Modernity, as we know it, began when humanity first embraced the idea of depth and dimension. In a Medium post I wrote back in 2020,

https://ramurrio.medium.com/the-end-of-perspective-and-the-new-amension-gebser-picasso-36a55f429f48

I explored the “end of perspective” and the arrival of a new dimension, inspired by the ideas of Jean Gebser and the fragmented forms of Picasso. Gebser famously argued that human consciousness evolves in waves, from the archaic to the magical, mythical, and mental structures, and finally toward the integral. Perspective, emerging during the Renaissance, was the mental structure’s crowning achievement. But as I wrote then, we are living through the collapse of this mental framework, the end of perspective itself, as we begin to step into the integral—a state of simultaneity where multiple dimensions coexist and the old vanishing points no longer apply.

Today, I want to go further and argue that perspective wasn’t just the foundation of modernity—it was the first psychedelic trip. It was the moment humanity’s mental chamber popped open, offering us not just a new way of seeing, but a new way of being. Linear perspective didn’t just allow us to depict reality; it altered the human brain, creating a revolution of perception as profound as LSD or psilocybin. To step back to where it began is to see perspective as both a tool and a chemical reaction, one that reshaped our consciousness as much as any substance could.

Imagine a world before the invention of perspective—when the flatness of reality was taken for granted, and humanity lived in a two-dimensional haze. Then came the Renaissance, and with it, perspective—a revolution of perception so profound it shattered the limits of the mind. Like a visionary dose of LSD or a handful of psilocybin mushrooms, perspective altered the collective consciousness, pulling humanity into a new dimension of experience. It wasn’t merely a tool for painting; it was the lens through which the infinite became visible.

For thousands of years, human beings had been confined to symbolic representations of their world. Egyptian hieroglyphs, Byzantine icons, medieval tapestries—all of these were maps, not landscapes. They were flat and static, a universe painted on the walls of Plato’s cave. Then, perspective exploded onto the scene like a chemical catalyst. Suddenly, the canvas was no longer a mere surface. It was a window, and through it, humanity could see a third dimension. Depth. Space. Infinity.

The psychedelic experience of perspective didn’t begin with Brunelleschi’s experiments or Alberti’s treatises; its roots stretch further back, perhaps to the moment when Francesco Petrarch ascended Mount Ventoux in the spring of 1336. In his Letters to Posterity, Petrarch describes climbing the mountain not for conquest or utility, but for the sheer joy of seeing the world from a higher vantage point. As he reached the summit and looked down on the vast landscape below, he experienced something profoundly transformative: the merging of the external world with the interior chamber of his mind.

For Petrarch, the act of seeing was more than physical—it was metaphysical. Standing atop the mountain, he realized that the journey up was a reflection of his own spiritual struggle, the climb a metaphor for the ascent of the soul. He opened St. Augustine’s Confessions at random and read a passage about turning inward to find truth. That moment of self-reflection, of inward vision inspired by the outward view, marks one of the earliest stirrings of the Renaissance psyche: a simultaneous awakening to the world outside and the worlds within.

Petrarch’s perspective was not yet the linear geometry of the Renaissance, but it was the beginning of seeing the world as a series of depths—geographical, intellectual, and spiritual tripping on the rediscovery of linear perspective, suddenly saw the world in a whole new dimension. Petrarch, that proto-psychedelic pioneer, didn’t just climb a mountain in 1336 to admire the view; he was tuning in, turning on, and dropping out of the medieval mindset. What he experienced wasn’t just a scenic vista—it was a paradigm shift, a mental breakthrough, a collective acid trip centuries before Hofmann synthesized LSD in his Swiss lab. The mountain, in Petrarch’s hands, became a kind of mental architecture, where the external panorama mirrored the labyrinthine complexities of thought and self-awareness. His writings turned the act of seeing into an act of discovery, and his experience on Ventoux can be read as the opening of one of James’s chambers—a revelation of what lies behind the door of perception.

What Petrarch hinted at in his solitary climb, Brunelleschi and his contemporaries later systematized with mathematical precision. Perspective, in this sense, is both an internal and external experience, a tool not just for depicting reality but for accessing new modes of consciousness. Petrarch’s mountain was not just a place but a metaphor for the vertigo and ecstasy of stepping outside the known chambers of the mind into an infinity of space and thought. The Renaissance wasn’t merely born from the rediscovery of Greek and Roman texts; it was ignited by these moments of inner and outer perspective—the revelation that the world and the self are both larger and more complex than anyone had imagined.

Perspective, you see, wasn’t just a technique for painting pretty pictures. It was a mind-bending revelation, a cognitive revolution that shattered the flat, symbolic world of the Middle Ages. Imagine the shock of suddenly realizing that space had depth, that the world wasn’t just a divine puppet show staged by an inscrutable God, but a vast, interconnected web of angles, lines, and vanishing points. It was as if the collective consciousness of Europe had been dosed with a hefty hit of psilocybin, and the walls of perception came tumbling down.

Artists like Brunelleschi and Alberti became the Timothy Learys of their day, evangelizing this new way of seeing. They didn’t just teach people how to draw; they taught them how to see. The canvas became a portal, a window into an infinite, multidimensional reality. And just like a psychedelic trip, perspective didn’t just change art—it changed everything. It reshaped architecture, science, philosophy, and even religion. Suddenly, God wasn’t just “up there” in some abstract heaven; He was everywhere, in the geometry of a cathedral, the proportions of a human body, the spiraling patterns of a seashell.

The innovators of perspective—Brunelleschi, Alberti, Leonardo—were not just painters or architects; they were psychonauts. They expanded the boundaries of reality, much as shamanic figures have done with their sacramental plants and visionary rituals. When Filippo Brunelleschi first demonstrated linear perspective in the early 1400s, he might as well have been handing out blotter paper on the streets of Florence. The effect was the same: a sudden awakening, a neural reprogramming. The brain popped.

The implications of this shift were cosmic. To see a vanishing point on the horizon was to understand, for the first time, that the world wasn’t flat but infinite. Perspective created the illusion of distance, and with it, the possibility of exploration. The human mind, previously boxed in by its own limitations, began to roam. It’s no coincidence that the Renaissance birthed not only great art but also the Age of Exploration. Columbus, Magellan, and Vespucci sailed into the same vast unknown that artists like Raphael and Michelangelo were painting into existence.

Perspective wasn’t just a technique; it was a substance—a cognitive elixir that rewired the human brain. It taught people to see beyond what was immediately in front of them. It unlocked the potential to imagine new worlds, both external and internal. It was, in a very real sense, the first psychedelic trip.

Of course, like any profound trip, perspective also brought with it existential vertigo. It dismantled the old order, dissolving the static certainties of medieval life. The flat earth was replaced by a spinning sphere, hurtling through infinite space. The fixed hierarchy of heaven and earth was replaced by a vertiginous cosmos, where man was no longer the center. Perspective was a doorway, but not everyone wanted to step through. The Church burned heretics for less.

And yet, perspective prevailed. It became the foundation of modern science, technology, and art. Newton saw the same vanishing points in his calculus that Dürer saw in his prints. Einstein’s relativity was a continuation of the psychedelic journey that began in Florence. Perspective taught us not only to see differently but to think differently. It shattered the boundaries of the known and opened humanity to the infinite.

Perspective wasn’t just a tool for representing reality—it created reality. It was a feedback loop, a self-reinforcing hallucination. The more people saw the world through the lens of perspective, the more they believed that this was how the world really was. And just like a bad trip, it had its dark side. The Renaissance obsession with order, symmetry, and control laid the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution, which in turn gave us Newtonian physics, industrialization, high modernism and the mechanistic worldview that dominates our lives today. In a sense, we’re still tripping on perspective, still trapped in its Euclidean grid, still trying to find our way back to the multidimensional, nonlinear reality that lies beyond.

So, was perspective the Renaissance equivalent of marijuana, LSD, and mushrooms? Absolutely. It was a consciousness-expanding technology, a mind-altering substance that reshaped the way we see and think. And like all psychedelics, it came with a warning label: Use with caution. May cause radical shifts in perception. Side effects include existential crises, paradigm shifts, and the occasional loss of medieval certainty.

“The map is not the territory, and the menu is not the meal.” Perspective was just another map, another menu, another way of navigating the infinite labyrinth of reality. And as any good psychonaut knows, the trip never really ends—it just keeps unfolding, one vanishing point at a time.

What began as a liberating expansion of consciousness, a psychedelic leap into the third dimension, eventually hardened into a rigid, mechanistic worldview that boxed reality into straight lines, right angles, and cold, calculated precision. The bad trip of perspective wasn’t just a stylistic choice; it was a cognitive prison, a reductionist trap that flattened the multidimensional richness of existence into a sterile grid of control and domination. And high modernism? That was the ultimate ego trip, the hubristic belief that we could engineer our way out of chaos, that we could impose order on the universe and bend it to our will. Spoiler alert: it didn’t end well.

The grid of perspective wasn’t just a way to paint a picture; it was a way to map the world, to measure it, to colonize it. The Renaissance obsession with proportion and symmetry gave birth to the Scientific Revolution, which in turn gave us Newtonian physics, Cartesian dualism, and the Enlightenment’s worship of reason. The world became a machine, and we became its engineers. But in our zeal to master nature, we forgot that we are nature. We traded the messy, organic, interconnected web of life for the cold, hard logic of the grid. And in doing so, we lost something essential—a sense of wonder, of mystery, of belonging to something greater than ourselves.

Fast forward to high modernism, the 20th-century apotheosis of this mechanistic worldview. High modernism was the ultimate bad trip, a collective delusion that we could redesign society from the ground up, that we could erase the chaos of history and replace it with a utopia of straight lines and right angles. Think of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, a city of towering concrete slabs and wide, empty boulevards, where every human need was supposedly met by rational planning. Think of Robert Moses’ highways, slicing through neighborhoods like a surgeon’s scalpel, severing communities and ecosystems in the name of progress. Think of the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plans, which turned entire nations into laboratories for social engineering, with catastrophic results. High modernism wasn’t just an architectural style or a political ideology; it was a mindset, a belief that we could impose order on the chaos of existence and emerge victorious.

But here’s the thing about bad trips: they always end in a crash. The high modernist dream of total control was just that—a dream. The more we tried to impose order on the world, the more chaotic it became. The grid of perspective, once a tool for liberation, became a cage, a straitjacket that stifled creativity and diversity. The high modernist utopias turned into dystopias, their sterile geometries alienating and dehumanizing. And the mechanistic worldview that underpinned it all—the belief that we are separate from nature, that we can dominate and exploit it without consequence—has brought us to the brink of ecological collapse.

So where do we go from here? How do we recover from the bad trip of perspective and high modernism? The answer, perhaps, lies in embracing the very things they sought to suppress: chaos, complexity, interconnectedness. We need to let go of the illusion of control and open ourselves to the messy, unpredictable, infinitely creative flow of life. We need to trade the grid for the web, the machine for the organism, the straight line for the fractal. In The universe is a giant Rorschach inkblot, and we are all just making it up as we go along. It’s time to stop trying to impose our will on the universe and start dancing with it. The bad trip is over. The next trip—whatever it is—is just beginning.

Non Linearity

The great cosmic joke: we’ve been staring at the world through the keyhole of linear perspective for centuries, thinking we’ve got it all figured out, while the door to non-linearity—the next frontier of consciousness—has been wide open all along. Linear perspective, for all its Renaissance glory, is just one lens, one filter, one tiny slice of the infinite pie of reality. And now, as we stand on the precipice of a new paradigm, it’s time to ask: What lies beyond the straight lines and vanishing points? What happens when we step off the grid and into the fractal, the quantum, the non-linear?

Non-linearity is the psychedelic frontier of the 21st century, the uncharted territory where cause and effect dance in a chaotic tango, where time loops back on itself like a Möbius strip, and where reality itself becomes a shimmering, ever-shifting hologram. It’s the realm of quantum entanglement, where particles separated by light-years communicate instantaneously, as if space and time were mere illusions. It’s the domain of chaos theory, where the flutter of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It’s the world of fractals, where self-similar patterns repeat at every scale, from the branching of trees to the structure of galaxies.

Non-linearity isn’t just a scientific concept or a mathematical abstraction. It’s a state of mind, a way of seeing, a new mode of consciousness. Just as linear perspective shattered the flat, symbolic worldview of the Middle Ages, non-linearity has the potential to shatter the mechanistic, reductionist worldview of the modern era. It’s the next step in the evolution of human perception, the next leap in our collective psychedelic journey.

Think about it: linear perspective gave us the illusion of control, the belief that we could map the world, measure it, and master it. But non-linearity reminds us that reality is far stranger, far more mysterious than we ever imagined. It’s a humbling, mind-expanding realization—one that echoes the insights of mystics, shamans, and psychedelic explorers throughout history. As Terence McKenna once said, “Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.”

So how do we grasp non-linearity? How do we step beyond the straight lines and into the swirling, pulsating, infinitely complex web of reality? The answer, as always, lies in expanding our consciousness. We need new tools, new metaphors, new ways of thinking. We need to embrace the paradoxes, the ambiguities, the uncertainties. We need to let go of our attachment to linear cause-and-effect and open ourselves to the possibility that everything is connected, that everything is interdependent, that everything is part of a vast, unfolding pattern that we can never fully comprehend.

In the words of Robert Anton Wilson, “The universe is a giant hologram, and we are all interconnected in ways we can barely imagine.” Non-linearity is the key to unlocking this holographic reality, to seeing beyond the illusion of separation and into the deeper unity that underlies all things. It’s the next frontier of consciousness, the next stage in our collective evolution. And like all great frontiers, it’s both exhilarating and terrifying, a leap into the unknown that promises to transform not just how we see the world, but how we see ourselves.