↑
lmao for some reason
Human on Teletubbie violence is always funny.
You both have some strange humor... I like it.
lmao for some reason
Human on Teletubbie violence is always funny.
You both have some strange humor... I like it.
Merkabah
- Thread starter Skarekrow
- Start date
Very fascinating!!
Enjoy
People with “Maladaptive Daydreaming” spend an
average of four hours a day lost in their imagination
MENTAL HEALTH, SLEEP AND DREAMING
June 25, 2018By Emma Young
“I have been lost in a daydream for as long as I can remember….These daydreams tend to be stories…for which I feel real emotion, usually happiness or sadness, which have the ability to make me laugh and cry…They’re as important a part of my life as anything else; I can spend hours alone with my daydreams….I am careful to control my actions in public so it is not evident that my mind is constantly spinning these stories and I am constantly lost in them.”
The 20-year-old woman who emailed these reflections to Eli Somer at the University of Haifa, Israel, diagnosed herself with Maladaptive Daydreaming, sometimes known as Daydreaming Disorder.
While Maladaptive Daydreaming is not included in standard mental health diagnostic manuals, there are cyber-communities dedicated to it, and “in recent years it has gradually become evident that daydreaming can evolve into an extreme and maladaptive behaviour, up to the point where it turns into a clinically significant condition,” write Somer and Nirit Soffer-Dudek at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in a new paper on the disorder, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry.
This study is, they say, the first to explore the mental health factors that accompany Maladaptive Daydreaming (MD) over time – and it provides insights into not only what might cause these intense, vivid, extended bouts of daydreaming but also hints at how to prevent them, or how to stop them in their tracks.
Because while many people who experience MD report enjoying their daydreams at the time, MD can also negatively affect their relationships with others, their day-to-day lives, and their overall emotional wellbeing.
Earlier work led researchers to suggest that MD might be either a dissociative disorder, a disturbance of attention, a behavioural addiction or an obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorder.
For the new online study, Somer and Soffer-Dudek recruited 77 self-diagnosed sufferers of MD, from 26 different countries, ranging in age from 18-60.
Just over 80 per cent were women (possibly because women seem to be more affected by MD than men, the researchers write).
The participants first provided details about any mental health diagnoses (21 had been diagnosed with depression, 14 with anxiety disorders and 5 with OCD, among other disorders).
Then, each evening before bed, for 14 days, they completed a series of questionnaires that asked about their experiences that day.
These scales assessed levels of dissociation, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, depression, general anxiety, social anxiety, and emotion – and also maladaptive day dreaming. (Participants were asked to report on the extent to which statements such as “I felt the need or urge to continue a daydream that was interrupted by a real-world event at a later point” had applied to them that day.)
On average, participants reported spending four hours a day daydreaming.
On days on which their MD was more intense and time-consuming, they also experienced higher levels of obsessive-compulsive symptoms, dissociation and negative emotion, and both types of anxiety.
But only obsessive-compulsive symptoms consistently predicted the intensity and duration of maladaptive daydreaming on the next day, regardless of the levels of obsessive-compulsive symptoms on that following day.
Despite these findings, the researchers note that only five of the participants had actually been diagnosed with OCD – “This discrepancy suggests that obsessive-compulsive symptoms and MD share common mechanisms and interact with each other…but MD does not seem to be merely a subtype of OCD.”
However, they added that many people with MD describe being consistently drawn to their daydreaming in a compulsive way.
“The finding that a surge in obsessive-compulsive symptoms precedes MD [also] points to a key role of this construct as a contributing mechanism,” Somer and Soffer-Dudek argue.
Compulsions to daydream, or to carry on daydreaming even after many hours have passed, might be addressed using cognitive behavioural approaches developed to address other compulsions, the researchers suggest.
They also speculate that low levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin may play a role in MD, as in OCD.
If future work confirms this, drugs that modify serotonin levels may possibly be used in treatment.
There were some limitations of the study – in particular, that it was based entirely on self-reports.
But as research on MD is scarce, and this is thought to be the first longitudinal exploration of the disorder, the results should at least help to inform future work in this area.
Though it’s also possible that not all people with MD will want treatment.
As the woman with MD who emailed Somer also wrote: “I am torn between the love of my daydreams and the desire to be normal.”
Enjoy
People with “Maladaptive Daydreaming” spend an
average of four hours a day lost in their imagination
MENTAL HEALTH, SLEEP AND DREAMING
June 25, 2018
“I have been lost in a daydream for as long as I can remember….These daydreams tend to be stories…for which I feel real emotion, usually happiness or sadness, which have the ability to make me laugh and cry…They’re as important a part of my life as anything else; I can spend hours alone with my daydreams….I am careful to control my actions in public so it is not evident that my mind is constantly spinning these stories and I am constantly lost in them.”
The 20-year-old woman who emailed these reflections to Eli Somer at the University of Haifa, Israel, diagnosed herself with Maladaptive Daydreaming, sometimes known as Daydreaming Disorder.
While Maladaptive Daydreaming is not included in standard mental health diagnostic manuals, there are cyber-communities dedicated to it, and “in recent years it has gradually become evident that daydreaming can evolve into an extreme and maladaptive behaviour, up to the point where it turns into a clinically significant condition,” write Somer and Nirit Soffer-Dudek at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in a new paper on the disorder, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry.
This study is, they say, the first to explore the mental health factors that accompany Maladaptive Daydreaming (MD) over time – and it provides insights into not only what might cause these intense, vivid, extended bouts of daydreaming but also hints at how to prevent them, or how to stop them in their tracks.
Because while many people who experience MD report enjoying their daydreams at the time, MD can also negatively affect their relationships with others, their day-to-day lives, and their overall emotional wellbeing.
Earlier work led researchers to suggest that MD might be either a dissociative disorder, a disturbance of attention, a behavioural addiction or an obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorder.
For the new online study, Somer and Soffer-Dudek recruited 77 self-diagnosed sufferers of MD, from 26 different countries, ranging in age from 18-60.
Just over 80 per cent were women (possibly because women seem to be more affected by MD than men, the researchers write).
The participants first provided details about any mental health diagnoses (21 had been diagnosed with depression, 14 with anxiety disorders and 5 with OCD, among other disorders).
Then, each evening before bed, for 14 days, they completed a series of questionnaires that asked about their experiences that day.
These scales assessed levels of dissociation, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, depression, general anxiety, social anxiety, and emotion – and also maladaptive day dreaming. (Participants were asked to report on the extent to which statements such as “I felt the need or urge to continue a daydream that was interrupted by a real-world event at a later point” had applied to them that day.)
On average, participants reported spending four hours a day daydreaming.
On days on which their MD was more intense and time-consuming, they also experienced higher levels of obsessive-compulsive symptoms, dissociation and negative emotion, and both types of anxiety.
But only obsessive-compulsive symptoms consistently predicted the intensity and duration of maladaptive daydreaming on the next day, regardless of the levels of obsessive-compulsive symptoms on that following day.
Despite these findings, the researchers note that only five of the participants had actually been diagnosed with OCD – “This discrepancy suggests that obsessive-compulsive symptoms and MD share common mechanisms and interact with each other…but MD does not seem to be merely a subtype of OCD.”
However, they added that many people with MD describe being consistently drawn to their daydreaming in a compulsive way.
“The finding that a surge in obsessive-compulsive symptoms precedes MD [also] points to a key role of this construct as a contributing mechanism,” Somer and Soffer-Dudek argue.
Compulsions to daydream, or to carry on daydreaming even after many hours have passed, might be addressed using cognitive behavioural approaches developed to address other compulsions, the researchers suggest.
They also speculate that low levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin may play a role in MD, as in OCD.
If future work confirms this, drugs that modify serotonin levels may possibly be used in treatment.
There were some limitations of the study – in particular, that it was based entirely on self-reports.
But as research on MD is scarce, and this is thought to be the first longitudinal exploration of the disorder, the results should at least help to inform future work in this area.
Though it’s also possible that not all people with MD will want treatment.
As the woman with MD who emailed Somer also wrote: “I am torn between the love of my daydreams and the desire to be normal.”
Very beautiful....I imagine a choir of the entire collective unconscious might sound similar...
The 2011 Virtual Choir video features 2052 performances of 'Sleep' from 1752 singers in 58 countries,
individually recorded and uploaded to YouTube between September 2010 and January 2011.
http://virtualchoir.org
The 2011 Virtual Choir video features 2052 performances of 'Sleep' from 1752 singers in 58 countries,
individually recorded and uploaded to YouTube between September 2010 and January 2011.
http://virtualchoir.org
This is a pretty incredible series of accounts, though it should be more aptly named "Fighter Pilots and OOBEs".
Of course it's all approached from a materialist POV...pointing to this or that region of the brain causing you to have an altered perception of oneself.
What if stimulating that region does in fact produce an out of body experience...or perhaps going OOB causes this area of the brain to light up.
It's premature imho to jump to the conclusion that the brain must be confused and this is the result.
These guys were spun in the centrifuge at heavy g-forces and lost consciousness multiple times in a row...I bet that could shake your astral self loose from your body if anything could, lol.
Enjoy!
Of course it's all approached from a materialist POV...pointing to this or that region of the brain causing you to have an altered perception of oneself.
What if stimulating that region does in fact produce an out of body experience...or perhaps going OOB causes this area of the brain to light up.
It's premature imho to jump to the conclusion that the brain must be confused and this is the result.
These guys were spun in the centrifuge at heavy g-forces and lost consciousness multiple times in a row...I bet that could shake your astral self loose from your body if anything could, lol.
Enjoy!
Fighter Pilots and NDE's
Part of the episode "Where am I?" by WNYC's Radiolab,
which discusses how pilot fighters experience near-death-like experiences while training
under extreme G forces that make their brains lose their bearings with regard to the rest of their bodies.
Link to full program on Radiolab's website: http://www.radiolab.org/2006/may/05/
Part of the episode "Where am I?" by WNYC's Radiolab,
which discusses how pilot fighters experience near-death-like experiences while training
under extreme G forces that make their brains lose their bearings with regard to the rest of their bodies.
Link to full program on Radiolab's website: http://www.radiolab.org/2006/may/05/
Cool
Psychologists have only begun to unravel the concept of “personality,” that all-important but nebulous feature of individual identity.
Recent studies suggest that personality traits don’t simply affect your outlook on life, but the way you perceive reality.
One study published earlier this year in the Journal of Research in Personality goes so far as to suggest that openness to experience changes what people see in the world.
It makes them more likely to experience certain visual perceptions.
In the study, researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia recruited 123 volunteers and gave them the big five personality test, which measures extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience.
That last personality trait involves creativity, imagination, and a willingness to try new things.
They then tested who experienced a visual perception phenomenon called “binocular rivalry.”
This phenomenon occurs when each eye is shown a different image—in this case, a red patch in one eye and a green patch to another.
Most people switch back and forwards between the two incompatible images, as the brain can only perceive one at a time.
But some people merge the two images into a unified red-green patch.
Participants who scored higher on openness were more likely to perceive this combined image.
This makes sense, according to the researchers, because openness to new experiences is linked with creativity.
In an article on their results in The Conversation, they write that the ability to combine two images seems “like a ‘creative’ solution to the problem presented by the two incompatible stimuli.”
Anna Antinori lead author of the study, explains that we’re constantly filtering out what sensory information to focus on.
For example, you might well be subconsciously ignoring the noise around you or the feeling of a chair against your back.
And this then determines what we perceive.
“The ‘gate’ that lets through the information that reaches consciousness may have a different level of flexibility,” she says. “Open people appear to have a more flexible gate and let through more information than the average person.”
This isn’t the only study that connects personality with perception.
As the researchers note in The Conversation, an earlier study shows that those who score high in openness are less likely to experience “inattentional blindness.”
This visual phenomenon occurs when people are focusing so hard on one feature of a scene that they completely fail to notice something entirely obvious—such as in the video below.
Around half of people are so busy watching ball-passes that they miss the man in a gorilla costume.
Though the research suggests that personality affects the way we filter conscious experience, it’s not clear exactly how this process works.
The authors speculate that overlapping neurochemicals in the brain may link perception to personality.
“Thus the abundance of the same neurochemical, or lack thereof, may affect both one’s personality and low-level vision,” adds Antinori.
There is also evidence to suggest that personality traits aren’t fixed.
One study has shown that meditation can affect binocular rivalry, and training can make people more open to new experiences.
Then there’s research that shows psilocybin (the key ingredient in magic mushrooms) makes people more open.
But while studies show that personality can shift over time, there’s currently little research on whether perception also changes to correspond with new personality traits.
But given the above cited evidence that meditation can shift perception, Antinori believes the way we see the world may well change in line with personality. “It may be possible that a change in people’s personality may also affect how they see the world,” she says.
The mechanics behind how personality is formed—and the effects it has—are still unknown.
But mounting evidence suggests that our personalities are affecting our experience of the world in more ways than we realize.
This article has been updated to reflect comments from lead researcher Anna Antinori.
Open-minded people have a different visual perception of reality
Psychologists have only begun to unravel the concept of “personality,” that all-important but nebulous feature of individual identity.
Recent studies suggest that personality traits don’t simply affect your outlook on life, but the way you perceive reality.
One study published earlier this year in the Journal of Research in Personality goes so far as to suggest that openness to experience changes what people see in the world.
It makes them more likely to experience certain visual perceptions.
In the study, researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia recruited 123 volunteers and gave them the big five personality test, which measures extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience.
That last personality trait involves creativity, imagination, and a willingness to try new things.
They then tested who experienced a visual perception phenomenon called “binocular rivalry.”
This phenomenon occurs when each eye is shown a different image—in this case, a red patch in one eye and a green patch to another.
Most people switch back and forwards between the two incompatible images, as the brain can only perceive one at a time.
But some people merge the two images into a unified red-green patch.
Participants who scored higher on openness were more likely to perceive this combined image.
This makes sense, according to the researchers, because openness to new experiences is linked with creativity.
In an article on their results in The Conversation, they write that the ability to combine two images seems “like a ‘creative’ solution to the problem presented by the two incompatible stimuli.”
Anna Antinori lead author of the study, explains that we’re constantly filtering out what sensory information to focus on.
For example, you might well be subconsciously ignoring the noise around you or the feeling of a chair against your back.
And this then determines what we perceive.
“The ‘gate’ that lets through the information that reaches consciousness may have a different level of flexibility,” she says. “Open people appear to have a more flexible gate and let through more information than the average person.”
This isn’t the only study that connects personality with perception.
As the researchers note in The Conversation, an earlier study shows that those who score high in openness are less likely to experience “inattentional blindness.”
This visual phenomenon occurs when people are focusing so hard on one feature of a scene that they completely fail to notice something entirely obvious—such as in the video below.
Around half of people are so busy watching ball-passes that they miss the man in a gorilla costume.
Though the research suggests that personality affects the way we filter conscious experience, it’s not clear exactly how this process works.
The authors speculate that overlapping neurochemicals in the brain may link perception to personality.
“Thus the abundance of the same neurochemical, or lack thereof, may affect both one’s personality and low-level vision,” adds Antinori.
There is also evidence to suggest that personality traits aren’t fixed.
One study has shown that meditation can affect binocular rivalry, and training can make people more open to new experiences.
Then there’s research that shows psilocybin (the key ingredient in magic mushrooms) makes people more open.
But while studies show that personality can shift over time, there’s currently little research on whether perception also changes to correspond with new personality traits.
But given the above cited evidence that meditation can shift perception, Antinori believes the way we see the world may well change in line with personality. “It may be possible that a change in people’s personality may also affect how they see the world,” she says.
The mechanics behind how personality is formed—and the effects it has—are still unknown.
But mounting evidence suggests that our personalities are affecting our experience of the world in more ways than we realize.
This article has been updated to reflect comments from lead researcher Anna Antinori.
One more for the night
Enjoy!
The ultimate triumph of mind over matter would be to survive bodily death.
The argument, roughly put: the greater the power of mind over physical reality, the greater the plausibility of survival.
In contrast, if our mental states are just byproducts of physical causes, they aren’t likely to survive physical death.
But if our minds cannot be reduced to, or explained by, physical states, surviving death becomes more credible.
Mind may be married to body; but divorce need not mean the death of mind.
Sometimes divorce is not just the end but a new and even more exciting beginning.
There are all kinds of mind-body interactions (MBIs) in which some aspect of our mental life appears to act upon—and in some sense transcend—physical reality.
To make the case in detail is a long story.
For the moment a rough sketch will have to do.
Roughly, we can classify MBIs as normal, abnormal, and supernormal, ranging from the familiar to the rare and extraordinary.
Ordinary walking is a good familiar place to begin.
We use our legs and arms to carry out our intentions in daily life.
Using our body intentionally is already a sign of the power of mind over matter.
Beyond daily work and chores, there is dancing, art, sport and sometimes daring or heroic action where we use our bodies in increasingly expressive and possibly dangerous ways.
For example, Tibetan monks said to run vast distances at incredible speeds and of Buddhist and Catholic levitators and bilocators.
Along with these are out-of-body experiences, which some see as a proof of the mind’s independence of the body, and even as a preview of life after death.
Or take the family of so-called poltergeists that seem to perform all manner of tricks on familiar physics.
These are spiced by the mystery of not knowing the nature of the intelligence behind the anomalies, whether from the mind of a disturbed adolescent or from spirits having some fun with, or venting some spleen on, the living.
There is the “direct voice” phenomenon, articulate communications heard but not seen.
The auditory spectrum of queer phenomena is wide: raps, bangs, thuds, knocks, footsteps, voices, moans, laughter, all reported in hauntings; also, on a higher plane, transcendental music, sometimes heard as part of near-death or other ecstatic types of experience.
Each sense seems to have its supernormal analogue.
Annekatrin Puhle’s study, Light Changes (2013) describes a variety of unexplained, transformative light experiences.
Also, in all faiths, we find accounts of preternatural odors of sancity; Joseph of Copertino’s case is well documented (see my Wings of Ecstasy).
Breathing in this special class of supernormal fragrances was said to be therapeutic.
Among Catholic mystics like the 20th century Austrian stigmatist, Theresa Neumann, the taste of the communion wafer was conducive to ecstasy and at the same time served all her nutritional needs for decades of her very public life.
Perhaps the most practically important MBIs, whether in religious faith or medical settings, involve bodily healing.
The so-called “placebo” effect is so commonplace, we can forget how puzzling, how sometimes baffling, its ability to create a wide range of healing effects.
Documentation of seemingly miraculous healings must be added to our list.
The French physician Alexis Carrel, starting out as a skeptic in his Voyage to Lourdes, describes witnessing a young woman on the brink of death, brought back to life, physically transformed before his eyes, after she is bathed in the spring water that Bernadette Soubirous dug up out of the rocky terrain.
Sometimes the MBI is damaging: Related to this is the phenomenon of false pregnancy: women who produce and exhibit the physical symptoms of pregnancy—without actually being pregnant—what does this tell us?
Another sad psychic phenomenon comes under the rubric of “maternal impressions,” cases of women who while pregnant witness a traumatic sight such as a child with a missing limb and who then give birth to an infant with a similar missing limb.
This happens despite there being no nerve connections between mother and fetus.
With some evolved saints, yogis, and mediums, we confront a more surprising group of MBIs, for example, materialization: reports of mediums that materialize hands you can grasp, faces or full bodies of people known to be deceased that may physically embrace you and be photographed.
(See the cases of Eusapia Palladino, Martha Beraud (aka Eva C.), and D.D. Home for this.)
Even in historical times, we find reports of food unnaturally appearing and apparently “multiplied.”
Extreme MBIs occur in the context of religious symbolism.
It seems that in some reported cases the Eucharistic host has been seen to jump from the priest’s hand onto the tongue of impatient communicants.
Respect for matters of fact, no matter how strange, requires that I include on my list of metaphysical outlaws statues and paintings that weep and bleed. These phenomena are ongoing, but I’ll just mention A. R. Bandini’s The Miracle at Syracuse, an account of a statue of the Madonna that wept ample, real tears for four days, beginning on August 29, 1953, an event witnessed by scientists and thousands of eyewitnesses that was headlined around the world.
Strange phenomena are reported about the bodies of holy men and women.
We have stories of their luminous haloes, otherworldly fragrances, and of levitation, bilocation, dematerialization, and materialization.
We should of course mention MBIs associated with the corpses of the super-holy.
It seems that the bodies of dead yogis and saints refuse to behave like conventional corpses.
Often for months, even years, they just look asleep, physically incorrupt, and remain so for decades and even centuries.
Reportedly, these holy corpses frozen in time, may exude oils, retain flexibility, and behave in other undead ways.
In some Buddhist traditions, saints’ bodies after death have been observed to become vanishingly small, to emit colored lights, and then for a climax, to completely vanish.
And finally on death-related MBIs, in reincarnation cases there is evidence that the body of the reincarnated person carries over marks of wounds incurred in a previous life, thus making visible the continuity of two different embodied life experiences.
Many examples prove that mind can directly influence matter, for good or ill, for example, placebo and nocebo effects, which repeatedly prove how belief, imagination, and expectation can help or harm health.
Statistically, placebos (imaginative fictions) are about as effective as chemical anti-depressants.
My belief that I will get well is sometimes the critical variable what makes me well.
Thoughts can affect distant events, in other minds and other places; the facts of paranormality suggest that we inhabit an extended mental mind.
So what can we conclude about mind over matter and life after death?
From experience we know of the many ways that our minds affect physical reality.
First off, thoughts, desires, emotions shape our own bodies and lives, for good or for ill.
That’s a big step and already speaks to the reality of our agency--our affinity for mind-body transcendence.
In spite of genetics and external material circumstances, we retain the ability to transform our own lives.
And as a bonus I hesitantly add: In light of the sprawling mass of diverse and increasingly remarkable evidence, the culmination of mind over matter would clearly be the triumph of consciousness over bodily death.
That would be the ultimate proof of power of the human spirit, a secret, as Heraclitus said, that nature loves to hide.
But what nature loves to hide we need to make manifest.
The more we understand our extraordinary potentials, the more likely we may learn to tap into them.
Enjoy!
Mind Over Matter and Life After Death
The ultimate triumph of mind over matter would be to survive bodily death.
The argument, roughly put: the greater the power of mind over physical reality, the greater the plausibility of survival.
In contrast, if our mental states are just byproducts of physical causes, they aren’t likely to survive physical death.
But if our minds cannot be reduced to, or explained by, physical states, surviving death becomes more credible.
Mind may be married to body; but divorce need not mean the death of mind.
Sometimes divorce is not just the end but a new and even more exciting beginning.
There are all kinds of mind-body interactions (MBIs) in which some aspect of our mental life appears to act upon—and in some sense transcend—physical reality.
To make the case in detail is a long story.
For the moment a rough sketch will have to do.
Roughly, we can classify MBIs as normal, abnormal, and supernormal, ranging from the familiar to the rare and extraordinary.
Ordinary walking is a good familiar place to begin.
We use our legs and arms to carry out our intentions in daily life.
Using our body intentionally is already a sign of the power of mind over matter.
Beyond daily work and chores, there is dancing, art, sport and sometimes daring or heroic action where we use our bodies in increasingly expressive and possibly dangerous ways.
For example, Tibetan monks said to run vast distances at incredible speeds and of Buddhist and Catholic levitators and bilocators.
Along with these are out-of-body experiences, which some see as a proof of the mind’s independence of the body, and even as a preview of life after death.
Or take the family of so-called poltergeists that seem to perform all manner of tricks on familiar physics.
These are spiced by the mystery of not knowing the nature of the intelligence behind the anomalies, whether from the mind of a disturbed adolescent or from spirits having some fun with, or venting some spleen on, the living.
There is the “direct voice” phenomenon, articulate communications heard but not seen.
The auditory spectrum of queer phenomena is wide: raps, bangs, thuds, knocks, footsteps, voices, moans, laughter, all reported in hauntings; also, on a higher plane, transcendental music, sometimes heard as part of near-death or other ecstatic types of experience.
Each sense seems to have its supernormal analogue.
Annekatrin Puhle’s study, Light Changes (2013) describes a variety of unexplained, transformative light experiences.
Also, in all faiths, we find accounts of preternatural odors of sancity; Joseph of Copertino’s case is well documented (see my Wings of Ecstasy).
Breathing in this special class of supernormal fragrances was said to be therapeutic.
Among Catholic mystics like the 20th century Austrian stigmatist, Theresa Neumann, the taste of the communion wafer was conducive to ecstasy and at the same time served all her nutritional needs for decades of her very public life.
Perhaps the most practically important MBIs, whether in religious faith or medical settings, involve bodily healing.
The so-called “placebo” effect is so commonplace, we can forget how puzzling, how sometimes baffling, its ability to create a wide range of healing effects.
Documentation of seemingly miraculous healings must be added to our list.
The French physician Alexis Carrel, starting out as a skeptic in his Voyage to Lourdes, describes witnessing a young woman on the brink of death, brought back to life, physically transformed before his eyes, after she is bathed in the spring water that Bernadette Soubirous dug up out of the rocky terrain.
Sometimes the MBI is damaging: Related to this is the phenomenon of false pregnancy: women who produce and exhibit the physical symptoms of pregnancy—without actually being pregnant—what does this tell us?
Another sad psychic phenomenon comes under the rubric of “maternal impressions,” cases of women who while pregnant witness a traumatic sight such as a child with a missing limb and who then give birth to an infant with a similar missing limb.
This happens despite there being no nerve connections between mother and fetus.
With some evolved saints, yogis, and mediums, we confront a more surprising group of MBIs, for example, materialization: reports of mediums that materialize hands you can grasp, faces or full bodies of people known to be deceased that may physically embrace you and be photographed.
(See the cases of Eusapia Palladino, Martha Beraud (aka Eva C.), and D.D. Home for this.)
Even in historical times, we find reports of food unnaturally appearing and apparently “multiplied.”
Extreme MBIs occur in the context of religious symbolism.
It seems that in some reported cases the Eucharistic host has been seen to jump from the priest’s hand onto the tongue of impatient communicants.
Respect for matters of fact, no matter how strange, requires that I include on my list of metaphysical outlaws statues and paintings that weep and bleed. These phenomena are ongoing, but I’ll just mention A. R. Bandini’s The Miracle at Syracuse, an account of a statue of the Madonna that wept ample, real tears for four days, beginning on August 29, 1953, an event witnessed by scientists and thousands of eyewitnesses that was headlined around the world.
Strange phenomena are reported about the bodies of holy men and women.
We have stories of their luminous haloes, otherworldly fragrances, and of levitation, bilocation, dematerialization, and materialization.
We should of course mention MBIs associated with the corpses of the super-holy.
It seems that the bodies of dead yogis and saints refuse to behave like conventional corpses.
Often for months, even years, they just look asleep, physically incorrupt, and remain so for decades and even centuries.
Reportedly, these holy corpses frozen in time, may exude oils, retain flexibility, and behave in other undead ways.
In some Buddhist traditions, saints’ bodies after death have been observed to become vanishingly small, to emit colored lights, and then for a climax, to completely vanish.
And finally on death-related MBIs, in reincarnation cases there is evidence that the body of the reincarnated person carries over marks of wounds incurred in a previous life, thus making visible the continuity of two different embodied life experiences.
Many examples prove that mind can directly influence matter, for good or ill, for example, placebo and nocebo effects, which repeatedly prove how belief, imagination, and expectation can help or harm health.
Statistically, placebos (imaginative fictions) are about as effective as chemical anti-depressants.
My belief that I will get well is sometimes the critical variable what makes me well.
Thoughts can affect distant events, in other minds and other places; the facts of paranormality suggest that we inhabit an extended mental mind.
So what can we conclude about mind over matter and life after death?
From experience we know of the many ways that our minds affect physical reality.
First off, thoughts, desires, emotions shape our own bodies and lives, for good or for ill.
That’s a big step and already speaks to the reality of our agency--our affinity for mind-body transcendence.
In spite of genetics and external material circumstances, we retain the ability to transform our own lives.
And as a bonus I hesitantly add: In light of the sprawling mass of diverse and increasingly remarkable evidence, the culmination of mind over matter would clearly be the triumph of consciousness over bodily death.
That would be the ultimate proof of power of the human spirit, a secret, as Heraclitus said, that nature loves to hide.
But what nature loves to hide we need to make manifest.
The more we understand our extraordinary potentials, the more likely we may learn to tap into them.
Hahahahahahahah!!!!! Yes!!!!! @Wyote , this is what I was talking about!!!! Woohoo! Yay!
Hahahahahahahah!!!!! Yes!!!!! @Wyote , this is what I was talking about!!!! Woohoo! Yay!
- Sep 28, 2008
- 41,240
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- MBTI
- INFJ
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- 954 so/sx
- Sep 28, 2008
- 41,240
- 246,776
- 4,281
- MBTI
- INFJ
- Enneagram
- 954 so/sx
At least I can claim it as an old picture, lol.
Top notch photoshopping there Milky.
(My gift back to you)
You both have a merry christmas as well!
Cool!
I was just discussing this in another thread recently...I think it was @Asa ?
Anyhow...it makes just as much sense as any other origin story of Santa...if not more.
The way I understood it...and perhaps it was done regionally (or I was just wrong)...the reindeer would eat the mushrooms and then the people would drink the urine of the reindeer...not that I'm gonna be doing that anytime soon, lol.
But yes, the Amanita's are not the same as the magic mushrooms being cultivated and sold and used now.
I mean...you can buy the AM caps online at Shaman supply shops...but they have a lot more side effects than the psilocybe cubensis variety used more popularly.
Firstly, you can overdose on them as opposed to the psilocybe of which you cannot.
I mean, you can try to OD on them (and would be blasted to another planet), but you would start to vomit...and then if you could keep them down...the effect would just stop working after you burned through the majority of your serotonin.
With AM's I hear there is bad abdominal pain, sweating, shaking, vomiting, etc. and you can overdose on them and die.
Hence the drinking of the urine with those toxins removed for a much more pleasant and non-deadly trip.
People still use them...in the right quantities and conditions and with the right knowledge I'm sure they are pretty swell.
Thanks man...have a nice holiday!
Much love to everyone!
Been a while since I've posted a larger bit of info...
Enjoy!
by Iona Miller and Richard Alan Miller
Organization for the Advancement of Knowledge, Grants Pass, Oregon
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
"One really should start thinking
in terms of biomind receptors,
rather than in terms of ESP"
~ Ingo Swann
SHOT IN THE DARK-SIDE OF THE MOON
While on his journey to the moon and back, astronaut Edgar Mitchell conducted an unscheduled experiment of his own.
On June 22, 1971, he informed the New York Times that:
"During the Apollo 14 lunar expedition I performed an extrasensory-perception experiment the world's first in space. In it five symbols a star, cross, circle, wavy line and square were oriented randomly in columns of 25.
Four persons in the United States attempted to guess the order of the symbols. They were able to do this with success that could be duplicated by chance in one out of 3,000 experiments."
He claimed, in effect, that his demonstration showed that ESP (Extrasensory Perception) was independent of shielding, locale, distance, or time.
When he got back to planet Earth, he founded The Institute of Noetic Science (IONS), noetic meaning consciousness studies. That program, now run by parapsychologist Dean Radin, is still thriving and the Institute recently moved to larger quarters in an old school in Petaluma, California.
IONS is celebrating its 30th anniversary.
MAKES ME WANT TO PSI
The spontaneous event commonly called psychic experience, perception or ability is called 'psi' in scientific arenas.
Even more precisely, it is now often referred to as anomalous cognition (AC). A particular form of intentional AC is known as Remote Viewing. Between 1978-1995 the U.S. government sponsored the Stargate Program, in conjunction with Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a psyops development think tank.
The existence of psi or ESP abilities has been hotly debated among scientists for decades, since J. B. Rhine began his experiments in 1927.
Both the pro (Dean Radin; Ingo Swann; Jessica Utts, Russell Targ; Hiroshi Motoyama) and con (James Randi, Susan Blackmore, CSICOPS) positions have their "true believers", and it seems never the twain shall meet.
Psi is still a paradigm that lives on the outskirts trying to become a sanctioned science. But just because a subject is controversial, and happens to be a space and time transcending experience, doesn't mean we shouldn't investigate it. In fact, it beckons us to focus on it even more thoroughly to reveal the truths hidden there. We simply need to do it with stringent, critic-proof methodology.
There are a variety of psi powers, known for centuries in Eastern philosophy as siddhas, exceptional human abilities.
The uninitiated or skeptical may be perplexed or daunted at the prospect of coming to any rational conceptual understanding of these anomalous phenomena, which have been associated with the realm of mysticism, superstition and the supernatural.
In actual fact, research by the authors, who are both certified hypnotherapists (A.C.H.E.), and others (Miller; Ryzl) shows that nearly anyone can improve their psi ability through simple techniques of self-hypnosis.
Psi is also at the root of focused intent, distant mental interactions, distance healing and therapeutic rapport, where there is a subtle shared consciousness and often brainwave synchronization. This capacity is within everyone’s grasp, as the human potential movement demonstrated with such trance phenomena as fire walking and guided imagery.
We've virtually all had those uncanny or awesome experiences where we seemed to intuit, dream, or "know" something in advance of conventional means. Sometimes it is called pre-sentiment. Around 55% of reported incidents occur in dreams.
Another example, is the synchronicity at work in the affairs of "star-crossed lovers."
When we are in love, we seem to share the same "wavelength," virtually able to read one another’s minds. Who hasn’t thought of a friend or acquaintance only to have the phone ring?
Often the most compelling stories come from those who don't even "believe" in the phenomenon, but find themselves experiencing it, usually in the unfortunate circumstance of the illness, injury or death of a distant loved-one.
Psi is not just a mental perception or conception; we feel it in our guts, in our bones, in our marrow. It is first and foremost a holistic mind/body experience.
According to leading parapsychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner,
"At one level of investigation, there already are 'replications' and 'battle-tested' results, specifically the finding that about 50% of an unselected group will report having had a 'psychic experience,' supposedly involving those psi phenomena that have been given such labels as 'telepathy', 'clairvoyance', 'precognition', and 'psychokinesis' [mind over matter].
This percentage may vary from one culture, age group, and educational level to the next, but it has been repeated, in one study after another, for the last several decades."
The move in biophysics is to take psi research from endless theorization, proofs of existence and boring replications into innovative and practical experimentation.
The problem is that in order to do that scientifically, one has to risk credibility and professional suicide, as well as being underfunded.
OPEN SESAME
Though it often seems confined to mediums, channels, sensitives, or ESPers, most individuals are capable of expressing some nonlocal communication or psi phenomena.
However, that ability may be blocked for various reasons by an adaptation to consensus reality, to conventional thinking. We need to develop "out of the box" thinking. Even Einstein said that past, present, and future are illusions, even if they are stubborn ones. Conscious calculation rarely plays a role in ESP; the same is true for creativity.
Both ESP and creativity have deep taproots in the psyche. Pang and Forte (1967) found some evidence of a relationship between creativity and ESP, as did others (Honorton, 1967).
Frederick Myers reported that a large proportion of ESP experiences occur in altered states such as dreams, trance, hypnosis and creativity while Masters and Houston (1966) counted it among the varieties of psychedelic experience.
ESP, hypnosis and mind-expanded states have sensitivity to the unconscious at their core. And that subconscious expresses itself through symbols, imagery, and sensations to communicate with the conscious mind. Hypnosis is the "open sesame" to the waking impressions and sensory images of the deeper mind/body.
The elusive ability to swing back 'the doors of perception' and enter the numinous realm of the collective unconscious was described by psychologist C.G. Jung. Whether deliberate or accidental, anyone can open to the force of this revealed process, to this dynamic information field. Those who frustrate themselves with self-defeating behavior in other areas of life often show poor psi performance.
Positive ESP scores seem to correlate generally with traits such as openness, high self-esteem, warmth, sociability, adventuresomeness, relaxation, assertiveness, talkativeness and practicality. However, some psi-talented individuals often don't score well in laboratory settings.
On the other hand Russell Targ (1994) claims,
"[P]si is no longer elusive; it can be demonstrated when needed for study and investigation."
Even though psychic training to strengthen the signal line is possible, unpredictability has been the hallmark of this emergent gift.
To overcome this problem in both the theoretical and experimental arenas requires a marriage of the disciplines of physics, biology, medicine, psychology, and hypnosis.
Findings from all these fields converge in the paradoxical subject of Extra-Sensory Perception. As the ideas of quantum mechanics, relativity and parapsychology slowly make their way into our collective consciousness, our common-sense views on time and causality find themselves more strained than they've ever been in the course of human history.
Will this challenge remain the domain of theoretical science, or can we foresee a day in which the general understanding, and even the experience of the average individual, will be shaped by this new perspective on reality? (Sidorov, 2003, "The Mind In Time").
It takes many disciplines, as well as the latest findings in physiology, neurobiology and information theory to begin to formulate any comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon and bridge the conceptual gap.
ESP used to be studied in Parapsychology, an adjunct of psychology. But its subject matter has become so mainstream, the field has been return to ordinary Psychology. ESP "software" is studied in psychology, but ESP "hardware" is the domain of biophysics.
Researchers are probing the interface between matter, spacetime and mind with increasing precision. There is optimism that ultimately conventional pathways will be found to explain their appearance. Suggestions have included Schumann Resonance as a nearly-instantaneous carrier of psi information or perhaps paradoxical quantum nonlocality or coherence to account for it.
There are many models that provide potentially viable explanations. The mental aspects can perhaps be described psychologically, but the mechanics require models from physics. A variety of theories have been proposed, including neurological, holographic, electromagnetic, and quantum mechanics based hypotheses.
Like electricity, no one knows how psi works.
However, to foster and practice psi we don't need to know how it works, anymore than we need to know the mechanics of internal combustion to drive a car.
WHAT IS PSI?
This month (July 2003) on the editorial board of the Journal of Non-Local and Remote Mental Interactions, we have been preparing a special issue on Remote Viewing.
Stargate RV expert and teacher, Joseph McMoneagle is interviewed, along with such notables as author and theoretical physicist, Fred Alan Wolf, and Finnish physicist Matti Pitkanen.
Many plausible theories and new experimental protocols are being proposed, pushing the leading edge of physics, biophysics, and experimental parapsychology. Though it is often suggested, it remains to be seen if psi is a field, a quantum effect, or a physical quantity.
We are examining aspects from coherent fields to strength of intent, arousal states, target specificity, subject-target separation, psi-expectancy, anticipatory effects and information flow.
Studies of field resonance, metabolism, biophotons, entanglement, geomagnetic fluctuations, time-reversed experience, energy transfer, physiological detectors, biomind receptors, psychophysical responses, bioregulation, enhanced recovery, experimenter effects, EM signatures and transduction pathways may yield more information about the process.
The areas of extrasensory perception or anomalous cognition we discuss here include,
Stories of distance healing, a form of PK or psychokinesis (mind over matter), require another article of their own to do them justice. It may be easier to model virtual information transfer than mind over matter.
"Spooky action at a distance" requires even stronger evidence than sensing at a distance. But is "distance" here really a factor or an illusion in a holographic simply-connected universe? The paradox of space-time and relativity presents itself in psi as psycho-retrocognition, or time-reversed PK.
Though these experiences of knowing at a distance are called "extra-sensory," they often appear "as if" received by conventional sensory or mental means, for how else can we "know what we know"? It is a holistic psychophysical experience, affecting the whole self, physically, emotionally, mentally and often spiritually.
The impediments of distance and time seem to dissolve; the barriers of space-time are mysteriously overcome.
The information is 'just there' in one form or another, whether spontaneous or facilitated.
"in 1990 Herman Sno, a psychiatrist at Hospital de Heel in Zaandam, the Netherlands, suggested that memories are stored in a format similar to holograms. Unlike a photograph, each section of a hologram contains all the information needed to reproduce the entire picture.
But the smaller the fragment, the fuzzier the resultant image. According to Sno, deja vu occurs when some small detail in one's current situation closely matches a memory fragment, conjuring up a blurry image of that former experience."
There are competing theories of deja vu, but the holographic concept of reality is a leading contender in the biomechanical explanations of psi.
Psi meaning comes through emotionally intense visual, auditory and kinesthetic experiences. It is a human potential we can learn to tap. We can use our intentionality as a probability perturbation instrument. We can use mental focus to alternately concentrate and relax our attention. Intent is suggested as a variable in transmission and reception in the exchange of extrasensory information, possibly within the range of ELF electromagnetic frequencies (Sidorov, 2002).
Stanford and Lovin (1970) found possible support for a relationship between the generation of alpha waves and ESP, as did Monroe (1971).
More recent research has implicated the electromagnetic signals of Schumann Resonances as carrier of seemingly non-local transfer of information (Pitkanin, 2001). Persinger (1989) has suggested that psi information signals are actually carried on extremely low electromagnetic frequencies and our temporal lobe structures are sensitive to them.
Whether one believes in spontaneous psi experience, or not, it has a long and colorful history, in the mystic and healing arts of the East and West, and in science, even business. The difference is the trigger that evokes the experience. Management trainers have taught self-hypnosis as a means of fostering intuition, rapport and other practical applications of ESP.
The role of ESP is inextricably bound up with other creative processes where information or inspiration seemingly appear from nowhere. Data acquired through ESP, prescient dreams and other imaginative thought processes riddles the stories of scientific discovery and creativity. Psychic detective work and investigative reporting has received mixed reviews, since following up on dry leads uses time and vital resources. Without controls, these anecdotes are difficult to evaluate.
In the arts, it has been said that "life imitates art," sometimes to uncanny proportions. Krippner (1972) recounts a story of ESP in creativity, whose prophetic detail later took on ominous tones.
In 1898, Morgan Robertson published a popular novel called Futility. It described the wreck of a giant ship called the Titan, considered "unsinkable" by the characters in the novel.
Perhaps you recognize this oft-told tale as that of the Titanic, but it was not wrecked until April 15, 1912.
In the novel,
FROM TRANCE TO CREATIVITY
The question becomes "How can we facilitate the emergence of psi phenomena, either for greater awareness or creativity?"
Knowing what we know about psi expression, how can we train ourselves to encourage its emergence? Hypnosis or self-hypnosis simply helps engage the emotional mind, the imaginal mind, the biophysical mind rather than just approaching the task rationally and conceptually.
Unfortunately, the question of psi-facilitation was asked by covert forces during the Cold War, and much of the statistical and practical data on psi comes from those black-ops sources (CIA, KGB, NSA, DIA, DOD, U.S. Army and Navy).
The Russians wanted to use psi for espionage and the US countered with its own team. Much of this government-sponsored work went on at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), by Puharich, Puthoff, Targ, and Swann.
Human potential advocates, Jack Schwarz and Robert Monroe separately pursued independent, more explorative and mystical approaches. Both taught consciousness management techniques through forms of self-hypnosis. Schwarz, practicing as the Aleithea Foundation in Southern Oregon, focused on bioregulation with autohypnosis and subtle human energies.
Monroe's techniques employ neuroregulation with the frequency-following response (which he trademarked with the Monroe Institute in Virginia, as Hemi-Synch) to induce trance, entraining both hemispheres in alpha and theta (1982).
Hemi-Synch, also known as binaural beat technology, actively drives the modulation of electrocortical activity through resonance effects, changing levels of awareness and arousal, attentional focus, and cognitive content. Often combined with biofeedback, it helps shortcut processes that would take years of technologically unassisted yogic training.
Graywolf Swinney (2001), Dr. Stanley Krippner, and Iona Miller have conducted trainings in co-consciousness (Erickson, Rossi & Rossi, 1976) and theta training at Asklepia Foundation, also in Southern Oregon.
A deep state of rapport is used in psychotherapeutic journey processes, employing shamanic hypnotherapeutic techniques. Theta is reportedly the psychic range of the mind, generated largely in the temporal lobes. Co-consciousness is a shared virtuality, a telepathic rapport wherein both participant's brainwaves become synchronized into a single holographic biofield (Miller and Swinney, 2000).
Spontaneous psi phenomena have been associated with theta waves by Krippner (1977), the Greens (1977), and more recently by Persinger (1987). Consciously producing theta requires quieting the body, emotions and thoughts simultaneously, leading to an integrative reverie, a deep focus of attention. Theta is often accompanied by hypnagogic or dream-like imagery emanating from the temporal lobes.
John Curtis Gowan (1975) catalogued the entire spectrum of extraordinary phenomena related to trance, art, and creativity. In his taxonomy, he called these distinctive modes or domains of human dynamics Prototaxic (Trance), Parataxic (Art), and Syntaxic (Creativity).
Trance is characterized by loss of ego, art by emotionally charged (often symbolic) imagery, and in creativity meaning is more or less fully cognized symbolically with ego present. In some ways, these modalities could represent the uncanniness of precognition, the imagery of clairvoyance, and the knowing of telepathy.
Trance is often associated with awe, dread, horror, and panic since ego control is weak or absent. These numinous effects are moderated in the artistic experience that comes as visualization, audialization, emotional inspiration, sensual, symbolic and mythopoetic imagery.
In terms of precognition, artists are often said to be perceptually "ahead of their time." Art is the transition phase in the relationship between the ego and the emergent transcendent function. Transcendenceis a "quantum leap," a recurrent process, not a steady-state. It is a phase-transition moving toward illumination.
The syntaxic experience of creativity is even more benign since the mind apprehends directly without ego dissociation. Psi experiences become more naturally integrated - regular, inspirational and uplifting while less frightening or awesome.
Gowan's work naturally included both hypnosis and ESP, which he cited as consciously or unconsciously operative at these various levels of dissociation, ego-involvement and levels of arousal (sympathetic and parasympathetic). Puharich (1961) found telepathic reception facilitated by parasympathetic activation, while sending the message was stronger with activation of the sympathetic, or adrenergic system.
For Gowan, the accessibility of certain psychic experiences depended on the mode of functioning. Intuitive self-knowledge is intrinsic to a wide variety of higher mental functions.
Hypnosis and self-hypnosis are clearly linked to the primal trance, but can be applied in more integrated modes to enhance psi ability (Krippner, 1968).
PSI DEEPLY - HYPNOSIS & ESP
In 1967, the Czech government tried to co-opt the allegedly successful psychical research and training program of biochemist Milan Ryzl.
After screening many candidates, he found 50 high-scoring subjects, and they proceeded to win several rounds of the Czech lottery.
"Milan Ryzl, a chemist who defected to the United States from Czechoslovakia in 1967, developed a hypnotic technique for facilitating ESP... Ryzl’s technique involved the intensive use of deep hypnosis sessions almost daily for a period of several months. The first stage of the sessions was to instill confidence in his subjects that they could visualize clear mental images containing accurate extrasensory information.
Once this stage was reached, Ryzl concentrated on conducting simple ESP tests with immediate feedback so that subjects might learn to associate certain mental states with accurate psychic information.
Subjects were taught to reject mental images which were fuzzy or unclear. This process, according to Ryzl, continued until the subject was able to perceive clairvoyantly with accuracy and detail. Finally, Ryzl attempted to wean the subject away from his own tutelage so that he or she could function independently. While still in Czechoslovakia, Ryzl claimed to have used this technique with some five hundred individuals, fifty of whom supposedly achieved success.
Other studies have shown heightened ESP in states of physical relaxation or in trance and hypnotic states. In fact, the use of hypnosis to produce high ESP scores is one of the most replicable procedures in psi research."
(Mishlove, 1975).
WORLD’S FIRST PSYCHIC TOURNAMENT
In 1973, after hosting Ryzl for weeks in his Seattle home with many late-night discussions on the nature of psi, physicist and parapsychologist Richard Alan Miller created a model for anomalous cognition.
Also drawing on his laboratory experience with biofeedback, he wrote a paper called "ESP Induction through Forms of Self Hypnosis." In 1975, while never claiming to be a psychic, he got to put his theory to a rather unique test: the World’s First Psychic Tournament.
On September 21, 1975, Llewellyn Publications, noted occult publisher, sponsored this event in Minneapolis, Minnesota as part of their 5th Annual Gnosticon Festival.
The tournament itself was co-sponsored by the Foundation for the Study of Man, originally set up to continue the work of Dr. J. B. Rhine and his pioneering work in ESP at Duke University. Many famous psychics were invited, including such personalities as John Pierrakos and Sibyl Leek.
One of the authors of this article (RAM) was also invited to test the proposed models for inducing ESP ability using forms of self-hypnosis. Since he was relatively unknown for having any abilities in this ESP field, it seemed to hold some potential as a valid first study. More than 20 nationally known psychics also participated in this event.
The clairvoyance test consisted of twenty (20) cards randomly pulled from ten (10) poker decks. Each participant was to guess the suit of each card.
With one chance in four of guessing the correct suit, the average score for a run of 20 cards with no ESP ability is 5. Each participant was given five (5) different runs. A final score determined the winner, with a total of 25 representing the norm.
What happened is now history: More than 50 percent of those participating showed normal scores ranging from 22 to 27 out of a possible 100, as would be expected in the general population. Most of the more well-known psychics showed some seemingly paranormal ability in clairvoyance, as expected, with total scores averaging between 8 and 12 correct answers out of 20. One well-known psychic even had a score as high as 61 out of a total possible 100.
Using the technique of ESP induction through forms of self-hypnosis as outlined in his paper, however, Miller did not have a run less than 16 out of 20. His total score was 83 out of 100. This was more than two orders of magnitude greater probability than scores of nationally recognized psychics.
He took home a first place certificate as testament to his extraordinary performance.
It still hangs on the wall in the office.
THE PSI FACTOR
Of course, this anecdotal evidence does not constitute scientific proof of this model.
What it does represent, however, is a need to understand the true significance of self-hypnosis is and how it relates to extra-sensory perception. Something definitely made a difference in the experiment. How might this be applied to therapy? Or perhaps to such questions as the role of placebo, spontaneous healing based in the physically-transforming belief that you can do something beyond your normal scope.
Miller went on to create an ESP screening questionnaire that helps define the attitudes that facilitate psi. It was given to 500 college students and weighing factors were assigned to individual questions.
The bell-shaped curve developed from the survey indicated that helpful traits included a belief in ESP, extroversion, freedom from anxiety, easy or frequent dream recall, hypnotizability, and a relatively expressive personality. Memory, creativity, and visualization/association showed inconclusive results.
However, EEG parameters showed a highly significant positive correlation between directional alpha frequency shift and ESP scoring. More recent studies have shown an even greater correlation for theta brainwaves and psi faculty. There also seems to be a correlation between high ESP scores and number of reported psi experiences.
In its Stargate Project, SRI developed even more stringent criteria for what constitutes a viable remote viewer, based on statistical results. In their program, the level of arousal, according to McMoneagle as told to JNLRMI, didn’t seem to matter much.
Whereas normal people are recommended to relax or use the progression relaxation that facilitates self-hypnosis, professional remote viewers can begin from a relaxed state and move to an excited one, or begin excited and become calmer.
HOW DID HE DO IT?
So, just how did Miller wind up beating the best psychics in the nation at their own game? And more importantly, how can you increase your Psi-Q?
Miller developed a set of self-consistent definitions and postulates relating self-hypnosis and ESP, both a theory and a practice.
The standard definitions used for hypnosis often call it a borderline state between sleeping and waking, i.e. body asleep, mind awake. Any state characterized by an intense concentration of attention in on area, accompanied by a profound lack of attention in other areas, may also be considered hypnosis. It opens us to our psychophysical impressions by limiting external input.
With this type of definition, everyone is considered to be continually in a light state of hypnosis, witness "white line fever" while driving, or the plea, "I was spaced-out." Musicians call it "being in the groove," others "sharing a wavelength." Our social roles are also like trance states with their intrinsic patterns. When we go in public we wear the "armour" of our persona and immerse ourselves in that self-image.
Charisma is also a form of hypnosis akin to Mesmer’s original "animal magnetism."
Traumas also create trance states with automatic behaviors that can persist for years. The "scripts, games, and rackets" of Transactional Analysis can also be seen as trance states, where we habitually replay our typical ways of dealing with self, others, and world. So the question becomes not "if" one is hypnotized, but what kind of trance and its depth one is in at any given moment.
The depth of hypnosis, which is an implied issue in this definition, may be defined as the difference between the intensity of concentration in one sphere or area and the depth of inhibition in others. Attention focused in one area creates a corresponding lacuna, or lack of attention, in other areas of the brain.
Centering the attention for prolonged periods, often with suggestions for further deepening, leads to deeper states of hypnosis.
With these definitions, a useful model for relating hypnosis to psi phenomena is possible.
Psi Theory:
The Method:
This may occur in hypnotic states, in states of intentionality, elated or traumatic emotions, or when interest, motivation, or desire is strongly increased.
The individual confronts the continuum with desire and prolonged concentration. The question being asked must be intense enough to impress itself on the unconscious. Lacking intensity, the signal will not be perceived. Intentionality strengthens the signal path.
Consciousness is then dropped into a "blank" state, an empty state, or "beginner’s mind." The actual visualization is a switch from the concentrated point to the void. When this occurs the information is impressed on consciousness, resulting in a psychophysical perceptual event. This event is independent of both space and time.
Ordinarily when people spontaneously fall into trance states, they are generally not in a "blank mind" state of expectant emptiness. There is the chatter of subconscious thoughts going on even as the process deepens toward sleep. These thoughts are generated and go on automatically at a subliminal level, often without awareness.
Consequently, the information or signal path gets distorted, and weird patterns emerge, much like those experienced in dreams. In a waking dream, distorted signals may be perceived as "spirit guides", automatic handwriting, or other autonomous related phenomena of trance states. We have seen earlier that Gowan characterized this loss of ego-awareness as the Prototaxic Mode.
Puharich believes reception is enhanced by "parasympathetic activation" in which there is an increase in released acetylcholine. He claims that telepathic sending of information is easier when there is an increased amount of adrenaline in the system. These metabolic processes are not "causal" but merely correlates of psi. Psi meaning comes through intense visual, auditory, and kinesthetic psychosensory experiences.
This "energized enthusiasm" can be seen in states of emotional involvement and artistic inspiration (Parataxic Mode), as well as creativity (Syntaxic Mode). Parataxic experience consists of relationships with multisensory images whose meaning remains on the symbolic level.
Syntaxic experiences occur when the consciously aware ego cooperates willingly with the subconscious forces. Here knowing and meaning are clearer and fully cognized with minimal distortion.
Other higher forms of concentration include biofeedback, meditation, tantra, peak experiences, higher Jhana states of yoga, and so on. Concentration is intense, structured and prolonged.
Discussion:
ESP is often observed in hypnosis, a state characterized by a single intensive thought. Recurrent cases of psycho-kinetic phenomena, such as the haunted-house variety, are often reported to be connected with previous trauma or tragic events, associated with intensity of concentration, I(c).
The frequently reported cases of crisis telepathy - ESP contact between two persons, one of which is dying or in grave danger - are necessarily associated with intense thought or concentration, even obsession and a highly aroused state. The length of time experienced depends entirely upon the circumstances; in some cases there is subjective dilation of time perception.
The discovery of mental impregnation, known in the literature as psychometry suggests that repeated identical thoughts increase the expected psychic effect. Wearing a ring for a long time may "imprint" memory of the wearer onto the ring; just slipping a ring on and off and handing it to a psychometrist will not generally reveal any memory of the wearer.
Religious or spiritual traditions assert that repeated prayers may be more effective than single ones. In other words, the more you repeat the same prayer, or mantra, or the more you do a single ritual, the greater the effect.
Along that line of reasoning, "tithing" might be seen as a factor of one’s time or attention, rather than money. Some meditation schools, for example, require no money but 10% of your daily time (2.5 hours) in meditation.
The stimulating action of psi formation on the brain may account for memory, more particularly, active recollection. The influence of psi formation increases the level of awareness of the neuro-patterns corresponding to the thought to be remembered.
The synapses are flooded over and over with the same chemical messengers and electrical signals.
The correlating psychosomatic content is consciously re-experienced.
zero-point energy (ZPE).
Physicist David Bohm, biologist Rupert Sheldrake (researching psychic pets) with his morphogenetic fields, and Ervin Laszlo propose zero-point or vacuum potential mediation for psi. The superdense quantum vacuum may be a physically real field, including but not limited to gravitation and electromagnetism. Perhaps it can transmit psi.
However, they can’t provide any experimental protocols that might test such theories. Is psi a field or a quantum effect? Fields link phenomena in time as well as space. But, fields themselves cannot be observed; only the influences propagating through them.
Other theories suggest phase-conjugate pilot waves, scalar waves, virtual states, hyperfield flux, holographic hyperchannel effect, complementarity, even uncertainty. Biophysical theories for the paranormal bridge include Josephson junctions, microtubules, and liquid crystals as psi transducers.
Honorton and others long ago found defects in old psi testing techniques and addressed criticisms with new methodology. They eliminated variables like subconscious cueing by covering the subjects’ eyes with split ping-pong balls and playing "white noise" into their ears.
Researchers hypothesized that this neutral field would function as a less-distracting "blank canvas" for psi hits. So it served a dual purpose of refining experimental procedure and minimizing distracting sensory input. These experiments, (known as Ganzfield tests), were replicated by many experimenters in many facilities, with encouragingly similar positive results. Other tests were conducted in sensory deprivation chambers and electrically-shielded Faraday cages.
Experimenter bias, the tendency to find what one seeks, is an occupational hazard, though skeptics have found positive psi correlations. But careful interpretations of models, artifacts, experimental method, instrumentation, randomization, target selection, statistical inference, sensory leakage, recording errors, and controls can’t be rigorous enough.
Proper scientific control for ESP research has been refined over the years, though cheating and frauds have plagued the field, and the naïve scientist. One solution to this dilemma lately has been to experiment with the field-tested government Remote Viewers, who have established track records.
They have their own reports of their subjective experiences - not the results of their missions - but the sensations that led to the observation or retrieval of those images.
Remote viewer Ingo Swann, called the father of RV, argues for the demystification of psi. Swann’s model supersedes the traditional psi paradigm and focuses on the hardware issues discussed in neurobiology and information theory.
Swann argues for systematic and deliberate development of this ability much like athletic training, as well as conceptual understanding. He prefers the term Distant Mental Interactions with Living Systems(DMILS) to ESP. He wants this capacity tested in the context of physical science as part of man’s natural spectrum of senses.
He claims applying focus or attention on the perceptual apparatus with feedback on results "fine tunes" psi ability.
His concrete approach and insightful conclusions include his view of our sensory apparatus as a "transducer array" to convert information from one form to another. He calls his human "software" program a "mental information processing grid." He simply converts various forms of input energy to another form his sensory system can "read."
We do much the same when we interpret the electromagnetic signals that come through the air from a voice into meaning in our brains. He suggests we can develop the ability for several transducers of signals, depending on our exposure to the cognitive processing of these signals.
Targ claimed to see reasonably sharp and clear pictures. In remote viewing, if the mental picture doesn’t form, one is left with a mere "impression," a less-precise signal. The signal is compared against memory to determine if it is meaningful to the task at hand - the target.
In other words, you can develop this ability through practice and feedback of the accuracy of your perceived signals. Pathways that work get reinforced. The process is very similar to psychophysical learning with biofeedback, such as alpha and theta training.
Swann argues for learning to fine tune one’s signal to noise ratio, learning to notice direct sensory data as well as imaginal signals, such as feelings, intuition, impressions. Repeated exposure and accurate feedback strengthens recognition of subtle and implicit relationships. Can cybernetic machines, such as random number generators, computers, and biofeedback devices help us hone psi faculties?
Swann emphasizes the difference between message and its structure. An experienced viewer can put together mental images from subtle cues. In RV, the signal appears as symbols, sounds, feelings, tastes, pictures, and holistic impressions. One learns to organize them based, again, on repeated feedback.
Misconceptions, fears, rigid concepts, body movement, excessive gastrointestinal activity, sleepiness, language categories, and other psychological "baggage" can be sources of confounding noise. Other blocks come from trying too hard, and distracting daydreaming or preoccupying thoughts.
Telepathy, empathy or rapport, and charisma seem to be related and clearly come into play during therapeutic entrainment.
BIOPHYSICS OF PSI
Nothing is known about the physical mechanism of ESP, or anomalous cognition.
No one knows what modulates performance. Even those who can demonstrate psi in the laboratory on demand, cannot account for signal nonlocality or distant interaction. The origins of the data are not revealed, only the conclusions with their level of resolution or accuracy.
This is where the models of information theory and biophysics come into play.
Physicist Lian Sidorov proposes two working models for non-local communication and intent-mediated healing:
Pitkanen conjectures that distance healing involves transfer of specific electromagnetic frequencies through quantum wormholes for near-instant transfer of information.
The transmission may trigger certain brain frequencies and psychophysical changes. Thus, amplification of the signal leads from quantum to macroscopic effects.
Pitkanen suggests the brain is a sensory organ of our electromagnetic selves, and may be linked to planetary rhythms through Schumann Resonance.
In his model, the EM fields are not directly carried from sender to target. They are simultaneously generated at the two locations by a vacuum (geometrical) current. Therefore, they remain coherent while by passing the paradox of non-attenuation with distance. Neural processing and quantum events may interpenetrate.
This still doesn’t really account for origins of the data, but merely the transmission modes. Biophysics researchers are attempting to follow the signal back to its source. The research must be interfaced with current theories in the natural sciences. Then it can be considered empirical; the paradoxical anomaly can then be linked within the known framework of knowledge.
Is there really a field, or field-like continua, capable of transmitting information beyond the recognized limits of time and space?
Laszlo (1996) suggests that the natural processes of complexity and chaos could amplify vacuum-level fluctuations into significant inputs to behavior, and that the brain, another chaotic system, could receive and amplify these signals which can penetrate into consciousness.
SHAVING WITH OCCAM’S RAZOR
Occam’s Razor is a principle applied in science that contends problems should be stated in basic terms, not making more assumptions than needed to choose the simplest of equivalent models. Many hypotheses are proposed, tested, and rejected. Their validity is debated exposing their flaws and underlying assumptions.
Additional relevant hypotheses and unrelated statements are weeded out. Experiments with the sensitivity reveal which yield the most accurate predictions. If two rival theories pass empirical tests, the simpler one must be preferred.
When it comes to conspiracy theories, we apply Hanlon’s Razor:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
But before we can find answers, we have to ask the right questions. Once we ask the right questions, we often have all the information needed to solve the problem. Unfortunately, in the case of psi, it may be that our understanding of physics is still too incomplete to solve the riddle.
Lian Sidorov, editor of Journal of Non-Locality and Remote Mental Interactions has posed many incisive questions:
How is information stored and retrieved nonlocally by consciousness?
This simple question contains the essence of all psi paradoxes, from spontaneous events like precognition and telepathy to carefully engineered processes like retro-psychokinesis.
"What you are saying seems to be that:
We can also learn to recognize certain psychophysical patterns in ourselves through feedback. The physical and the psychical are inseparable. There appears to be an energetic/informational component, perhaps based in EM frequencies and holographic interference patterns. Holographic processes do occur in nature, including holographic information storage. The holographic field is a physical reality composed of interference waves.
In Scientific American (Aug. 2003), Bekenstein poses the question "Are you a hologram?" and states quantum physics says the entire universe might be.
Can a somatic EM hologram possibly amplify as little as one quantum of energy into an effective signal? Are there holographic hyperchannels? Information in a field is holographic and the propagation of holographic interference patterns is quasi-instantaneous.
Every part of the field contains the whole informational content, just in lower resolution.
"Each particle of mass in our bodies represents one closure of the entire universe - yielding a holographic reality - and deeper communication with ourselves is identical to communication with the universe, including any part of it, at any distance.
Furthermore, in hyperspace the future and the past are all present. Since a particle does indeed exhibit a four-dimensional component for 1/137 of the time, each particle does connect to the future and to the past.
With selective tuning and kindling any part of this holographic reality is accessible. However, because of the smallness of a single selective signal in the midst of the totality, the channel is quite noisy.
For this reason skilled psychics - persons who have been found to have a greater fidelity for selective tuning - can be expected to produce better results than the normal person."
(Bearden, 1988)
Entanglement seems to occur somehow between all participants of a given intentional set-up.
We have no idea how the non-local factor of target specificity is accomplished, other than intent and training.
How we can increase our sensitivity is yet another question. The signal is perceived against a transient background of chaotic noise, and amplified by the body’s physiological pathways. Desire, intense concentration, and spiritual focus have been suggested.
The trance state has been proposed as restricting the amount of input while allowing access to subtle perceptions.
Mind is a dynamic function of the entire organism at all levels of self-organization. Constantly fluctuating local parameters are embodied and amplified through the body’s electromagnetic control hologram. Mind/body modulates our sensitivity to external and internal information. Researchers measure a brainwave known as Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) to measure anticipation, anticipatory strategies, or readiness to respond; this stimulus can be informative or uninformative, carry content or just be an alert.
Remote viewing requires super-sensitivity and super-efficient states. It is not the result of cognitive training, but a gradual remolding of the entire psychophysical structure and metabolic pathways. Thus, the mind/body becomes a highly coherent, information-transparent transducer.
Vast information resources are hidden in unexplored manifolds of the mind/body continuum. In psi research, the study of nature and our nature - our potential - becomes entwined.
As Einstein (1934, The World As I See It) said,
"We are seeking for the simplest possible scheme of thought that will bind together the observed facts."
Enjoy!
by Iona Miller and Richard Alan Miller
Organization for the Advancement of Knowledge, Grants Pass, Oregon
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
"One really should start thinking
in terms of biomind receptors,
rather than in terms of ESP"
~ Ingo Swann
SHOT IN THE DARK-SIDE OF THE MOON
While on his journey to the moon and back, astronaut Edgar Mitchell conducted an unscheduled experiment of his own.
On June 22, 1971, he informed the New York Times that:
"During the Apollo 14 lunar expedition I performed an extrasensory-perception experiment the world's first in space. In it five symbols a star, cross, circle, wavy line and square were oriented randomly in columns of 25.
Four persons in the United States attempted to guess the order of the symbols. They were able to do this with success that could be duplicated by chance in one out of 3,000 experiments."
He claimed, in effect, that his demonstration showed that ESP (Extrasensory Perception) was independent of shielding, locale, distance, or time.
When he got back to planet Earth, he founded The Institute of Noetic Science (IONS), noetic meaning consciousness studies. That program, now run by parapsychologist Dean Radin, is still thriving and the Institute recently moved to larger quarters in an old school in Petaluma, California.
IONS is celebrating its 30th anniversary.
MAKES ME WANT TO PSI
The spontaneous event commonly called psychic experience, perception or ability is called 'psi' in scientific arenas.
Even more precisely, it is now often referred to as anomalous cognition (AC). A particular form of intentional AC is known as Remote Viewing. Between 1978-1995 the U.S. government sponsored the Stargate Program, in conjunction with Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a psyops development think tank.
The existence of psi or ESP abilities has been hotly debated among scientists for decades, since J. B. Rhine began his experiments in 1927.
Both the pro (Dean Radin; Ingo Swann; Jessica Utts, Russell Targ; Hiroshi Motoyama) and con (James Randi, Susan Blackmore, CSICOPS) positions have their "true believers", and it seems never the twain shall meet.
Psi is still a paradigm that lives on the outskirts trying to become a sanctioned science. But just because a subject is controversial, and happens to be a space and time transcending experience, doesn't mean we shouldn't investigate it. In fact, it beckons us to focus on it even more thoroughly to reveal the truths hidden there. We simply need to do it with stringent, critic-proof methodology.
There are a variety of psi powers, known for centuries in Eastern philosophy as siddhas, exceptional human abilities.
The uninitiated or skeptical may be perplexed or daunted at the prospect of coming to any rational conceptual understanding of these anomalous phenomena, which have been associated with the realm of mysticism, superstition and the supernatural.
In actual fact, research by the authors, who are both certified hypnotherapists (A.C.H.E.), and others (Miller; Ryzl) shows that nearly anyone can improve their psi ability through simple techniques of self-hypnosis.
Psi is also at the root of focused intent, distant mental interactions, distance healing and therapeutic rapport, where there is a subtle shared consciousness and often brainwave synchronization. This capacity is within everyone’s grasp, as the human potential movement demonstrated with such trance phenomena as fire walking and guided imagery.
We've virtually all had those uncanny or awesome experiences where we seemed to intuit, dream, or "know" something in advance of conventional means. Sometimes it is called pre-sentiment. Around 55% of reported incidents occur in dreams.
Another example, is the synchronicity at work in the affairs of "star-crossed lovers."
When we are in love, we seem to share the same "wavelength," virtually able to read one another’s minds. Who hasn’t thought of a friend or acquaintance only to have the phone ring?
Often the most compelling stories come from those who don't even "believe" in the phenomenon, but find themselves experiencing it, usually in the unfortunate circumstance of the illness, injury or death of a distant loved-one.
Psi is not just a mental perception or conception; we feel it in our guts, in our bones, in our marrow. It is first and foremost a holistic mind/body experience.
According to leading parapsychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner,
"At one level of investigation, there already are 'replications' and 'battle-tested' results, specifically the finding that about 50% of an unselected group will report having had a 'psychic experience,' supposedly involving those psi phenomena that have been given such labels as 'telepathy', 'clairvoyance', 'precognition', and 'psychokinesis' [mind over matter].
This percentage may vary from one culture, age group, and educational level to the next, but it has been repeated, in one study after another, for the last several decades."
The move in biophysics is to take psi research from endless theorization, proofs of existence and boring replications into innovative and practical experimentation.
The problem is that in order to do that scientifically, one has to risk credibility and professional suicide, as well as being underfunded.
OPEN SESAME
Though it often seems confined to mediums, channels, sensitives, or ESPers, most individuals are capable of expressing some nonlocal communication or psi phenomena.
However, that ability may be blocked for various reasons by an adaptation to consensus reality, to conventional thinking. We need to develop "out of the box" thinking. Even Einstein said that past, present, and future are illusions, even if they are stubborn ones. Conscious calculation rarely plays a role in ESP; the same is true for creativity.
Both ESP and creativity have deep taproots in the psyche. Pang and Forte (1967) found some evidence of a relationship between creativity and ESP, as did others (Honorton, 1967).
Frederick Myers reported that a large proportion of ESP experiences occur in altered states such as dreams, trance, hypnosis and creativity while Masters and Houston (1966) counted it among the varieties of psychedelic experience.
ESP, hypnosis and mind-expanded states have sensitivity to the unconscious at their core. And that subconscious expresses itself through symbols, imagery, and sensations to communicate with the conscious mind. Hypnosis is the "open sesame" to the waking impressions and sensory images of the deeper mind/body.
The elusive ability to swing back 'the doors of perception' and enter the numinous realm of the collective unconscious was described by psychologist C.G. Jung. Whether deliberate or accidental, anyone can open to the force of this revealed process, to this dynamic information field. Those who frustrate themselves with self-defeating behavior in other areas of life often show poor psi performance.
Positive ESP scores seem to correlate generally with traits such as openness, high self-esteem, warmth, sociability, adventuresomeness, relaxation, assertiveness, talkativeness and practicality. However, some psi-talented individuals often don't score well in laboratory settings.
On the other hand Russell Targ (1994) claims,
"[P]si is no longer elusive; it can be demonstrated when needed for study and investigation."
Even though psychic training to strengthen the signal line is possible, unpredictability has been the hallmark of this emergent gift.
To overcome this problem in both the theoretical and experimental arenas requires a marriage of the disciplines of physics, biology, medicine, psychology, and hypnosis.
Findings from all these fields converge in the paradoxical subject of Extra-Sensory Perception. As the ideas of quantum mechanics, relativity and parapsychology slowly make their way into our collective consciousness, our common-sense views on time and causality find themselves more strained than they've ever been in the course of human history.
Will this challenge remain the domain of theoretical science, or can we foresee a day in which the general understanding, and even the experience of the average individual, will be shaped by this new perspective on reality? (Sidorov, 2003, "The Mind In Time").
It takes many disciplines, as well as the latest findings in physiology, neurobiology and information theory to begin to formulate any comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon and bridge the conceptual gap.
ESP used to be studied in Parapsychology, an adjunct of psychology. But its subject matter has become so mainstream, the field has been return to ordinary Psychology. ESP "software" is studied in psychology, but ESP "hardware" is the domain of biophysics.
Researchers are probing the interface between matter, spacetime and mind with increasing precision. There is optimism that ultimately conventional pathways will be found to explain their appearance. Suggestions have included Schumann Resonance as a nearly-instantaneous carrier of psi information or perhaps paradoxical quantum nonlocality or coherence to account for it.
There are many models that provide potentially viable explanations. The mental aspects can perhaps be described psychologically, but the mechanics require models from physics. A variety of theories have been proposed, including neurological, holographic, electromagnetic, and quantum mechanics based hypotheses.
Like electricity, no one knows how psi works.
However, to foster and practice psi we don't need to know how it works, anymore than we need to know the mechanics of internal combustion to drive a car.
WHAT IS PSI?
This month (July 2003) on the editorial board of the Journal of Non-Local and Remote Mental Interactions, we have been preparing a special issue on Remote Viewing.
Stargate RV expert and teacher, Joseph McMoneagle is interviewed, along with such notables as author and theoretical physicist, Fred Alan Wolf, and Finnish physicist Matti Pitkanen.
Many plausible theories and new experimental protocols are being proposed, pushing the leading edge of physics, biophysics, and experimental parapsychology. Though it is often suggested, it remains to be seen if psi is a field, a quantum effect, or a physical quantity.
We are examining aspects from coherent fields to strength of intent, arousal states, target specificity, subject-target separation, psi-expectancy, anticipatory effects and information flow.
Studies of field resonance, metabolism, biophotons, entanglement, geomagnetic fluctuations, time-reversed experience, energy transfer, physiological detectors, biomind receptors, psychophysical responses, bioregulation, enhanced recovery, experimenter effects, EM signatures and transduction pathways may yield more information about the process.
The areas of extrasensory perception or anomalous cognition we discuss here include,
- Telepathy
- Clairvoyance
- Precognition
Stories of distance healing, a form of PK or psychokinesis (mind over matter), require another article of their own to do them justice. It may be easier to model virtual information transfer than mind over matter.
"Spooky action at a distance" requires even stronger evidence than sensing at a distance. But is "distance" here really a factor or an illusion in a holographic simply-connected universe? The paradox of space-time and relativity presents itself in psi as psycho-retrocognition, or time-reversed PK.
Though these experiences of knowing at a distance are called "extra-sensory," they often appear "as if" received by conventional sensory or mental means, for how else can we "know what we know"? It is a holistic psychophysical experience, affecting the whole self, physically, emotionally, mentally and often spiritually.
The impediments of distance and time seem to dissolve; the barriers of space-time are mysteriously overcome.
The information is 'just there' in one form or another, whether spontaneous or facilitated.
- Telepathy is a message, direct mind-to-mind communication, direct knowing through being, a clear intuition or empathic awareness, often demonstrated in the psychotherapeutic setting. Telepathy is a transmission from one mind to another.
- Clairvoyance appears as information about events at remote locations, manifesting as an image, or gestalt psychic impression, rather than a thought; (it is often linked to perception at a distance: so-called astral travel, out-of-body experience, or remote viewing).
- Precognition is the most uncanny; transcending time, it seems to rend the veils of the future (jamais vu) and the past (deja vu) with strong, often unpleasant, premonitions.
"in 1990 Herman Sno, a psychiatrist at Hospital de Heel in Zaandam, the Netherlands, suggested that memories are stored in a format similar to holograms. Unlike a photograph, each section of a hologram contains all the information needed to reproduce the entire picture.
But the smaller the fragment, the fuzzier the resultant image. According to Sno, deja vu occurs when some small detail in one's current situation closely matches a memory fragment, conjuring up a blurry image of that former experience."
There are competing theories of deja vu, but the holographic concept of reality is a leading contender in the biomechanical explanations of psi.
Psi meaning comes through emotionally intense visual, auditory and kinesthetic experiences. It is a human potential we can learn to tap. We can use our intentionality as a probability perturbation instrument. We can use mental focus to alternately concentrate and relax our attention. Intent is suggested as a variable in transmission and reception in the exchange of extrasensory information, possibly within the range of ELF electromagnetic frequencies (Sidorov, 2002).
Stanford and Lovin (1970) found possible support for a relationship between the generation of alpha waves and ESP, as did Monroe (1971).
More recent research has implicated the electromagnetic signals of Schumann Resonances as carrier of seemingly non-local transfer of information (Pitkanin, 2001). Persinger (1989) has suggested that psi information signals are actually carried on extremely low electromagnetic frequencies and our temporal lobe structures are sensitive to them.
Whether one believes in spontaneous psi experience, or not, it has a long and colorful history, in the mystic and healing arts of the East and West, and in science, even business. The difference is the trigger that evokes the experience. Management trainers have taught self-hypnosis as a means of fostering intuition, rapport and other practical applications of ESP.
The role of ESP is inextricably bound up with other creative processes where information or inspiration seemingly appear from nowhere. Data acquired through ESP, prescient dreams and other imaginative thought processes riddles the stories of scientific discovery and creativity. Psychic detective work and investigative reporting has received mixed reviews, since following up on dry leads uses time and vital resources. Without controls, these anecdotes are difficult to evaluate.
In the arts, it has been said that "life imitates art," sometimes to uncanny proportions. Krippner (1972) recounts a story of ESP in creativity, whose prophetic detail later took on ominous tones.
In 1898, Morgan Robertson published a popular novel called Futility. It described the wreck of a giant ship called the Titan, considered "unsinkable" by the characters in the novel.
Perhaps you recognize this oft-told tale as that of the Titanic, but it was not wrecked until April 15, 1912.
In the novel,
- the ship displaced 70,000 tons (Titanic 66,000 tons), was 800 feet long (Titanic 828 feet)
- the Titan carried 3000 passengers and 24 lifeboats, while Titanic had only 20 lifeboats for the same number of people
- both ships sank while encountering an iceberg at the speed of 23-25 knots
FROM TRANCE TO CREATIVITY
The question becomes "How can we facilitate the emergence of psi phenomena, either for greater awareness or creativity?"
Knowing what we know about psi expression, how can we train ourselves to encourage its emergence? Hypnosis or self-hypnosis simply helps engage the emotional mind, the imaginal mind, the biophysical mind rather than just approaching the task rationally and conceptually.
Unfortunately, the question of psi-facilitation was asked by covert forces during the Cold War, and much of the statistical and practical data on psi comes from those black-ops sources (CIA, KGB, NSA, DIA, DOD, U.S. Army and Navy).
The Russians wanted to use psi for espionage and the US countered with its own team. Much of this government-sponsored work went on at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), by Puharich, Puthoff, Targ, and Swann.
Human potential advocates, Jack Schwarz and Robert Monroe separately pursued independent, more explorative and mystical approaches. Both taught consciousness management techniques through forms of self-hypnosis. Schwarz, practicing as the Aleithea Foundation in Southern Oregon, focused on bioregulation with autohypnosis and subtle human energies.
Monroe's techniques employ neuroregulation with the frequency-following response (which he trademarked with the Monroe Institute in Virginia, as Hemi-Synch) to induce trance, entraining both hemispheres in alpha and theta (1982).
Hemi-Synch, also known as binaural beat technology, actively drives the modulation of electrocortical activity through resonance effects, changing levels of awareness and arousal, attentional focus, and cognitive content. Often combined with biofeedback, it helps shortcut processes that would take years of technologically unassisted yogic training.
Graywolf Swinney (2001), Dr. Stanley Krippner, and Iona Miller have conducted trainings in co-consciousness (Erickson, Rossi & Rossi, 1976) and theta training at Asklepia Foundation, also in Southern Oregon.
A deep state of rapport is used in psychotherapeutic journey processes, employing shamanic hypnotherapeutic techniques. Theta is reportedly the psychic range of the mind, generated largely in the temporal lobes. Co-consciousness is a shared virtuality, a telepathic rapport wherein both participant's brainwaves become synchronized into a single holographic biofield (Miller and Swinney, 2000).
Spontaneous psi phenomena have been associated with theta waves by Krippner (1977), the Greens (1977), and more recently by Persinger (1987). Consciously producing theta requires quieting the body, emotions and thoughts simultaneously, leading to an integrative reverie, a deep focus of attention. Theta is often accompanied by hypnagogic or dream-like imagery emanating from the temporal lobes.
John Curtis Gowan (1975) catalogued the entire spectrum of extraordinary phenomena related to trance, art, and creativity. In his taxonomy, he called these distinctive modes or domains of human dynamics Prototaxic (Trance), Parataxic (Art), and Syntaxic (Creativity).
Trance is characterized by loss of ego, art by emotionally charged (often symbolic) imagery, and in creativity meaning is more or less fully cognized symbolically with ego present. In some ways, these modalities could represent the uncanniness of precognition, the imagery of clairvoyance, and the knowing of telepathy.
Trance is often associated with awe, dread, horror, and panic since ego control is weak or absent. These numinous effects are moderated in the artistic experience that comes as visualization, audialization, emotional inspiration, sensual, symbolic and mythopoetic imagery.
In terms of precognition, artists are often said to be perceptually "ahead of their time." Art is the transition phase in the relationship between the ego and the emergent transcendent function. Transcendenceis a "quantum leap," a recurrent process, not a steady-state. It is a phase-transition moving toward illumination.
The syntaxic experience of creativity is even more benign since the mind apprehends directly without ego dissociation. Psi experiences become more naturally integrated - regular, inspirational and uplifting while less frightening or awesome.
Gowan's work naturally included both hypnosis and ESP, which he cited as consciously or unconsciously operative at these various levels of dissociation, ego-involvement and levels of arousal (sympathetic and parasympathetic). Puharich (1961) found telepathic reception facilitated by parasympathetic activation, while sending the message was stronger with activation of the sympathetic, or adrenergic system.
For Gowan, the accessibility of certain psychic experiences depended on the mode of functioning. Intuitive self-knowledge is intrinsic to a wide variety of higher mental functions.
Hypnosis and self-hypnosis are clearly linked to the primal trance, but can be applied in more integrated modes to enhance psi ability (Krippner, 1968).
PSI DEEPLY - HYPNOSIS & ESP
In 1967, the Czech government tried to co-opt the allegedly successful psychical research and training program of biochemist Milan Ryzl.
After screening many candidates, he found 50 high-scoring subjects, and they proceeded to win several rounds of the Czech lottery.
"Milan Ryzl, a chemist who defected to the United States from Czechoslovakia in 1967, developed a hypnotic technique for facilitating ESP... Ryzl’s technique involved the intensive use of deep hypnosis sessions almost daily for a period of several months. The first stage of the sessions was to instill confidence in his subjects that they could visualize clear mental images containing accurate extrasensory information.
Once this stage was reached, Ryzl concentrated on conducting simple ESP tests with immediate feedback so that subjects might learn to associate certain mental states with accurate psychic information.
Subjects were taught to reject mental images which were fuzzy or unclear. This process, according to Ryzl, continued until the subject was able to perceive clairvoyantly with accuracy and detail. Finally, Ryzl attempted to wean the subject away from his own tutelage so that he or she could function independently. While still in Czechoslovakia, Ryzl claimed to have used this technique with some five hundred individuals, fifty of whom supposedly achieved success.
Other studies have shown heightened ESP in states of physical relaxation or in trance and hypnotic states. In fact, the use of hypnosis to produce high ESP scores is one of the most replicable procedures in psi research."
(Mishlove, 1975).
WORLD’S FIRST PSYCHIC TOURNAMENT
In 1973, after hosting Ryzl for weeks in his Seattle home with many late-night discussions on the nature of psi, physicist and parapsychologist Richard Alan Miller created a model for anomalous cognition.
Also drawing on his laboratory experience with biofeedback, he wrote a paper called "ESP Induction through Forms of Self Hypnosis." In 1975, while never claiming to be a psychic, he got to put his theory to a rather unique test: the World’s First Psychic Tournament.
On September 21, 1975, Llewellyn Publications, noted occult publisher, sponsored this event in Minneapolis, Minnesota as part of their 5th Annual Gnosticon Festival.
The tournament itself was co-sponsored by the Foundation for the Study of Man, originally set up to continue the work of Dr. J. B. Rhine and his pioneering work in ESP at Duke University. Many famous psychics were invited, including such personalities as John Pierrakos and Sibyl Leek.
One of the authors of this article (RAM) was also invited to test the proposed models for inducing ESP ability using forms of self-hypnosis. Since he was relatively unknown for having any abilities in this ESP field, it seemed to hold some potential as a valid first study. More than 20 nationally known psychics also participated in this event.
The clairvoyance test consisted of twenty (20) cards randomly pulled from ten (10) poker decks. Each participant was to guess the suit of each card.
With one chance in four of guessing the correct suit, the average score for a run of 20 cards with no ESP ability is 5. Each participant was given five (5) different runs. A final score determined the winner, with a total of 25 representing the norm.
What happened is now history: More than 50 percent of those participating showed normal scores ranging from 22 to 27 out of a possible 100, as would be expected in the general population. Most of the more well-known psychics showed some seemingly paranormal ability in clairvoyance, as expected, with total scores averaging between 8 and 12 correct answers out of 20. One well-known psychic even had a score as high as 61 out of a total possible 100.
Using the technique of ESP induction through forms of self-hypnosis as outlined in his paper, however, Miller did not have a run less than 16 out of 20. His total score was 83 out of 100. This was more than two orders of magnitude greater probability than scores of nationally recognized psychics.
He took home a first place certificate as testament to his extraordinary performance.
It still hangs on the wall in the office.
THE PSI FACTOR
Of course, this anecdotal evidence does not constitute scientific proof of this model.
What it does represent, however, is a need to understand the true significance of self-hypnosis is and how it relates to extra-sensory perception. Something definitely made a difference in the experiment. How might this be applied to therapy? Or perhaps to such questions as the role of placebo, spontaneous healing based in the physically-transforming belief that you can do something beyond your normal scope.
Miller went on to create an ESP screening questionnaire that helps define the attitudes that facilitate psi. It was given to 500 college students and weighing factors were assigned to individual questions.
The bell-shaped curve developed from the survey indicated that helpful traits included a belief in ESP, extroversion, freedom from anxiety, easy or frequent dream recall, hypnotizability, and a relatively expressive personality. Memory, creativity, and visualization/association showed inconclusive results.
However, EEG parameters showed a highly significant positive correlation between directional alpha frequency shift and ESP scoring. More recent studies have shown an even greater correlation for theta brainwaves and psi faculty. There also seems to be a correlation between high ESP scores and number of reported psi experiences.
In its Stargate Project, SRI developed even more stringent criteria for what constitutes a viable remote viewer, based on statistical results. In their program, the level of arousal, according to McMoneagle as told to JNLRMI, didn’t seem to matter much.
Whereas normal people are recommended to relax or use the progression relaxation that facilitates self-hypnosis, professional remote viewers can begin from a relaxed state and move to an excited one, or begin excited and become calmer.
HOW DID HE DO IT?
So, just how did Miller wind up beating the best psychics in the nation at their own game? And more importantly, how can you increase your Psi-Q?
Miller developed a set of self-consistent definitions and postulates relating self-hypnosis and ESP, both a theory and a practice.
The standard definitions used for hypnosis often call it a borderline state between sleeping and waking, i.e. body asleep, mind awake. Any state characterized by an intense concentration of attention in on area, accompanied by a profound lack of attention in other areas, may also be considered hypnosis. It opens us to our psychophysical impressions by limiting external input.
With this type of definition, everyone is considered to be continually in a light state of hypnosis, witness "white line fever" while driving, or the plea, "I was spaced-out." Musicians call it "being in the groove," others "sharing a wavelength." Our social roles are also like trance states with their intrinsic patterns. When we go in public we wear the "armour" of our persona and immerse ourselves in that self-image.
Charisma is also a form of hypnosis akin to Mesmer’s original "animal magnetism."
Traumas also create trance states with automatic behaviors that can persist for years. The "scripts, games, and rackets" of Transactional Analysis can also be seen as trance states, where we habitually replay our typical ways of dealing with self, others, and world. So the question becomes not "if" one is hypnotized, but what kind of trance and its depth one is in at any given moment.
The depth of hypnosis, which is an implied issue in this definition, may be defined as the difference between the intensity of concentration in one sphere or area and the depth of inhibition in others. Attention focused in one area creates a corresponding lacuna, or lack of attention, in other areas of the brain.
Centering the attention for prolonged periods, often with suggestions for further deepening, leads to deeper states of hypnosis.
With these definitions, a useful model for relating hypnosis to psi phenomena is possible.
Psi Theory:
- Postulate I: The conscious experience is associated with the nervous processes which take place above a certain critical level of awareness/alertness. This function, defined as I(c), varies considerably in a state of hypnosis, where attention is focused.
- Postulate II: Psi Energy, arbitrarily defined as E(psi), is an equivalent in the field of extra-sensory phenomenon of what, in our three-dimensional world, is called energy.
- Correlate A: E(psi) is not limited by time.
- Correlate B: E(psi) can not be transformed into other energies (i.e. physical energies,; converting heat into light).
- Correlate C: E(psi) operates by manipulating the transformation of physical energies.
- Correlate A: E(psi) is not limited by time.
- Postulate III: Psi Energy, is responsible for extra-sensory perception and psycho-kinetic phenomenon (PK).
- Postulate IV: Psi Energy is the product of some aspect of the metabolic processes. Physical data regarding the relationship between metabolic processes and extra-sensory perception can be found in Beyond Telepathy, by Andrija Puharich.
- Postulate V: The generation of Psi Energy rapidly decreases the level of alertness. This immediately explains why:
- each conscious act has a limited duration
- why we experience a permanent train of changing thoughts
- why our attention permanently shifts from one object to the next.
- each conscious act has a limited duration
- Postulate VI: The intensity of conscious experience, I(c), depends on the time rate of the generation of psi Energy. Mathematically, this is described as dE(psi)/dt = A(e) x I(c).
The rate of change of E(psi) as a function of time is equal to some geographical constant, A(e), times the intensity of concentration, I(c). More simply stated Psi Energy is equal to a geographical constant times the intensity of concentration, I(c), times the amount of time that the thought is held. E(psi) = A(e) x I(c) x t
If we cannot make any particular thought last long enough, it should be sufficient to repeat it again and again until the value of the individual brief periods add up to a sufficient value. The equation now becomes E(psi) = A(e) c I(c) x [t(1) + t(2) + t(3) + …]
- Postulate VII: The formation of Psi Energy, which is created by a holistic psychophysical act, preserves the semantic control of the thought that created it. In essence, your thought is uniquely distinct. If you deviate from your thought slightly, it is a different thought-form, including the psychosomatic component. There is a tangible shift in the mind/body.
The Method:
- Formulate the question.
- Hold that thought for as long as possible.
- Assume that the event has occurred.
- Drop into a "blank mind" state and wait.
This may occur in hypnotic states, in states of intentionality, elated or traumatic emotions, or when interest, motivation, or desire is strongly increased.
The individual confronts the continuum with desire and prolonged concentration. The question being asked must be intense enough to impress itself on the unconscious. Lacking intensity, the signal will not be perceived. Intentionality strengthens the signal path.
Consciousness is then dropped into a "blank" state, an empty state, or "beginner’s mind." The actual visualization is a switch from the concentrated point to the void. When this occurs the information is impressed on consciousness, resulting in a psychophysical perceptual event. This event is independent of both space and time.
Ordinarily when people spontaneously fall into trance states, they are generally not in a "blank mind" state of expectant emptiness. There is the chatter of subconscious thoughts going on even as the process deepens toward sleep. These thoughts are generated and go on automatically at a subliminal level, often without awareness.
Consequently, the information or signal path gets distorted, and weird patterns emerge, much like those experienced in dreams. In a waking dream, distorted signals may be perceived as "spirit guides", automatic handwriting, or other autonomous related phenomena of trance states. We have seen earlier that Gowan characterized this loss of ego-awareness as the Prototaxic Mode.
Puharich believes reception is enhanced by "parasympathetic activation" in which there is an increase in released acetylcholine. He claims that telepathic sending of information is easier when there is an increased amount of adrenaline in the system. These metabolic processes are not "causal" but merely correlates of psi. Psi meaning comes through intense visual, auditory, and kinesthetic psychosensory experiences.
This "energized enthusiasm" can be seen in states of emotional involvement and artistic inspiration (Parataxic Mode), as well as creativity (Syntaxic Mode). Parataxic experience consists of relationships with multisensory images whose meaning remains on the symbolic level.
Syntaxic experiences occur when the consciously aware ego cooperates willingly with the subconscious forces. Here knowing and meaning are clearer and fully cognized with minimal distortion.
Other higher forms of concentration include biofeedback, meditation, tantra, peak experiences, higher Jhana states of yoga, and so on. Concentration is intense, structured and prolonged.
Discussion:
ESP is often observed in hypnosis, a state characterized by a single intensive thought. Recurrent cases of psycho-kinetic phenomena, such as the haunted-house variety, are often reported to be connected with previous trauma or tragic events, associated with intensity of concentration, I(c).
The frequently reported cases of crisis telepathy - ESP contact between two persons, one of which is dying or in grave danger - are necessarily associated with intense thought or concentration, even obsession and a highly aroused state. The length of time experienced depends entirely upon the circumstances; in some cases there is subjective dilation of time perception.
The discovery of mental impregnation, known in the literature as psychometry suggests that repeated identical thoughts increase the expected psychic effect. Wearing a ring for a long time may "imprint" memory of the wearer onto the ring; just slipping a ring on and off and handing it to a psychometrist will not generally reveal any memory of the wearer.
Religious or spiritual traditions assert that repeated prayers may be more effective than single ones. In other words, the more you repeat the same prayer, or mantra, or the more you do a single ritual, the greater the effect.
Along that line of reasoning, "tithing" might be seen as a factor of one’s time or attention, rather than money. Some meditation schools, for example, require no money but 10% of your daily time (2.5 hours) in meditation.
The stimulating action of psi formation on the brain may account for memory, more particularly, active recollection. The influence of psi formation increases the level of awareness of the neuro-patterns corresponding to the thought to be remembered.
The synapses are flooded over and over with the same chemical messengers and electrical signals.
The correlating psychosomatic content is consciously re-experienced.
zero-point energy (ZPE).
Physicist David Bohm, biologist Rupert Sheldrake (researching psychic pets) with his morphogenetic fields, and Ervin Laszlo propose zero-point or vacuum potential mediation for psi. The superdense quantum vacuum may be a physically real field, including but not limited to gravitation and electromagnetism. Perhaps it can transmit psi.
However, they can’t provide any experimental protocols that might test such theories. Is psi a field or a quantum effect? Fields link phenomena in time as well as space. But, fields themselves cannot be observed; only the influences propagating through them.
Other theories suggest phase-conjugate pilot waves, scalar waves, virtual states, hyperfield flux, holographic hyperchannel effect, complementarity, even uncertainty. Biophysical theories for the paranormal bridge include Josephson junctions, microtubules, and liquid crystals as psi transducers.
Honorton and others long ago found defects in old psi testing techniques and addressed criticisms with new methodology. They eliminated variables like subconscious cueing by covering the subjects’ eyes with split ping-pong balls and playing "white noise" into their ears.
Researchers hypothesized that this neutral field would function as a less-distracting "blank canvas" for psi hits. So it served a dual purpose of refining experimental procedure and minimizing distracting sensory input. These experiments, (known as Ganzfield tests), were replicated by many experimenters in many facilities, with encouragingly similar positive results. Other tests were conducted in sensory deprivation chambers and electrically-shielded Faraday cages.
Experimenter bias, the tendency to find what one seeks, is an occupational hazard, though skeptics have found positive psi correlations. But careful interpretations of models, artifacts, experimental method, instrumentation, randomization, target selection, statistical inference, sensory leakage, recording errors, and controls can’t be rigorous enough.
Proper scientific control for ESP research has been refined over the years, though cheating and frauds have plagued the field, and the naïve scientist. One solution to this dilemma lately has been to experiment with the field-tested government Remote Viewers, who have established track records.
They have their own reports of their subjective experiences - not the results of their missions - but the sensations that led to the observation or retrieval of those images.
Remote viewer Ingo Swann, called the father of RV, argues for the demystification of psi. Swann’s model supersedes the traditional psi paradigm and focuses on the hardware issues discussed in neurobiology and information theory.
Swann argues for systematic and deliberate development of this ability much like athletic training, as well as conceptual understanding. He prefers the term Distant Mental Interactions with Living Systems(DMILS) to ESP. He wants this capacity tested in the context of physical science as part of man’s natural spectrum of senses.
He claims applying focus or attention on the perceptual apparatus with feedback on results "fine tunes" psi ability.
His concrete approach and insightful conclusions include his view of our sensory apparatus as a "transducer array" to convert information from one form to another. He calls his human "software" program a "mental information processing grid." He simply converts various forms of input energy to another form his sensory system can "read."
We do much the same when we interpret the electromagnetic signals that come through the air from a voice into meaning in our brains. He suggests we can develop the ability for several transducers of signals, depending on our exposure to the cognitive processing of these signals.
Targ claimed to see reasonably sharp and clear pictures. In remote viewing, if the mental picture doesn’t form, one is left with a mere "impression," a less-precise signal. The signal is compared against memory to determine if it is meaningful to the task at hand - the target.
In other words, you can develop this ability through practice and feedback of the accuracy of your perceived signals. Pathways that work get reinforced. The process is very similar to psychophysical learning with biofeedback, such as alpha and theta training.
Swann argues for learning to fine tune one’s signal to noise ratio, learning to notice direct sensory data as well as imaginal signals, such as feelings, intuition, impressions. Repeated exposure and accurate feedback strengthens recognition of subtle and implicit relationships. Can cybernetic machines, such as random number generators, computers, and biofeedback devices help us hone psi faculties?
Swann emphasizes the difference between message and its structure. An experienced viewer can put together mental images from subtle cues. In RV, the signal appears as symbols, sounds, feelings, tastes, pictures, and holistic impressions. One learns to organize them based, again, on repeated feedback.
Misconceptions, fears, rigid concepts, body movement, excessive gastrointestinal activity, sleepiness, language categories, and other psychological "baggage" can be sources of confounding noise. Other blocks come from trying too hard, and distracting daydreaming or preoccupying thoughts.
Telepathy, empathy or rapport, and charisma seem to be related and clearly come into play during therapeutic entrainment.
BIOPHYSICS OF PSI
Nothing is known about the physical mechanism of ESP, or anomalous cognition.
No one knows what modulates performance. Even those who can demonstrate psi in the laboratory on demand, cannot account for signal nonlocality or distant interaction. The origins of the data are not revealed, only the conclusions with their level of resolution or accuracy.
This is where the models of information theory and biophysics come into play.
Physicist Lian Sidorov proposes two working models for non-local communication and intent-mediated healing:
- Direct transmission (entrainment) of specialized electromagnetic frequencies, observed primarily in proximal healing
- Distant healing and remote viewing/diagnosis, where the target’s electromagnetic profile is modulated from a distance via partial entanglement of subject-target
Pitkanen conjectures that distance healing involves transfer of specific electromagnetic frequencies through quantum wormholes for near-instant transfer of information.
The transmission may trigger certain brain frequencies and psychophysical changes. Thus, amplification of the signal leads from quantum to macroscopic effects.
Pitkanen suggests the brain is a sensory organ of our electromagnetic selves, and may be linked to planetary rhythms through Schumann Resonance.
In his model, the EM fields are not directly carried from sender to target. They are simultaneously generated at the two locations by a vacuum (geometrical) current. Therefore, they remain coherent while by passing the paradox of non-attenuation with distance. Neural processing and quantum events may interpenetrate.
This still doesn’t really account for origins of the data, but merely the transmission modes. Biophysics researchers are attempting to follow the signal back to its source. The research must be interfaced with current theories in the natural sciences. Then it can be considered empirical; the paradoxical anomaly can then be linked within the known framework of knowledge.
Is there really a field, or field-like continua, capable of transmitting information beyond the recognized limits of time and space?
Laszlo (1996) suggests that the natural processes of complexity and chaos could amplify vacuum-level fluctuations into significant inputs to behavior, and that the brain, another chaotic system, could receive and amplify these signals which can penetrate into consciousness.
SHAVING WITH OCCAM’S RAZOR
Occam’s Razor is a principle applied in science that contends problems should be stated in basic terms, not making more assumptions than needed to choose the simplest of equivalent models. Many hypotheses are proposed, tested, and rejected. Their validity is debated exposing their flaws and underlying assumptions.
Additional relevant hypotheses and unrelated statements are weeded out. Experiments with the sensitivity reveal which yield the most accurate predictions. If two rival theories pass empirical tests, the simpler one must be preferred.
When it comes to conspiracy theories, we apply Hanlon’s Razor:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
But before we can find answers, we have to ask the right questions. Once we ask the right questions, we often have all the information needed to solve the problem. Unfortunately, in the case of psi, it may be that our understanding of physics is still too incomplete to solve the riddle.
Lian Sidorov, editor of Journal of Non-Locality and Remote Mental Interactions has posed many incisive questions:
How is information stored and retrieved nonlocally by consciousness?
This simple question contains the essence of all psi paradoxes, from spontaneous events like precognition and telepathy to carefully engineered processes like retro-psychokinesis.
- How can one strengthen the signal line?
- What is the significance of electromagnetic signatures detected at the target in remote conscious interactions?
- What is the earliest physiological detector of psi information in the transduction pathway to conscious awareness?
- What determines the direction of information flow in nonlocal interactions; for example, between healer and patient?
- What are the technical requirements of an experimental program and how do we develop the most suitable types of equipment to detect such effects?
"What you are saying seems to be that:
- everything you will ever know is already contained in your universe, although not necessarily accessible to your conscious mind - that comes with the effort involved in RV, or is revealed spontaneously as in "precognitive"
- "when" a given target event takes place relative to the experimental present is irrelevant, because all the information is already available
- other people’s expectation and feedback should not affect your results, as long you are careful to task yourself in a way which does not include those elements
- "Making contact" with the target is more like flipping to the right page in your book than reaching anything in space and time"
- Are there preferred pathways for the signals in psi phenomena, windows of psi "sensitivity"?
- How specifically is the target recognized?
- How does one modulate and target "intent"?
- How does the signal rise above the threshold of awareness?
We can also learn to recognize certain psychophysical patterns in ourselves through feedback. The physical and the psychical are inseparable. There appears to be an energetic/informational component, perhaps based in EM frequencies and holographic interference patterns. Holographic processes do occur in nature, including holographic information storage. The holographic field is a physical reality composed of interference waves.
In Scientific American (Aug. 2003), Bekenstein poses the question "Are you a hologram?" and states quantum physics says the entire universe might be.
Can a somatic EM hologram possibly amplify as little as one quantum of energy into an effective signal? Are there holographic hyperchannels? Information in a field is holographic and the propagation of holographic interference patterns is quasi-instantaneous.
Every part of the field contains the whole informational content, just in lower resolution.
"Each particle of mass in our bodies represents one closure of the entire universe - yielding a holographic reality - and deeper communication with ourselves is identical to communication with the universe, including any part of it, at any distance.
Furthermore, in hyperspace the future and the past are all present. Since a particle does indeed exhibit a four-dimensional component for 1/137 of the time, each particle does connect to the future and to the past.
With selective tuning and kindling any part of this holographic reality is accessible. However, because of the smallness of a single selective signal in the midst of the totality, the channel is quite noisy.
For this reason skilled psychics - persons who have been found to have a greater fidelity for selective tuning - can be expected to produce better results than the normal person."
(Bearden, 1988)
Entanglement seems to occur somehow between all participants of a given intentional set-up.
We have no idea how the non-local factor of target specificity is accomplished, other than intent and training.
- Do subject and target share a unified holographic field?
- Are standing waves picked up and carried by the Schumann Resonance, or transmitted by scalar waves or a gradient in the vacuum potential?
- Are the brains entrained on a resonant frequency?
- Does DNA function as a multi-mode antenna regulating growth, evolution, and perhaps psi?
- Are specific interference patterns in the brain decoded and amplified?
How we can increase our sensitivity is yet another question. The signal is perceived against a transient background of chaotic noise, and amplified by the body’s physiological pathways. Desire, intense concentration, and spiritual focus have been suggested.
The trance state has been proposed as restricting the amount of input while allowing access to subtle perceptions.
Mind is a dynamic function of the entire organism at all levels of self-organization. Constantly fluctuating local parameters are embodied and amplified through the body’s electromagnetic control hologram. Mind/body modulates our sensitivity to external and internal information. Researchers measure a brainwave known as Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) to measure anticipation, anticipatory strategies, or readiness to respond; this stimulus can be informative or uninformative, carry content or just be an alert.
Remote viewing requires super-sensitivity and super-efficient states. It is not the result of cognitive training, but a gradual remolding of the entire psychophysical structure and metabolic pathways. Thus, the mind/body becomes a highly coherent, information-transparent transducer.
Vast information resources are hidden in unexplored manifolds of the mind/body continuum. In psi research, the study of nature and our nature - our potential - becomes entwined.
As Einstein (1934, The World As I See It) said,
"We are seeking for the simplest possible scheme of thought that will bind together the observed facts."
REFERENCES
- Beckenstein, Jacob (2003), "Information in the Holographic Universe", SciAm, Aug. 03. pp. 58-65.
- Bearden, Thomas E. (1988). Excalibur Briefing: Explaining Paranormal Phenomena. San Francisco: Strawberry Hill Press.
- Erickson, Milton H. and Ernest L. Rossi & Sheila Rossi (1976). Hypnotic Realities, New York: Irvington Publishers, Inc.
- Gowan, John Curtis (1974). Development of the Psychedelic Individual, privately printed for the Creative Education Foundation, Northridge, California.
- Gowan, John Curtis (1975). Trance, Art, and Creativity, privately printed for the Creative Education Foundation, Buffalo, New York. http://www.csun.edu/edpsy/Gowan
- Green, Elmer and Alyce (1977). Beyond Biofeedback, San Francisco: Delacorte Press.
