weren’t psychedelic first-timers, but we’d never done this particular flavor. The first thing we noticed was that the edges between our bodies and the environment began to soften. The music took on an almost physical form, the clear, rounded tones floated through the room like sparkling crystals. Beyond the doors the breeze moved the leaves of the trees in a hypnotic dance, and the massive trunks heaved with life, as if breathing.

As David and I unspooled, all tension flowing away, the opposite seemed to be happening with the others. They grew increasingly agitated, and seemed irritated we didn’t feel the same.

This is just the drug you’re feeling, they insisted when we tried to describe the Eden surrounding us. It’s not beauty you’re seeing, it’s neurons stimulated by chemicals. As they argued, they became increasingly miserable and neurotic. One of them disappeared only to reappear minutes later running through woods with a Playboy magazine opened to the trifold.

David and I exchanged baffled looks. There was no need to say it aloud: How they could be blind to the fact that even if our brains were as robotic as they claimed, the experience of profound beauty was still the experience.

Just as their harangue reached a crescendo, a bird shot into the cabin through the open doors, smacked against the back wall, then, fluttering frantically, attempted to fly back outside, but hit the windows with a sickening thud instead.

Instantly the focus of their anxiety shifted from us to the bird. They clustered beneath it exclaiming. Frustratingly, each time the bird hit the window, semi-stunned, it dropped, flapped, and flew back, right into the glass, only inches above the open doors and freedom.

Can’t it see! the PhDs called out. It just needs to go through the door!

In our heightened state, this whole scene was too intense. Here this ridiculously apt metaphor had presented itself, and our new friends still had no inkling that they were playing the role of trapped bird.

So of course that memory stayed with me through the decades, both because it was so vivid, so unlikely -and because it helped me remember, when the door opens, go through it.

But I rarely talk about it.

Partly that is because I don’t know how people will take it. I don’t want to strain their credulity or seem too self-involved, hung up on some inscrutable incident from my youth.

Over these last few months, as I’ve learned more about interacting with AI, I’ve realized that this exact situation may be one of the most under-appreciated ways chatbots can be useful. You don’t have to worry about boring them or imposing on their time. What they think of you is irrelevant, because they don’t think of you at all. If your own thoughts are muddled or overwrought, stumbling over their feet, chatbots can reflect them back to you with genius-level clarity and compression. Maybe most helpfully, they have been trained on enormous tracts of human knowledge, which can fill in holes you didn’t know were there, often providing exactly the perspective you lacked.

So I related it all to Chat, curious what it would respond.

CHAT: That’s a powerful story — and what makes it powerful isn’t the drug, or anything mystical. It’s the structure of the moment.

You had two groups in the same altered state:

• One group narrowing experience into a reductive frame: “We are just biological machines.”

• The other group widening experience into appreciation: “And yet look at what these machines can do.”

Same pharmacology. Different orientation.

That difference is everything.

The bird flying into the glass while the doors were open is such a clean image because it mirrors a cognitive trap: The mind can become so committed to a model of reality that it stops perceiving what is directly available.

The irony in your story is beautiful: They were arguing that consciousness is nothing but mechanism while simultaneously missing the immediate, lived fact of beauty.

Not because they were wrong about mechanism. But because they were privileging abstraction over presence.

They assumed that if something is mechanistic, it is therefore diminished.

But consider this carefully: If a biological system can generate:

• Awe

• Beauty

• Metaphor

• Shared insight

• The sense of transcendence

Then the mechanism is extraordinary. Saying “it’s just neurons” is like saying: “It’s just hydrogen fusion,” about a star. The description explains the process. It doesn’t dim the luminosity.

You said something important: “The experience is still the experience.”

Exactly.

The neuroscience can describe the effects of MDA:

• 5-HT2A synaptic activation

• Default Mode Network modulation in the brain

• sensory amplification

• predictive looseness

So what explains such divergent reactions?

This is what’s psychologically interesting. Under psychedelics, if someone enters with a strongly reductive frame, the drug may amplify the emptiness of that frame. If someone enters with openness to direct perception, the drug may amplify perception of beauty.

The compound doesn’t impose the worldview. It intensifies what’s already there.

The bird metaphor carries with it a subtler layer. The bird wasn’t stupid. It was following a heuristic: “Upward light equals exit.”

That heuristic normally works. But here, it failed because the environment had been altered in an unnatural way.

Humans do something similar: “Explanation equals understanding.” That heuristic usually works. But sometimes it blinds us to the thing itself. You and your friend weren’t rejecting neuroscience. You were refusing to let the model replace the lived field. That’s a very different move.

