Psychedelic experiences can be understood as a form of fantasy activity, offering a favorable situation for phenomenological research. Applying Merleau-Ponty's later conceptual framework from The Visible and the Invisible, along with his mescaline analyses from The Phenomenology of Perception, psychedelic visions and emotional states are discussed within the Merleau-Pontian framework of the 'wild world.' From a phenomenological viewpoint, psychedelic visions represent an ongoing sense-making and Gestalt-formation process in which the subject's elaborative activity plays a crucial role.
This paper extends Sartre's concept of enchanted consciousness by integrating insights from psychedelic research. It first examines contradictions in Sartre's mescaline experiment and limits of his phenomenological analysis of hallucination. Then it argues that Benny Shanon's typology of ayahuasca hallucinations, grounded in phenomenological cognitive psychology, reveals aspects of enchanted consciousness Sartre missed. The phenomenon of double bookkeeping from phenomenological psychiatry illustrates delusional world characteristics. Comparing pathological double bookkeeping with psychedelic bookkeeping expands the idea of enchanted consciousness. Finally, Sartre's views on hallucination are updated, defining captivated consciousness through psychedelic double bookkeeping.