- Honorton, Charles (1967). "Creativity and precognitive scoring level," Psych. Abs. 41:08057.
- Honorton, Charles (1969), "A combination of techniques for separation of high and low-scoring ESP subjects," Psych. Abs. 43:08881, 1969.
- Krippner, Stanley (1968), "An experimental study in hypnosis and telepathy," Am. J. of Clinical Hypnosis, 11(1): 45-54.
- Krippner, Stanley, "Psi Research and the Human Brain’s ‘Reserve Capacities’", DynaPsych.
- Krippner, Stanley (Ed.), Advances in Parapsychological Research, Vol. I and Vol. II.
- Laszlo, Ervin (1996). "Subtle Connectins: Psi, Grof, Jung, and the Quantum Vacuum"; DynaPsych.
- Laszlo, Ervin (1994). "Toward a Physical Foundation for Psi Phenomena." J. B. Rhine Lecture. American Parapsychological Assn., Amsterdam, August 8, 1994.
- Masters, R. and Jean Houston (1966). The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston.
- Miller, R.A., Webb, B. Dickson, D. (1975), "A Holographic Concept of Reality," Psychoenergetic Systems Journal Vol. 1, 1975. 55-62. Gordon & Breach Science Publishers Ltd., Great Britain. Later reprinted in the hardback book Psychoenergetic Systems, Stanley Krippner, editor. 1979. 231-237. Gordon & Breach, New York, London, Paris. And in the journal Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, Vol. 5, 1992. 93-111. Boynton Beach, FL, Tom Lyttle, Editor.
- Miller, R. A., Webb. B., "Embryonic Holography," Psychoenergetic Systems, Stanley Krippner, Ed. Presented at the Omniversal Symposium, California State College at Sonoma, Saturday, September 29, 1973. Reprinted in Lyttle's journal Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, Vol. 6, 1993. 137-156.
- Miller, Richard Alan (1985), The Magical and Ritual Use of Aphrodisiacs, New York, NY: Destiny Books.
- Miller, Iona and Graywolf Swinney (2000). "CRP and Theta Reverie," Chaosophy 2000, Wilderville, Oregon: Institute for Consciousness Studies and Technologies.
- Mishlove, Jeffrey (1975, 1993), The Roots of Consciousness, Tulsa: Council Oak Books.
- Monroe, Robert (1971), Journeys Out of the Body, New York: Doubleday.
- Monroe, Robert (1982). "The Hemi-Synch Process", Unpublished, Monroe Institute.
- Motoyama, Hiroshi with Rande Brown, Science and the Evolution of Consciousness: Chakras, Ki and Psi.
- Pang, Henry and L. Fort (1967), "Relatedness of Creativity, . . .and ESP," Perceptual and Motor Skills, 24: 650.
- Persinger, Michael A. (1989), "Psi Phenomena and Temporal Lobe Activity: The Geomagnetic Factor," in I.A. Henkel and R. E. Berger (eds.) Research in Parapsychology 1988, Metuchen, NJ: Scarcrow Press.
- Persinger M.A., & Krippner S. (1989). Dream ESP experiments and geomagnetic activity. Journal of the American Society of Psychical Research, 83, 101- 106.
- Pitkanin, Matti, JNLRMI, Vol. 1, No. 1.
- Puharich, Andrija (1961), Beyond Telepathy. New York: Doubleday.
- Radin, Dean (1997). The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. New York: Harper & Collins.
- Radin, Dean and Bierman, Dick. "Anomalous unconscious emotional responses: evidence for a reversal of the arrow of time,"
- Randi, James. Flim Flam: Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions. Prometheus Books. Books.
- Ryzl, Milan. Parapsychology: A Scientific Approach
- Schmidt, Helmut (1970). "A Quantum Mechanical Random Number Generator for Psi Tests," Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. 34(3) 219-224, 1970.
- Schaut, G.B., & Persinger, M.A. (1985). Subjective telepathic experiences, geomagnetic activity and the ELF hypothesis. Part I. Data analysis. Psi Research 4(1), 4- 2O.
- Sidorov, Lian (2002) "On the possible mechanism of intent in paranormal phenomena," Journal of Non-Local and Remote Mental Interaction, Vol. 1(1).http://emergentmind.com/sidorov_II.htm
- Sidrov, Lian (2003a). "Editor’s Note", http://emergentmind.org/editor’snotes.htm
- Sidorov. Lian (2003b). "Landscaping the Mind: Interview with Joseph McMoneagle," http://emergentmind.org/mcmoneagle_II2.htm
- Sidorov, Lian (2003c). "Thinking Outside the Box in Experimental Parapsychology," http://emergentmind.org/sidorovII2.htm
- Stanford, R.G. and C. R. Lovin (1970), "The eeg alpha rhythm and ESP performances": Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 64:4.
Stevenson, Ian (1970), Telepathic Impressions, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
- Swinney, Graywolf (2001). Holographic Healing, Wilderville: Asklepia Publishing.
- Targ, Russell, & Hurt, David B. (1972). "Learning Clairvoyance and Perception with an Extra-Sensory Teaching machine," Parapsychology Review, Vol.3(44) 9-11, 1972.
- Ullman, Montague and Stanley Krippner (1973), Dream Telepathy, New York: McMillan Publishing Co.
This guy is freaking hilarious and awesome...my hero for the day.
ESP, Psychic Development & Prophecy. Today's Thought for June 5, 2019.
ESP, Psychic Development & Prophecy. Today's Thought for June 5, 2019.
Hmmmm...I'll have to read up more on this...a curious idea that I'm not sure actually works like they say, though I think I do some behaviors naturally anyhow, lol...perhaps worth looking into deeper.
Buddhist monks certainly do seem to take a similar path by cutting out those things which would trigger desire before it can arise.
Thoughts?
Enjoy!
Summary: The latest Silicon Valley crazy of dopamine fasting promises to “reset” the brain to be more effective and appreciate the smaller things in life more easily, but does it work?
Researchers look at the effect of dopamine fasting on brain health.
Source: The Conversation
It’s the latest fad in Silicon Valley.
By reducing the brain’s feel-good chemical known as dopamine – cutting back on things like food, sex, alcohol, social media and technology – followers believe that they can “reset” the brain to be more effective and appreciate simple things more easily.
Some even go so far as avoiding all social activities, and even eye contact.
The exercise, dubbed “dopamine fasting” by San Francisco psychologist Dr Cameron Sepah, is now getting increasing international attention.
But what exactly is it?
And does it work?
As someone who studies the brain’s reward system, I’d like to share my knowledge with you.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter – a chemical messenger produced in the brain.
It is sent around the brain conveying signals related to functions such as motor control, memory, arousal and reward processing.
For example, too little dopamine can result in disorders like Parkinson’s Disease, involving symptoms of muscle rigidity, tremors and changes in speech and gait.
One of the treatments for Parkinson’s is the drug L-DOPA, which can cross the blood-brain barrier and be converted into dopamine to help ease the symptoms.
Dopamine is also important in the reward system in the brain.
It is activated by primary rewards like food, sex and drugs. Importantly, the brain’s reward system can “learn” over time – cues in our environment that we associate with potential rewards can increase the activity of dopamine even in the absence of an actual reward.
So just being in a sweet shop and thinking about sweets can activate our brain’s dopamine.
This expectation and anticipation of rewards is called the “wanting” in neuroscience language.
As one of the main symptoms of depression is “anhedonia” – the lack of wanting, interest and pleasure in normally rewarding experiences – dysfunctional dopamine regulation has also been linked to this disorder.
Some treatments for depression, such as the drug bupropion, are designed to increase dopamine levels in the brain.
So, given the important role of dopamine in vital functions in the human brain, why would we want to fast from it?
The idea of dopamine fasting is based on the knowledge that dopamine is involved in unhealthy addictive behaviours.
As described, dopamine underpins wanting.
For instance, a drug addict may say they no longer want to take drugs.
But when in certain places where drug-related cues are present, the brain’s wanting system kicks in and addicts are overcome with strong urges to take the drug.
Dopamine fasters believe that they can reduce desires and craving for unhealthy and even unwanted behaviours by reducing dopamine.
Does it work?
First we need to be clear, it is certainly not advisable, even if we could, to reduce the amount of dopamine in the brain as we need it for everyday normal functions.
Further, simply banning a particular reward, like social media, isn’t going to reduce the levels of dopamine per se, but rather it can help reduce the stimulation of dopamine.
Therefore it is possible to reduce the amount of dopamine activity.
But the key to doing this is to reduce our exposure to the triggers associated with the rewards that initiate the wanting for the rewards in the first place.
After all, it is these cues that initiate the craving and the desires to engage in behaviours that help us get the rewards.
Thus just cutting out rewards doesn’t necessarily stop the brain from making us crave them – activating dopamine.
However, that this would “reset the brain” is not really correct – there is no way of even knowing what the baseline is.
So from a neuroscience perspective, this is nonsense for the time being.
If you find that you want to cut down on what you feel are unhealthy behaviours, such as spending too much time on social media or overeating, then you could start by reducing your exposure to the environmental cues that trigger the desires to carry out the unhealthy behaviours.
For example, if you go on your phone too much in the evenings when you are alone, try turning off the notifications sounds.
This way dopamine is not being activated by the cues and therefore not signaling the urges to pick up the phone.
And if you think you drink too much alcohol – ending up in bars with work colleagues most nights of the week – try to go somewhere else in the evenings, such as the cinema.
The symptoms of unhealthy behaviours are similar to the signs of substance abuse.
These might include spending the majority of the time engaging in the behaviour, continuing the behaviour despite physical and/or mental harm, having trouble cutting back despite wanting to stop and neglecting work, school or family.
You may even experience symptoms of withdrawal (for example, depression, irritability) when trying to stop.
In these instances, you may want to think about removing the cues that stimulate your dopamine neurons – a sort of dopamine fasting.
Buddhist monks certainly do seem to take a similar path by cutting out those things which would trigger desire before it can arise.
Thoughts?
Enjoy!
Dopamine fasting:
an expert reviews the latest craze in Silicon Valley
NEUROSCIENCE NEWS
DECEMBER 27, 2019
Dopamine chemical formula.
an expert reviews the latest craze in Silicon Valley
NEUROSCIENCE NEWSDECEMBER 27, 2019
Dopamine chemical formula.
Summary: The latest Silicon Valley crazy of dopamine fasting promises to “reset” the brain to be more effective and appreciate the smaller things in life more easily, but does it work?
Researchers look at the effect of dopamine fasting on brain health.
Source: The Conversation
It’s the latest fad in Silicon Valley.
By reducing the brain’s feel-good chemical known as dopamine – cutting back on things like food, sex, alcohol, social media and technology – followers believe that they can “reset” the brain to be more effective and appreciate simple things more easily.
Some even go so far as avoiding all social activities, and even eye contact.
The exercise, dubbed “dopamine fasting” by San Francisco psychologist Dr Cameron Sepah, is now getting increasing international attention.
But what exactly is it?
And does it work?
As someone who studies the brain’s reward system, I’d like to share my knowledge with you.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter – a chemical messenger produced in the brain.
It is sent around the brain conveying signals related to functions such as motor control, memory, arousal and reward processing.
For example, too little dopamine can result in disorders like Parkinson’s Disease, involving symptoms of muscle rigidity, tremors and changes in speech and gait.
One of the treatments for Parkinson’s is the drug L-DOPA, which can cross the blood-brain barrier and be converted into dopamine to help ease the symptoms.
Dopamine is also important in the reward system in the brain.
It is activated by primary rewards like food, sex and drugs. Importantly, the brain’s reward system can “learn” over time – cues in our environment that we associate with potential rewards can increase the activity of dopamine even in the absence of an actual reward.
So just being in a sweet shop and thinking about sweets can activate our brain’s dopamine.
This expectation and anticipation of rewards is called the “wanting” in neuroscience language.
As one of the main symptoms of depression is “anhedonia” – the lack of wanting, interest and pleasure in normally rewarding experiences – dysfunctional dopamine regulation has also been linked to this disorder.
Some treatments for depression, such as the drug bupropion, are designed to increase dopamine levels in the brain.
So, given the important role of dopamine in vital functions in the human brain, why would we want to fast from it?
The idea of dopamine fasting is based on the knowledge that dopamine is involved in unhealthy addictive behaviours.
As described, dopamine underpins wanting.
For instance, a drug addict may say they no longer want to take drugs.
But when in certain places where drug-related cues are present, the brain’s wanting system kicks in and addicts are overcome with strong urges to take the drug.
Dopamine fasters believe that they can reduce desires and craving for unhealthy and even unwanted behaviours by reducing dopamine.
Does it work?
First we need to be clear, it is certainly not advisable, even if we could, to reduce the amount of dopamine in the brain as we need it for everyday normal functions.
Further, simply banning a particular reward, like social media, isn’t going to reduce the levels of dopamine per se, but rather it can help reduce the stimulation of dopamine.
Therefore it is possible to reduce the amount of dopamine activity.
But the key to doing this is to reduce our exposure to the triggers associated with the rewards that initiate the wanting for the rewards in the first place.
After all, it is these cues that initiate the craving and the desires to engage in behaviours that help us get the rewards.
Thus just cutting out rewards doesn’t necessarily stop the brain from making us crave them – activating dopamine.
However, that this would “reset the brain” is not really correct – there is no way of even knowing what the baseline is.
So from a neuroscience perspective, this is nonsense for the time being.
If you find that you want to cut down on what you feel are unhealthy behaviours, such as spending too much time on social media or overeating, then you could start by reducing your exposure to the environmental cues that trigger the desires to carry out the unhealthy behaviours.
For example, if you go on your phone too much in the evenings when you are alone, try turning off the notifications sounds.
This way dopamine is not being activated by the cues and therefore not signaling the urges to pick up the phone.
And if you think you drink too much alcohol – ending up in bars with work colleagues most nights of the week – try to go somewhere else in the evenings, such as the cinema.
The symptoms of unhealthy behaviours are similar to the signs of substance abuse.
These might include spending the majority of the time engaging in the behaviour, continuing the behaviour despite physical and/or mental harm, having trouble cutting back despite wanting to stop and neglecting work, school or family.
You may even experience symptoms of withdrawal (for example, depression, irritability) when trying to stop.
In these instances, you may want to think about removing the cues that stimulate your dopamine neurons – a sort of dopamine fasting.
This just seems like another example of asceticism - spiritual and mental development being the goal. There are Christian common sense attitudes to this idea, but the Buddha’s Middle Way seems to be the succinct best response. Fasting is good - in moderation - and so is its opposite!Hmmmm...I'll have to read up more on this...a curious idea that I'm not sure actually works like they say, though I think I do some behaviors naturally anyhow, lol...perhaps worth looking into deeper.
Buddhist monks certainly do seem to take a similar path by cutting out those things which would trigger desire before it can arise.
Thoughts?
Enjoy!
Dopamine fasting:
an expert reviews the latest craze in Silicon Valley
DECEMBER 27, 2019
Dopamine chemical formula.
Summary: The latest Silicon Valley crazy of dopamine fasting promises to “reset” the brain to be more effective and appreciate the smaller things in life more easily, but does it work?
Researchers look at the effect of dopamine fasting on brain health.
Source: The Conversation
It’s the latest fad in Silicon Valley.
By reducing the brain’s feel-good chemical known as dopamine – cutting back on things like food, sex, alcohol, social media and technology – followers believe that they can “reset” the brain to be more effective and appreciate simple things more easily.
Some even go so far as avoiding all social activities, and even eye contact.
The exercise, dubbed “dopamine fasting” by San Francisco psychologist Dr Cameron Sepah, is now getting increasing international attention.
But what exactly is it?
And does it work?
As someone who studies the brain’s reward system, I’d like to share my knowledge with you.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter – a chemical messenger produced in the brain.
It is sent around the brain conveying signals related to functions such as motor control, memory, arousal and reward processing.
For example, too little dopamine can result in disorders like Parkinson’s Disease, involving symptoms of muscle rigidity, tremors and changes in speech and gait.
One of the treatments for Parkinson’s is the drug L-DOPA, which can cross the blood-brain barrier and be converted into dopamine to help ease the symptoms.
Dopamine is also important in the reward system in the brain.
It is activated by primary rewards like food, sex and drugs. Importantly, the brain’s reward system can “learn” over time – cues in our environment that we associate with potential rewards can increase the activity of dopamine even in the absence of an actual reward.
So just being in a sweet shop and thinking about sweets can activate our brain’s dopamine.
This expectation and anticipation of rewards is called the “wanting” in neuroscience language.
As one of the main symptoms of depression is “anhedonia” – the lack of wanting, interest and pleasure in normally rewarding experiences – dysfunctional dopamine regulation has also been linked to this disorder.
Some treatments for depression, such as the drug bupropion, are designed to increase dopamine levels in the brain.
So, given the important role of dopamine in vital functions in the human brain, why would we want to fast from it?
The idea of dopamine fasting is based on the knowledge that dopamine is involved in unhealthy addictive behaviours.
As described, dopamine underpins wanting.
For instance, a drug addict may say they no longer want to take drugs.
But when in certain places where drug-related cues are present, the brain’s wanting system kicks in and addicts are overcome with strong urges to take the drug.
Dopamine fasters believe that they can reduce desires and craving for unhealthy and even unwanted behaviours by reducing dopamine.
Does it work?
First we need to be clear, it is certainly not advisable, even if we could, to reduce the amount of dopamine in the brain as we need it for everyday normal functions.
Further, simply banning a particular reward, like social media, isn’t going to reduce the levels of dopamine per se, but rather it can help reduce the stimulation of dopamine.
Therefore it is possible to reduce the amount of dopamine activity.
But the key to doing this is to reduce our exposure to the triggers associated with the rewards that initiate the wanting for the rewards in the first place.
After all, it is these cues that initiate the craving and the desires to engage in behaviours that help us get the rewards.
Thus just cutting out rewards doesn’t necessarily stop the brain from making us crave them – activating dopamine.
However, that this would “reset the brain” is not really correct – there is no way of even knowing what the baseline is.
So from a neuroscience perspective, this is nonsense for the time being.
If you find that you want to cut down on what you feel are unhealthy behaviours, such as spending too much time on social media or overeating, then you could start by reducing your exposure to the environmental cues that trigger the desires to carry out the unhealthy behaviours.
For example, if you go on your phone too much in the evenings when you are alone, try turning off the notifications sounds.
This way dopamine is not being activated by the cues and therefore not signaling the urges to pick up the phone.
And if you think you drink too much alcohol – ending up in bars with work colleagues most nights of the week – try to go somewhere else in the evenings, such as the cinema.
The symptoms of unhealthy behaviours are similar to the signs of substance abuse.
These might include spending the majority of the time engaging in the behaviour, continuing the behaviour despite physical and/or mental harm, having trouble cutting back despite wanting to stop and neglecting work, school or family.
You may even experience symptoms of withdrawal (for example, depression, irritability) when trying to stop.
In these instances, you may want to think about removing the cues that stimulate your dopamine neurons – a sort of dopamine fasting.
A really great discussion!
The account of Stephen Fanning and his NDE is simply amazing as is the section on entheogenic substances.
I especially like these quotes from below:
“Western philosophy philosophizes from a single state of consciousness only, the waking state, whereas India philosophizes from all four states: waking, dream, dreamless sleep, and a fourth, turiya, that defies description.”
And...speaking of entheogens...
"Grof writes: “Many individuals . . . reported that their attitudes toward dying and their concepts of death underwent dramatic changes. Fear of their own physiological demise diminished, they became open to the possibility of consciousness existing after clinical death and tended to view the process of dying as an adventure in consciousness rather than the ultimate biological disaster.”
Enjoy!
Note: The following is a lecture by Huston Smith who was a leading religious scholar that taught at several universities.
This lecture was delivered to the Harvard Divinity School as part of their Ingersoll Lecture series on October 18, 2001 and published in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin 30, vol 3 (2001-2002).
In this lecture, Smith bring together three topics, Emmanuel Swedenborg and his prodigious accomplishments, clairvoyance and paranormal visions (his books are free to download in our library); the phenomenon of veridical Near Death Experiences; and finally entheogenic experiences helping with ego death and consciousness exploration.
The terms of the Ingersoll Lecture do not require that there be any sequential connection between them, but Carol Zaleski’s lecture last year, “In Defense of Immortality,” sets the stage for mine so perfectly that in my credulous moments I could be led to believe that, unbeknownst to her, that was the hidden intent behind the matters she chose to deal with.
And if she would like to join this fanciful game she could with equal right claim that I have chosen my topic to complete what she began, thereby making of our lectures a brace.
Our lectures work the same street: eschewing proof, which is impossible in this area, they both seek to remove obstacles to believing in immortality.
At the same time they complement each other by working the two sides of the street, hers the theoretical side and mine the empirical.
There is a second way our two lectures can be paired—we both spin off from William James’s 1898 Ingersoll Lecture, while again in different ways— she from his “will to believe” and I from the “radical empiricism” that his exceptional generosity of mind led him to.
He titled his Ingersoll Lecture “On Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine,” and I have already mentioned that Professor Zaleski continued that trajectory by unmasking the shallowness of some theoretical objections to immortality that have gathered force in the century that separates us from James.
