psychonautics
from the Greek psyche [“soul”, “spirit” or “mind”] and naútes [“sailor” or “navigator”] – “a sailor of the soul” refers both to a methodology for describing and explaining the subjective effects of altered states of consciousness […] and to a research paradigm in which the researcher voluntarily immerses himself or herself into an altered mental state in order to explore the accompanying experiences– from the Wikipedia article on psychonautics
I like the word psychonaut. It describes what we all do in the sense that we all, in our lives, travel through and explore the mind. We are unable to do anything else. And in a wider sense, Spirit is a psychonaut. All of the existence is Spirit expressing, exploring, and experiencing itself. It’s Lila, the play of the divine.
In a more limited sense, some of us are more intentional psychonauts than others. Some of us have a passion for exploring the mind – whether it’s the human psyche, Big Mind, or both.
Of course, the word psychonaut comes with some (unfortunate?) associations from the 70s. But as history shows, we are free to redefine words. And psychonaut is one word I would like to redefine to be free of the 70s associations and instead mean an exploration of the psyche and Big Mind in a broader sense.
Whether it’s the journey of discovery we all inevitably do, or the journey of discovery some of us more intentionally engage in.
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Initial notes…..
- psychonaut
- word coined in the 1970s, used to describe exploration of altered states, often drug-induced
- for me, see it as an excellent term that can be used in a broader / more general sense (losing the drug/70s associations)
- explorer of the mind
- human mind / psyche
- and big mind / that which all happens within and as (aka Spirit, the divine, Brahman, Buddha Mind etc.)
- we are all psychonauts
- travel through the small/big mind, including Spirit itself – the one and only psychonaut (travelling and exploring through and as each of us, all beings, everything)
- some of us more explicitly so as well, have a passion for it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychonautics