The Only Instrument

Nitrous Oxide, imbibed in the right set and setting, is definitely a psychedelic --  a baffling one. Although one of the insights of all psychedelics is that the experience of being conscious of the universe through a wider than normal aperture cannot be adequately expressed in words, it is possible to use words to describe, albeit incompletely, certain insights:

As I wrote elsewhere in my Patreon, 

"To a significant extent, my life path and my ways of thinking were permanently altered by my experimentation with psychedelics in my teens and twenties. In my sixties, the most important takeaway was that the revelations that had shaped my ways of thinking and living still seemed valid. Among these were the understanding that the universe (as JBS Haldane put it) is not only stranger than I imagine, but stranger than I can imagine (which makes me an agnostic on matters such as God and extrasensory experience); the direct experience of the way mind and culture construct reality -- and the infinite number of other ways it can be constructed (as William James put it: 

"Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different."

The possibility that consciousness, like energy and matter, is fundamental (that is, just as life seems to vivify matter and consciousness seems to add another, emergent, dimension to sentient life, psychedelic experience put me in touch with a way of experiencing consciousness that seemed to be extending this teleology in all known directions plus more -- and which implied that there are even more extended forms of consciousness, perhaps to come, perhaps coextant with the world we know but not perceptible to minds that don't know how to attune to direct experience of the interbeing of all things. 

 In my own experience, I did receive what I thought were fundamental revelations, important new understandings of well, everything. But when I returned to normal consciousness, my notes were nonsensical. William James also wrote The Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide, in which he noted the baffling barrier that seems to prevent the insights gained within the state from being expressed during normal waking consciousness:

"With me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at the cadaverous-looking snow peak from which the sunset glow has just fled, or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand."

The set for my experiences with the noetic gas included a small group of friends who had years of experience with group psychedelic experiences, through our participation in the Grateful Dead phenomenon. (Decades ago) The setting was a recording studio with all the hard surfaces covered in carpet and pillows, with large medical grade nitrous tanks firmly anchored, and balloons that were filled with the gas from the tank. These are safety measures necessitated by the effects of the gas: you don't want to be around hard things in case you fall down;you don't want the heavy tank to fall; you don't want to make the mistake of sucking from the tank directly, clamping your feet on the tube, passing out, and dying. The recording studio was set up to record what we were saying and the musical background at that time, if any, every ten minutes, half hour, hour, then randomly replaying them to us a minute or hour later. 

At first the random and unexpected replays were disorienting, but as we began to experience them, we started harmonizing with our selves of the recent past. Then the person in charge of the tank began to release gas from the tank rhythmically, along with the self-harmonic replays, which was when the only "insight" that didn't turn into gibberish later occurred to me: "Attention is the only instrument." As in the Zen story about the flag: is it the flag, the wind, or the mind of the observer that is waving?