Specifically she showed that those objections have been accepted by the media makers more for psychological than for logical reasons; immortality has been deemed improbable because science disallows it.
The unexamined premise here, which dominated the twentieth century but is now becoming more untenable by the hour I am tempted to say, is that science discloses the whole of reality.
This pithy epitomization of Professor Zaleski’s lecture does not do justice to the subtlety with which she deals with her important theme, most importantly and courageously the black eye she gives twentieth century theologians for going along with this cultural trend instead of opposing it.
But I must stop talking about Zaleski and get on with what I myself have to say.
I have already indicated that I will be picking up on James’s radical empiricism, and this is far trickier turf, for it requires talking about paranormal phenomena that are in line with James’s interests in seances in Emerson Hall— interests that his academic successors found so unacceptable that Ralph Barton Perry, James’s literary executor, omitted from his edition of The Complete Works of William James his essays on fringe phenomena without even acknowledging the omission. I shall be considering here three paranormal phenomena: a savant, Emanuel Swedenborg; a phenomenon, near-death experiences; and third, experiences that used to be called psychedelic but that serious scholars now refer to as entheogenic.
I begin with Swedenborg.
In tagging Swedenborg a savant I use that epithet loosely.
If I were speaking to an audience of committed Swedenborgians, his accounts of Heaven and Hell would fall on our ears not as intimations of immortality but as the truth of the matter as God revealed it to his latest prophet.
As it is, I am approaching Swedenborg empirically, from this side of the divide, to see how far we can move toward believing his reports of Heaven and Hell without resorting to divine revelation.
This requires recognizing him to have had an extraordinary talent ordinary people lack, which is where the notion of savants comes in, for that is the key denotation of the word.
Space allows only four examples.
Thomas Fuller, a late eighteenth-century Virginia slave, could barely count, yet when asked how many seconds a man who had lived for 70 years 17 days 12 hours had lived, he answered after a minute and a half’s reflection, 2,210,500,800.
When Benjamin Rush, the physician who wrote a classic paper on Fuller, told him that his calculation was a bit off, the slave said, “But massa, you forget the leap years.”
Dr. Down of Down Syndrome fame studied a boy who read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and recited it back word for word without having the slightest idea of what the book was about.
Advances in knowledge of how the brain works may demystify these first two examples by way of eidetic imagery which converts in the first case numbers and in the second words into seeing.
And if hearing, too, can get cross-wired to seeing, eidetic imagery may turn out to explain my third savant, Leslie Lemke, who could repeat note for note compositions, including original ones, that pianists in audiences came forward to play.
However, nothing in our current canons of knowledge can explain the performance of the fourth savant I shall cite.
He crossed my path only last spring through a personal friend whose top-of-the-line harp was stolen.
Through the networking of her mother, a dowser, she finally reached Harold McCoy, who lives in a trailer in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
McCoy asked to be sent a street map of Oakland on which he targeted the house where the stolen harp was found to be hidden.
I find such bizarre talents lending credence to James’s hypothesis, echoed by Bergson and Aldous Huxley, that the human mind is more like a reducing valve than a generator, one through which Mind-at-Large lets trickle only the kind of information that is necessary for us to survive on the material plane.
Approaching the mind from that side enlarges our whole notion of what it is to be human and makes it easier for us to give credence to extraordinary phenomena such as Swedenborg presents us with.
If the representatives I have listed can perform “miracles” of these sorts, is there anything but prejudice to cause us to reject out of hand the possibility that Emanuel Swedenborg was a savant whose clairvoyance extended into the afterlife?
Two important differences separate Swedenborg from the savants that psychologists study, however.
First, the talents of typical savants surface in persons who are seriously retarded in one way or another, whereas Swedenborg flourished on every human front.
Second, the talents of other savants relate to things of this world—mathematical calculations, musical prowess, and the like—where accuracy can be checked, whereas the referents of Swedenborg’s reports of the afterlife are off the empirical map.
Both of these differences require elaboration.
Far from being retarded, Swedenborg was one of the most remarkable men history registers.
When Alfred Binet designed the Stanford-Binet intelligence test he looked for the most brilliant persons who ever lived.
Swedenborg was listed among these few.
Vocationally he was an overseer of Sweden’s major mining industry, but his life was spent learning all there was in one field after another.
He published an incredible 108 works in science before he began to look at psychology and religion.
It would be fair to say that in the mid-eighteenth century he appeared to know everything there was to be known in the Western world.
He was the first to formulate the nebular hypothesis and did remarkable work on human anatomy.
He ground his own microscopic lenses and founded several sciences including crystallography.
At the age of 56 he turned inward to explore his dreams, and he ended up leaving us what may be the largest and oldest series of interpreted dreams.
In his day the spiritual practices of Hinduism and Buddhism were unknown in the West so he developed his own spiritual practices based on reduced breathing and intense concentration.
It was in the midst of all this that God—he was a devout Christian and took the Bible as his rule of life—came to him to announce that he was going to actually show him the afterworld.
For the next 27 years he visited Heaven and Hell daily and recorded what he found in his five-volume Spiritual Diary.
To round off his biography, he was a baron who served in his country’s House of Lords.
As a nobleman, scientist, and spiritual explorer, he was welcomed in social gatherings.
His conduct was exemplary in every respect and he was a paragon of self-effacing modesty.
On the second point, which concerns verification, it is true that Swedenborg’s visits to Heaven and Hell are not open to public verification.
Still, some of his paranormal sightings were checkable.
To mention only three of these, at a social gathering 300 miles from his home in Stockholm, he became visibly agitated.
When asked what was wrong, he said that a fire was raging in Stockholm.
The fire was brought under control only two doors from his house, just as he had reported.
Second, he predicted months in advance while he was in perfect health, the day and hour of his death.
These two cases show only that Swedenborg was clairvoyant, but the third bears directly on his claim to have been in touch with the other world.
A widow who was being charged for an expensive set of silver that her husband had left her asked Swedenborg to contact her deceased husband.
He did, and her husband told her that the receipt showing that he had paid for the set was in a hidden compartment in his desk, which proved to be the case. In this case the deceased husband was the only person in existence who knew where the receipt was.
Turning now to what Swedenborg reported concerning the afterlife, I must be distressingly brief.
This is what he saw:
The moment the heart stops we enter the spiritual world.
There we have spiritual bodies which function much like our former material ones.
Life there is at first so similar to life on earth that some may even need to be instructed that they have died.
This World of Spirits is a temporary stopping place.
Its essential function is to show us what we really are inwardly.
Angels help us here, and on the basis of their instructions we decide whether Heaven or Hell is most suited to us.
This resembles the Day of Judgment in the world’s religions except that it is more psychological and of our own doing rather than God’s.
What we are accustomed to leads us to choose Heaven or Hell.
In this spirit world the essential difference between Heaven and Hell becomes clear.
Those who prefer Hell have, in their worldly lives, spiraled in on themselves and lived primarily for themselves.
Those destined for Heaven have in their worldly lives spiraled outward towards others and the common good.
As goodness is inherent in the real nature of things, those who prefer Hell live in ignorance of, and conspire against, the world order, whereas those who are bent on Heaven delight in learning the nature of reality and cooperating with it.
This disposition surfaces automatically as the sum of their life choices before death and the same holds for those who prefer Hell.
Living for oneself is by its very nature a life of conflict, whereas loving cooperation brings peace and happiness.
Hell is a place of constriction and limitation, for when one spirals inward, one enters the small limited world of self.
Heaven is an opening-out world where you work cooperatively with others in harmony with the overall nature of things.
Those in Hell can visit Heaven, but they are uncomfortable with the light of understanding there and return to what they are accustomed to.
Obviously the temporary stop in the World of Spirits is highly psychological because it involves discovering what we really are.
We have all seen people who think of themselves first and foremost.
This is the mark of Hell.
And we have also seen people who consider and enjoy others—the mark of Heaven.
Actually this mark of Heaven is built into our humanity, for (Swedenborg was instructed) we are each born with an innate love of at least our own life.
If we capitalize on this love and give it expression we come into the sphere of what we enjoy doing above all else.
This is where all our capacities are best realized, and people differ as to where that happens to be—some in gardening, some in painting, wherever.
In Heaven people gather in societies of people who enjoy doing the same kinds of things.
There is work to be done in Heaven and these harmonious societies carry out spiritual functions that go far beyond the limited kinds of work we see in this world.
People who live out the love of their lives are happy and useful.
“Uses” figure importantly in Heaven.
When we are useful we contribute to the whole.
We are also doing what we want to do.
So Heaven can be said to be a kingdom of uses.
Heaven appears to God as a “Grand Human” whose organs (the societies in Heaven) work together to make One Life.
In the same vein, God sees the multiple churches and religions as coordinated in one Universal Church.
Swedenborg was very much ahead of his time in this teaching.
All who enter Heaven are angels who are people of advanced spiritual understanding.
There are three levels of this understanding measured by ascending degrees of love.
The lowest, natural spiritual level is in harmony with the total order of things.
Above it are angels who focus on love of neighbors but approach spiritual matters rationally.
The highest kind of angel has love of the Lord as the main focus of its life.
These angels not only know but also feel what is true and act on it without debate or speculation.
These three angelic levels are like steps into the love of God who is love itself.
Once we grasp the parameters of Heaven and Hell we see that they are anticipated in our earthly lives.
Persons destined for Hell are already wrapped up in themselves and the inner quality of their lives is hellish.
Conversely those who are destined for Heaven already enjoy a wider sphere of family and friends.
Swedenborg’s 27 years exploring Heaven greatly enriched his understanding of the human as well as the divine.
Basically it led him to see how tightly the human meshes with the total order of things.
God works through people who cooperate with him, and this indwelling God, who is a part of their very nature, is the ground of their immortality.
Let me end this section on Swedenborg by stating a little more fully than I have thus far the underlying thesis of this lecture.
I call its three case studies intimations of immortality to steer clear of any claims of proof.
Speaking for myself and minimally, I consider them as giving us things to think about when we ask whether there is life after death.
I will, however, add a methodological conviction of mine.
Images that derive from sense reports of our three-dimensional macro-world map attach no more isomorphically onto the world of spirit than they do onto the micro-world of quantum mechanics or the mega-world of relativity theory.
I take this to mean that we can take seriously the abstract outlines of what Swedenborg saw without assuming that the concrete images that filled in those outlines are literally true.
Now to near death experiences.
The 1975 publication of Raymond Moody’s Life After Life introduced a new frontier into the study of parapsychology, and interest in near-death experiences (hereafter NDE) has mounted steadily in the quarter-century that has intervened.
There are now a dozen or so books on the subject and an international association devoted to its study that publishes a journal, the Journal of Near Death Experiences.
Instead of trying to summarize the hundreds of reports that have appeared in print I intend to let a single report, which I will quote at some length, stand for them all.
Here again William James is my mentor, for as we all know, much of the power of his Varieties of Religious Experience derives from its concreteness—the way he lets other people make his points for him by telling us what they directly experienced.
What follows, then, is a solicited letter from a professor of history who has granted me permission to include it in this lecture.
It reads:
I have no doubt that there was more to my experience than I can remember, for the memory loss that resulted from my illness was severe.
The memories that I do have, however, are vivid and unforgettable and they changed my life.
The reality that I was in was more real, more intense, than anything in this current world of ours. It was hyper-reality.
I was in a place.
Around me was flatness and barrenness.
To talk about a sequence to the experience is to distort it.
There was no time there.
I now know that time is a convenient fiction for this world, but it did not exist in that one.
Everything seemed to be at one moment, even when “events” seemed to occur in a sequence.
[Swedenborg also says you have to get beyond time and space to see Heaven.]
What seemed to be the sky, the land, and everything was of a pale blue-gray color.
It was like being on a raft in the middle of the ocean where sky and sea merge into one monochromatic world, but I felt as though I were standing on firm land.
There was only the blue-gray vastness that seemed to stretch endlessly.
Beside me was a Being, whom I never saw but whose presence I felt constantly.
Its presence was constant, enormous and powerful.
With the Being beside me, exuding love and comfort to me, I re-experienced my life, and it was not what I would have expected.
While growing up in a fundamentalist church, I had been told many times about what it would be like when one faced God after death.
It would be something like watching God’s movie of your life (as in Albert Brooks’s film Defending Your Life).
You would watch all the scenes of your life on the screen and there would be nothing you could do but admit that the record was true: ‘Well, I guess you got me, fair and square.’
But this is not what happened.
It was a re-experiencing of my life, but from three different perspectives simultaneously.
One perspective was my version of my life as I might have recounted it to anyone patient enough to listen.
However, it was not so much the reliving of overt events as it was re-experiencing the emotions, feelings, and thoughts of my life.
Here were the emotions that I had felt and why I had believed that I had them.
Here were my conscious reasons for the actions that I had taken.
Here were the hurts I felt and my responses to them.
Here was my emotional life as I recalled having experienced it.
However, as I was re-experiencing my version of my life, I was also experiencing my life from the perspective of those with whom I was involved.
I felt what they felt, I lived their emotions as they acted with and reacted to me.
This was their version of my life.
When I thought they were clearly out of line and reacted with anger or thoughtlessness, I felt the pain and frustration my actions caused them.
It was an absolutely different view of my life and it was not a pretty one.
It was shocking to feel the pain that another person felt due to what I had done even as, when I did them, I believed myself to have been fully justified because of the person’s own actions.
At the time I had told myself that I was justified, but even if that were true, their pain was real.
It hurt.
And there was more.
At exactly the same time I experienced a third view of my life.
It was not my version, with my justifications.
It was not that of the others in my life, with their versions of my life and their own justifications for their own actions, thoughts, and feelings.
It was an unbiased view, free of the subjective and self-serving rationalizations that the others and I had used to support the countless acts of selfishness and lack of true love in our lives.
To me it can only be described as God’s view of my life.
It was what had really happened, the real motivations, the truth.
Stripped away were my lies to myself that I actually believed, my self-justification, my preference to see myself always in the best light.
I did not find myself in Hell, but I was suffering torment.
It was horribly painful to experience the fullness of my life and I was filled with contempt for myself.
How could I have been so incredibly stupid as to believe my own lies?
Why was simple compassion so difficult?
In particular it hurt to discover that I had been hiding behind my version of logic in order to deny emotional truths.
All of this—the three-way re-experiencing of my life and self-judgment—was simultaneous and yet separate and distinct.
There was no such thing as the sequence of events that we believe time to be.
In the end, I heard a judgment on my life, but it was my own judgment of myself. It came from within me and it had my voice.
My life was clear to me. I was a failure.
And through all this the Being was at my side. I felt nothing but love and support from the Being.
It exuded emotion: you are loved, you are lovable; your worst fault is that you are human. It goes with the territory.
I remember the words, “Don’t worry, you are only human.”
I was in emotional agony.
It was terrible to know that I was a mere mortal, just like everyone else, for I had thought that I was so much better than that.
But the Being accepted me.
The Being was letting me know that it was not acceptable to hurt other people, but it is part of the human condition.
It’s not all right, because it hurts other people, but it is all right, because it is what humans do.
Next—if I can really talk about next, for time and sequence do not really exist—I felt that I was given an understanding of everything that is, at least everything that is really important.
I felt as if all the secrets of the universe were revealed to me— not mathematical formulas, but simply how the universe operates, what is true, how things are.
I now knew everything.
Here space requires that I break off Steven Fanning’s account (he has allowed me to mention his name) adding only its closing sentences, which read:
“I remember making a positive decision. I wanted to come back to life. I wanted to do what I would be needed for. I then began my slow climb out of the coma and into consciousness.”
What are we to make of this account, which as I have said I am allowing to double for the whole of its genre?
Without going back on my early admission that concerning immortality proofs are impossible, I find myself wanting to confess that to my ears Professor Fanning’s account rings intuitively true to what we might expect to experience when we die if sentience does continue.
It also registers an important corrective to the notion of a vengeful God that too often creeps into the popular imagination.
Moral economy—justice—requires that there be judgment, a day of reckoning, but (as in most NDEs) Fanning experienced it as self-inflicted.
To this summary glance at the NDE phenomenon, I want to add only one more point and it takes the form of a question.
Why are university professors, who set the pace for our culture, so closed to the possibility that such experiences might be veridical—which is to say, the foretastes of immortality that they present themselves as being?
I lean here on an essay by a former MIT student of mine, Neal Grossman, who teaches philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Titling his paper “Who’s Afraid of Life After Death?,” he answers: university professors are, out of all proportion to the general public.
And the reason they are afraid of life after death is that they are (in the word he coins for the occasion) “fundamaterialists.”
To entertain the possibility that NDEs are what they purport to be would require entertaining the possibility that the materialistic worldview that dominates the academy today, together with its corollary that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, is false.
So deeply ingrained is that worldview in the academic mind that the rejection of NDEs, Grossman concludes, has become a dogma or ideology rather than the hypothesis it must be if the subject is be considered empirically, which is to say, scientifically.
Presented with reports of NDEs, critics tend to dismiss them on grounds that no number of such cases could prove that there is life after death, which happens to be true but is no reason for disqualifying them from being evidence that bears on the issue, for scientific hypotheses are never proven.
Theorems in logic and mathematics can be proved, but in empirical science, hypotheses are never proved.
They are rendered more or less probable by the empirical findings that relate to them.
Moreover, some deliverances in NDEs, Grossman adds, can be empirically checked.
There is a growing repository of cases in which subjects report information they could not possibly have acquired through their physical senses: information such as what was said in waiting rooms several floors below while their bodies were lying unconscious on the operating table.
In one such case, the subject’s body temperature had been lowered to 60 degrees and all the blood was drained from her body.
Her electroencephalogram was silent, her brainstem response was absent, and no blood flowed through her brain.
A brain in this state cannot create any kind of experience, yet the patient experienced a profound NDE that included detailed veridical perceptions of what transpired in the operation.
From the drift of Grossman’s paper we can imagine the kind of response he has gotten when he has tried to interest his colleagues in this kind of evidence. “Drug-induced hallucinations,” “last gasp of a dying brain,” “people see what they want to see”—these were the kinds of retorts he commonly heard.
I say that this does not surprise us because I suspect that as card-carrying members to the academy, most of us, myself included, have to labor to keep similar retorts from bubbling up in our own minds.
With this I conclude the second section of my lecture, reminding you as I do so that my overarching objective is to present empirical evidence that might soften the current prejudices against immortality that Carol Zaleski last year targeted so tellingly from the theological side.
One evening last spring while I was dining in a New York City penthouse that overlooked the kingdoms of this world, my hostess turned to me and said, “Many years ago, while lying on a carpet and listening to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, I had a profound experience of the death of my ego and simultaneously of my identity with all that is. With that identity my fear of death dropped away.”
She was describing her first encounter with an entheogen, one of that small class of non-addictive plants and chemicals that can alter consciousness dramatically.
(Recreational users continue to call them psychedelics, but serious seekers feel that that word is too tied to the psychedelic 1960s to be serviceable.)
Aldous Huxley anticipated my hostess’s report.
In a 1955 letter to Humphry Osmond, the Canadian chemist who introduced him to the entheogens, he wrote, “I remember saying and feeling that I don’t think I should mind dying, for dying must be like this passage from the known (constituted by life-long habits of subject-object existence) to the unknown cosmic fact.”
Behind these two firsthand testimonials lie entheogenic histories that stretch back into the twilight zones of protohistory.
One of the hymns to Soma in the Rig Veda—Soma has been identified by Gordon Wasson as the psychoactive mushroom Amanita muscaria—reports,
And there is Eleusis.
Grounded in the agricultural cycle and extended from there to human beings, its mystery of Demeter and Persephone is the story of life resurrecting from death.
Initially that mystery was of local significance only, but it soon became an important part of Athenian citizenship, and eventually developed into a pan-Hellenic institution, attaining universal significance by the time of the Roman Empire.
The power of Eleusis derived not only from its message—that bodily death is not the end of the road—but in the fact that its initiates were shown that that is the case.
It did this by transporting them to a place that outsiders would call mythical but that participants saw as the place where the final realities were directly perceived.
What transported them to that place was an eight-day ritual that climaxed in the drinking of the kykeon, which contained an entheogen.
I say it was an entheogen as if this were established fact, which it is not, the thesis is controversial.
But I put it forward as fact to challenge the classics establishment which has ignored the evidence rather than considering it seriously.
That evidence derives from the triangulation of three disciplines— chemistry, mycology, and classics—as assembled most accessibly in a book, The Road to Eleusis, by authorities in all three fields: the mycologist Gordon Wasson; Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD; and the classicist Carl Ruck, who teaches at Boston University.
One would think that if classicists considered their thesis wrong they would take it as their professional responsibility to point that out.
As it is, the wide berth they have given the book suggests, on the one hand, psychological resistance to the idea that Eleusis was implicated with (to use the inflammatory word) a drug; and on the other hand, epistemic resistance, the refusal to accept exceptional states of consciousness as valid sources of knowledge.
I am reminded of the answer the late Indian philosopher T.M.P. Mahadevan gave me when I asked him for the basic difference between Indian philosophy and Western.
He answered, “Western philosophy philosophizes from a single state of consciousness only, the waking state, whereas India philosophizes from all four states: waking, dream, dreamless sleep, and a fourth, turiya, that defies description.”