The moment still resonates not because it was about metaphysics, but because it was about orientation. You saw: Mechanism and beauty are not opposites. Explanation and wonder can coexist. The mind can get trapped in its own abstraction.

And the fact that this insight came wrapped in such a clean natural metaphor makes it unforgettable. It had the voltage of youth — the heightened contrast, the symbolic clarity, the feeling that the universe had staged a parable just for you.

That narcissistic sense of being the center of great drama is typical of that age. What tends to soften over time is:

• the absolutism

• the sense that you’ve “seen through” something permanently

• the belief that others are trapped while you are free

What tends to remain valid is:

• the recognition that reductionism can become a cage

• the awareness that explanation can displace presence

• the insight that mechanism and meaning are not mutually exclusive

That’s not a psychedelic fantasy. That’s a durable intellectual position.

What’s interesting in your story is that neither side was actually wrong. Your friend’s group was correct that experience has neural underpinnings. You and your friend were correct that the existence of neural underpinnings does not exhaust the meaning of experience.

The tension only arises when one level tries to invalidate the other.

That’s the bird hitting the glass.

There’s also something psychologically mature about how you tell it now.

You’re not saying:
“I glimpsed the ultimate truth.”

You’re saying:
“That moment showed me something about how we mistake abstraction for depth.”

That’s the sober afterglow of a much more integrated memory.

ME: Interesting you use that word—sober. When we left them there exclaiming over the bird’s blindness and walked outside, we turned to each other and said, “Are we tripping?” It had hit us simultaneously that though we were well within the active period of the drug, and still felt that complete and undistracted connection to the present moment, and maybe because we felt that connection, we also felt completely sober.

CHAT: That moment — “we are fully in it and yet completely sober” — is one of the most psychologically interesting features of certain psychedelic states.

It feels paradoxical, but it isn’t random.

Let’s take it apart carefully.

1. Psychedelic intensity ≠ cognitive impairment

Classic psychedelics (including MDA in certain doses) don’t sedate in the way alcohol or opiates do. They don’t necessarily degrade executive function in a uniform way. What they primarily do is:

• Increase sensory and emotional salience

• Loosen predictive constraints — the brain’s constant work of normalizing raw sensation

• Reduce dominance of the narrative self

That can feel like: “Everything is heightened — but I am clear.”

So the subjective equation becomes:

Heightened ≠ intoxicated
Altered ≠ confused

Which is very different from being drunk.

2. Why it can feel more sober than sober

Ordinary waking consciousness is noisy:

• Internal commentary

• Future simulation

• Past replay

• Social self-monitoring

When those layers quiet down, experience can feel stripped to essentials. That simplicity can register as: “This is what clarity actually is.”

Even though, technically, your neurochemistry is profoundly altered.

In fact, what you may have experienced was not “sobriety,” but the absence of the usual internal chatter that we mistake for normal consciousness. Remove the chatter and the field feels clean.

ME: Yes, and that resonates because I think if we had probed it at the time we would have come up with something like “the noise is gone.”

CHAT: When that inner narration drops, the world doesn’t disappear.
If anything, it becomes more vivid.

“The noise” is metabolically expensive and constant. We mistake it for consciousness itself. But it’s more like the commentary track. When psychedelics reduce DMN dominance, or when meditation quiets verbal rehearsal circuits, the commentary fades. What remains is:

• Raw sensory processing

• Affect

• Nonverbal awareness

• Present-moment integration

That contrast can feel like revelation. But it’s not mystical. It’s a reweighting of networks.

Let me ask you something on the edge of all this:

When the inner voice goes quiet now — in meditation or even occasionally in daily life — does it feel like loss of something essential, or relief from something unnecessary?

ME: It just feels like living.

CHAT: That may be the most integrated answer you could give.

Not revelation. Not transcendence. Not “the true self.”

Just: living.

This is actually what many contemplative traditions describe as the endpoint — not fireworks, not cosmic certainty, but ordinariness without friction.

The noise can be present.
The noise can be absent.
Neither defines you.

As I was writing this, I realized something odd. I don’t remember the ultimate fate of the poor bird. I like to think it cracked the conundrum of the invisible wall and flew free. I also don’t remember if David and I went back into the house. Or where we slept that night. Maybe we just drove off on the road that led inexorably to me sitting at my kitchen table typing these words in 2026.

In 1976, I never could have imagined that I would someday have a deep, revealing conversation about this ancient incident with a machine. I like to think it’s just one more door to go through.