When other states of consciousness are taken into account, loss of the fear of death is reported so frequently that it would be difficult to choose from them so I shall quote what Stan Grof and Joan Halifax say in the most important compendium of such reports that has thus far been compiled, The Human Encounter With Death.
The book is based on Grof’s 20-year study of the results of psychedelic therapy, which involved hundreds of patients and thousands of sessions, a study that began in Prague and ended 20 years later at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center.
On page 20 of that book Grof writes: “Many individuals . . . reported that their attitudes toward dying and their concepts of death underwent dramatic changes. Fear of their own physiological demise diminished, they became open to the possibility of consciousness existing after clinical death and tended to view the process of dying as an adventure in consciousness rather than the ultimate biological disaster.”
Again, as once before in this lecture, I will admit that the West is enough in my bones to make it seem passing strange that microscopic changes in brain chemistry can open us to the deepest truths of existence.
But then the whole mind-brain interaction is passing strange, indeed, completely inexplicable.
For, as Colin McGinn and others on the cutting edge of cognitive science now admit, in the more than 300 years since Descartes split the world into res cogitans and res extensa we have advanced not one iota in understanding the two-way interaction between mind and brain—how thoughts can engage (to put the matter crudely) a piece of meat, the brain, and vice versa.
Neurotheologians are busy trying to see if our rapidly expanding knowledge of brain mechanisms can throw light on theological claims.
They will discover that they cannot—neurotheology is no more than the latest form of reductionism.
Its practitioners may be able to discover what brain processes are working when think theologically and experience mystically, thereby refining somewhat the discovery of some decades standing that the left brain undergirds our use of language.
But some day they will wake up to the fact that this discovery tells us nothing about the truth status of what we say with language, or by extension, about the validity of what we experience when regions of the brain that are associated with various kinds of experience are active.
The events of contemporary history have so discredited the presuppositions of modern culture that epistemologically we must almost begin from scratch. Agnosticism has a place in this, for in many areas it is prudent simply to say we do not know.
But Pascal is still with us.
In the world of action, deeds, and choices, where we must decide, we cannot be loftily neutral.
We have to stake out our life trajectories.
That’s why religion matters, and in an Ingersoll Lecture it is appropriate to add that religion invariably wagers on immortality.
I have tried in this hour to suggest that there are empirical as well as theoretical reasons for thinking that the wager is not an irrational bet.
The account of Stephen Fanning and his NDE is simply amazing as is the section on entheogenic substances.
I especially like these quotes from below:
“Western philosophy philosophizes from a single state of consciousness only, the waking state, whereas India philosophizes from all four states: waking, dream, dreamless sleep, and a fourth, turiya, that defies description.”
And...speaking of entheogens...
"Grof writes: “Many individuals . . . reported that their attitudes toward dying and their concepts of death underwent dramatic changes. Fear of their own physiological demise diminished, they became open to the possibility of consciousness existing after clinical death and tended to view the process of dying as an adventure in consciousness rather than the ultimate biological disaster.”
Enjoy!
Note: The following is a lecture by Huston Smith who was a leading religious scholar that taught at several universities.
This lecture was delivered to the Harvard Divinity School as part of their Ingersoll Lecture series on October 18, 2001 and published in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin 30, vol 3 (2001-2002).
In this lecture, Smith bring together three topics, Emmanuel Swedenborg and his prodigious accomplishments, clairvoyance and paranormal visions (his books are free to download in our library); the phenomenon of veridical Near Death Experiences; and finally entheogenic experiences helping with ego death and consciousness exploration.
The terms of the Ingersoll Lecture do not require that there be any sequential connection between them, but Carol Zaleski’s lecture last year, “In Defense of Immortality,” sets the stage for mine so perfectly that in my credulous moments I could be led to believe that, unbeknownst to her, that was the hidden intent behind the matters she chose to deal with.
And if she would like to join this fanciful game she could with equal right claim that I have chosen my topic to complete what she began, thereby making of our lectures a brace.
Our lectures work the same street: eschewing proof, which is impossible in this area, they both seek to remove obstacles to believing in immortality.
At the same time they complement each other by working the two sides of the street, hers the theoretical side and mine the empirical.
There is a second way our two lectures can be paired—we both spin off from William James’s 1898 Ingersoll Lecture, while again in different ways— she from his “will to believe” and I from the “radical empiricism” that his exceptional generosity of mind led him to.
He titled his Ingersoll Lecture “On Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine,” and I have already mentioned that Professor Zaleski continued that trajectory by unmasking the shallowness of some theoretical objections to immortality that have gathered force in the century that separates us from James.
Specifically she showed that those objections have been accepted by the media makers more for psychological than for logical reasons; immortality has been deemed improbable because science disallows it.
The unexamined premise here, which dominated the twentieth century but is now becoming more untenable by the hour I am tempted to say, is that science discloses the whole of reality.
This pithy epitomization of Professor Zaleski’s lecture does not do justice to the subtlety with which she deals with her important theme, most importantly and courageously the black eye she gives twentieth century theologians for going along with this cultural trend instead of opposing it.
But I must stop talking about Zaleski and get on with what I myself have to say.
I have already indicated that I will be picking up on James’s radical empiricism, and this is far trickier turf, for it requires talking about paranormal phenomena that are in line with James’s interests in seances in Emerson Hall— interests that his academic successors found so unacceptable that Ralph Barton Perry, James’s literary executor, omitted from his edition of The Complete Works of William James his essays on fringe phenomena without even acknowledging the omission. I shall be considering here three paranormal phenomena: a savant, Emanuel Swedenborg; a phenomenon, near-death experiences; and third, experiences that used to be called psychedelic but that serious scholars now refer to as entheogenic.
I begin with Swedenborg.
In tagging Swedenborg a savant I use that epithet loosely.
If I were speaking to an audience of committed Swedenborgians, his accounts of Heaven and Hell would fall on our ears not as intimations of immortality but as the truth of the matter as God revealed it to his latest prophet.
As it is, I am approaching Swedenborg empirically, from this side of the divide, to see how far we can move toward believing his reports of Heaven and Hell without resorting to divine revelation.
This requires recognizing him to have had an extraordinary talent ordinary people lack, which is where the notion of savants comes in, for that is the key denotation of the word.
Space allows only four examples.
Thomas Fuller, a late eighteenth-century Virginia slave, could barely count, yet when asked how many seconds a man who had lived for 70 years 17 days 12 hours had lived, he answered after a minute and a half’s reflection, 2,210,500,800.
When Benjamin Rush, the physician who wrote a classic paper on Fuller, told him that his calculation was a bit off, the slave said, “But massa, you forget the leap years.”
Dr. Down of Down Syndrome fame studied a boy who read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and recited it back word for word without having the slightest idea of what the book was about.
Advances in knowledge of how the brain works may demystify these first two examples by way of eidetic imagery which converts in the first case numbers and in the second words into seeing.
And if hearing, too, can get cross-wired to seeing, eidetic imagery may turn out to explain my third savant, Leslie Lemke, who could repeat note for note compositions, including original ones, that pianists in audiences came forward to play.
However, nothing in our current canons of knowledge can explain the performance of the fourth savant I shall cite.
He crossed my path only last spring through a personal friend whose top-of-the-line harp was stolen.
Through the networking of her mother, a dowser, she finally reached Harold McCoy, who lives in a trailer in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
McCoy asked to be sent a street map of Oakland on which he targeted the house where the stolen harp was found to be hidden.
I find such bizarre talents lending credence to James’s hypothesis, echoed by Bergson and Aldous Huxley, that the human mind is more like a reducing valve than a generator, one through which Mind-at-Large lets trickle only the kind of information that is necessary for us to survive on the material plane.
Approaching the mind from that side enlarges our whole notion of what it is to be human and makes it easier for us to give credence to extraordinary phenomena such as Swedenborg presents us with.
If the representatives I have listed can perform “miracles” of these sorts, is there anything but prejudice to cause us to reject out of hand the possibility that Emanuel Swedenborg was a savant whose clairvoyance extended into the afterlife?
Two important differences separate Swedenborg from the savants that psychologists study, however.
First, the talents of typical savants surface in persons who are seriously retarded in one way or another, whereas Swedenborg flourished on every human front.
Second, the talents of other savants relate to things of this world—mathematical calculations, musical prowess, and the like—where accuracy can be checked, whereas the referents of Swedenborg’s reports of the afterlife are off the empirical map.
Both of these differences require elaboration.
Far from being retarded, Swedenborg was one of the most remarkable men history registers.
When Alfred Binet designed the Stanford-Binet intelligence test he looked for the most brilliant persons who ever lived.
Swedenborg was listed among these few.
Vocationally he was an overseer of Sweden’s major mining industry, but his life was spent learning all there was in one field after another.
He published an incredible 108 works in science before he began to look at psychology and religion.
It would be fair to say that in the mid-eighteenth century he appeared to know everything there was to be known in the Western world.
He was the first to formulate the nebular hypothesis and did remarkable work on human anatomy.
He ground his own microscopic lenses and founded several sciences including crystallography.
At the age of 56 he turned inward to explore his dreams, and he ended up leaving us what may be the largest and oldest series of interpreted dreams.
In his day the spiritual practices of Hinduism and Buddhism were unknown in the West so he developed his own spiritual practices based on reduced breathing and intense concentration.
It was in the midst of all this that God—he was a devout Christian and took the Bible as his rule of life—came to him to announce that he was going to actually show him the afterworld.
For the next 27 years he visited Heaven and Hell daily and recorded what he found in his five-volume Spiritual Diary.
To round off his biography, he was a baron who served in his country’s House of Lords.
As a nobleman, scientist, and spiritual explorer, he was welcomed in social gatherings.
His conduct was exemplary in every respect and he was a paragon of self-effacing modesty.
On the second point, which concerns verification, it is true that Swedenborg’s visits to Heaven and Hell are not open to public verification.
Still, some of his paranormal sightings were checkable.
To mention only three of these, at a social gathering 300 miles from his home in Stockholm, he became visibly agitated.
When asked what was wrong, he said that a fire was raging in Stockholm.
The fire was brought under control only two doors from his house, just as he had reported.
Second, he predicted months in advance while he was in perfect health, the day and hour of his death.
These two cases show only that Swedenborg was clairvoyant, but the third bears directly on his claim to have been in touch with the other world.
A widow who was being charged for an expensive set of silver that her husband had left her asked Swedenborg to contact her deceased husband.
He did, and her husband told her that the receipt showing that he had paid for the set was in a hidden compartment in his desk, which proved to be the case. In this case the deceased husband was the only person in existence who knew where the receipt was.
Turning now to what Swedenborg reported concerning the afterlife, I must be distressingly brief.
This is what he saw:
The moment the heart stops we enter the spiritual world.
There we have spiritual bodies which function much like our former material ones.
Life there is at first so similar to life on earth that some may even need to be instructed that they have died.
This World of Spirits is a temporary stopping place.
Its essential function is to show us what we really are inwardly.
Angels help us here, and on the basis of their instructions we decide whether Heaven or Hell is most suited to us.
This resembles the Day of Judgment in the world’s religions except that it is more psychological and of our own doing rather than God’s.
What we are accustomed to leads us to choose Heaven or Hell.
In this spirit world the essential difference between Heaven and Hell becomes clear.
Those who prefer Hell have, in their worldly lives, spiraled in on themselves and lived primarily for themselves.
Those destined for Heaven have in their worldly lives spiraled outward towards others and the common good.
As goodness is inherent in the real nature of things, those who prefer Hell live in ignorance of, and conspire against, the world order, whereas those who are bent on Heaven delight in learning the nature of reality and cooperating with it.
This disposition surfaces automatically as the sum of their life choices before death and the same holds for those who prefer Hell.
Living for oneself is by its very nature a life of conflict, whereas loving cooperation brings peace and happiness.
Hell is a place of constriction and limitation, for when one spirals inward, one enters the small limited world of self.
Heaven is an opening-out world where you work cooperatively with others in harmony with the overall nature of things.
Those in Hell can visit Heaven, but they are uncomfortable with the light of understanding there and return to what they are accustomed to.
Obviously the temporary stop in the World of Spirits is highly psychological because it involves discovering what we really are.
We have all seen people who think of themselves first and foremost.
This is the mark of Hell.
And we have also seen people who consider and enjoy others—the mark of Heaven.
Actually this mark of Heaven is built into our humanity, for (Swedenborg was instructed) we are each born with an innate love of at least our own life.
If we capitalize on this love and give it expression we come into the sphere of what we enjoy doing above all else.
This is where all our capacities are best realized, and people differ as to where that happens to be—some in gardening, some in painting, wherever.
In Heaven people gather in societies of people who enjoy doing the same kinds of things.
There is work to be done in Heaven and these harmonious societies carry out spiritual functions that go far beyond the limited kinds of work we see in this world.
People who live out the love of their lives are happy and useful.
“Uses” figure importantly in Heaven.
When we are useful we contribute to the whole.
We are also doing what we want to do.
So Heaven can be said to be a kingdom of uses.
Heaven appears to God as a “Grand Human” whose organs (the societies in Heaven) work together to make One Life.
In the same vein, God sees the multiple churches and religions as coordinated in one Universal Church.
Swedenborg was very much ahead of his time in this teaching.
All who enter Heaven are angels who are people of advanced spiritual understanding.
There are three levels of this understanding measured by ascending degrees of love.
The lowest, natural spiritual level is in harmony with the total order of things.
Above it are angels who focus on love of neighbors but approach spiritual matters rationally.
The highest kind of angel has love of the Lord as the main focus of its life.
These angels not only know but also feel what is true and act on it without debate or speculation.
These three angelic levels are like steps into the love of God who is love itself.
Once we grasp the parameters of Heaven and Hell we see that they are anticipated in our earthly lives.
Persons destined for Hell are already wrapped up in themselves and the inner quality of their lives is hellish.
Conversely those who are destined for Heaven already enjoy a wider sphere of family and friends.
Swedenborg’s 27 years exploring Heaven greatly enriched his understanding of the human as well as the divine.
Basically it led him to see how tightly the human meshes with the total order of things.
God works through people who cooperate with him, and this indwelling God, who is a part of their very nature, is the ground of their immortality.
Let me end this section on Swedenborg by stating a little more fully than I have thus far the underlying thesis of this lecture.
I call its three case studies intimations of immortality to steer clear of any claims of proof.
Speaking for myself and minimally, I consider them as giving us things to think about when we ask whether there is life after death.
I will, however, add a methodological conviction of mine.
Images that derive from sense reports of our three-dimensional macro-world map attach no more isomorphically onto the world of spirit than they do onto the micro-world of quantum mechanics or the mega-world of relativity theory.
I take this to mean that we can take seriously the abstract outlines of what Swedenborg saw without assuming that the concrete images that filled in those outlines are literally true.
Now to near death experiences.
The 1975 publication of Raymond Moody’s Life After Life introduced a new frontier into the study of parapsychology, and interest in near-death experiences (hereafter NDE) has mounted steadily in the quarter-century that has intervened.
There are now a dozen or so books on the subject and an international association devoted to its study that publishes a journal, the Journal of Near Death Experiences.
Instead of trying to summarize the hundreds of reports that have appeared in print I intend to let a single report, which I will quote at some length, stand for them all.
Here again William James is my mentor, for as we all know, much of the power of his Varieties of Religious Experience derives from its concreteness—the way he lets other people make his points for him by telling us what they directly experienced.
What follows, then, is a solicited letter from a professor of history who has granted me permission to include it in this lecture.
It reads:
I have no doubt that there was more to my experience than I can remember, for the memory loss that resulted from my illness was severe.
The memories that I do have, however, are vivid and unforgettable and they changed my life.
The reality that I was in was more real, more intense, than anything in this current world of ours. It was hyper-reality.
I was in a place.
Around me was flatness and barrenness.
To talk about a sequence to the experience is to distort it.
There was no time there.
I now know that time is a convenient fiction for this world, but it did not exist in that one.
Everything seemed to be at one moment, even when “events” seemed to occur in a sequence.
[Swedenborg also says you have to get beyond time and space to see Heaven.]
What seemed to be the sky, the land, and everything was of a pale blue-gray color.
It was like being on a raft in the middle of the ocean where sky and sea merge into one monochromatic world, but I felt as though I were standing on firm land.
There was only the blue-gray vastness that seemed to stretch endlessly.
Beside me was a Being, whom I never saw but whose presence I felt constantly.
Its presence was constant, enormous and powerful.
With the Being beside me, exuding love and comfort to me, I re-experienced my life, and it was not what I would have expected.
While growing up in a fundamentalist church, I had been told many times about what it would be like when one faced God after death.
It would be something like watching God’s movie of your life (as in Albert Brooks’s film Defending Your Life).
You would watch all the scenes of your life on the screen and there would be nothing you could do but admit that the record was true: ‘Well, I guess you got me, fair and square.’
But this is not what happened.
It was a re-experiencing of my life, but from three different perspectives simultaneously.
One perspective was my version of my life as I might have recounted it to anyone patient enough to listen.
However, it was not so much the reliving of overt events as it was re-experiencing the emotions, feelings, and thoughts of my life.
Here were the emotions that I had felt and why I had believed that I had them.
Here were my conscious reasons for the actions that I had taken.
Here were the hurts I felt and my responses to them.
Here was my emotional life as I recalled having experienced it.
However, as I was re-experiencing my version of my life, I was also experiencing my life from the perspective of those with whom I was involved.
I felt what they felt, I lived their emotions as they acted with and reacted to me.
This was their version of my life.
When I thought they were clearly out of line and reacted with anger or thoughtlessness, I felt the pain and frustration my actions caused them.
It was an absolutely different view of my life and it was not a pretty one.
It was shocking to feel the pain that another person felt due to what I had done even as, when I did them, I believed myself to have been fully justified because of the person’s own actions.
At the time I had told myself that I was justified, but even if that were true, their pain was real.
It hurt.
And there was more.
At exactly the same time I experienced a third view of my life.
It was not my version, with my justifications.
It was not that of the others in my life, with their versions of my life and their own justifications for their own actions, thoughts, and feelings.
It was an unbiased view, free of the subjective and self-serving rationalizations that the others and I had used to support the countless acts of selfishness and lack of true love in our lives.
To me it can only be described as God’s view of my life.
It was what had really happened, the real motivations, the truth.
Stripped away were my lies to myself that I actually believed, my self-justification, my preference to see myself always in the best light.
I did not find myself in Hell, but I was suffering torment.
It was horribly painful to experience the fullness of my life and I was filled with contempt for myself.
How could I have been so incredibly stupid as to believe my own lies?
Why was simple compassion so difficult?
In particular it hurt to discover that I had been hiding behind my version of logic in order to deny emotional truths.
All of this—the three-way re-experiencing of my life and self-judgment—was simultaneous and yet separate and distinct.
There was no such thing as the sequence of events that we believe time to be.
In the end, I heard a judgment on my life, but it was my own judgment of myself. It came from within me and it had my voice.
My life was clear to me. I was a failure.
And through all this the Being was at my side. I felt nothing but love and support from the Being.
It exuded emotion: you are loved, you are lovable; your worst fault is that you are human. It goes with the territory.
I remember the words, “Don’t worry, you are only human.”
I was in emotional agony.
It was terrible to know that I was a mere mortal, just like everyone else, for I had thought that I was so much better than that.
But the Being accepted me.
The Being was letting me know that it was not acceptable to hurt other people, but it is part of the human condition.
It’s not all right, because it hurts other people, but it is all right, because it is what humans do.
Next—if I can really talk about next, for time and sequence do not really exist—I felt that I was given an understanding of everything that is, at least everything that is really important.
I felt as if all the secrets of the universe were revealed to me— not mathematical formulas, but simply how the universe operates, what is true, how things are.
I now knew everything.
Here space requires that I break off Steven Fanning’s account (he has allowed me to mention his name) adding only its closing sentences, which read:
“I remember making a positive decision. I wanted to come back to life. I wanted to do what I would be needed for. I then began my slow climb out of the coma and into consciousness.”
What are we to make of this account, which as I have said I am allowing to double for the whole of its genre?
Without going back on my early admission that concerning immortality proofs are impossible, I find myself wanting to confess that to my ears Professor Fanning’s account rings intuitively true to what we might expect to experience when we die if sentience does continue.
It also registers an important corrective to the notion of a vengeful God that too often creeps into the popular imagination.
Moral economy—justice—requires that there be judgment, a day of reckoning, but (as in most NDEs) Fanning experienced it as self-inflicted.
To this summary glance at the NDE phenomenon, I want to add only one more point and it takes the form of a question.
Why are university professors, who set the pace for our culture, so closed to the possibility that such experiences might be veridical—which is to say, the foretastes of immortality that they present themselves as being?
I lean here on an essay by a former MIT student of mine, Neal Grossman, who teaches philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Titling his paper “Who’s Afraid of Life After Death?,” he answers: university professors are, out of all proportion to the general public.
And the reason they are afraid of life after death is that they are (in the word he coins for the occasion) “fundamaterialists.”
To entertain the possibility that NDEs are what they purport to be would require entertaining the possibility that the materialistic worldview that dominates the academy today, together with its corollary that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, is false.
So deeply ingrained is that worldview in the academic mind that the rejection of NDEs, Grossman concludes, has become a dogma or ideology rather than the hypothesis it must be if the subject is be considered empirically, which is to say, scientifically.
Presented with reports of NDEs, critics tend to dismiss them on grounds that no number of such cases could prove that there is life after death, which happens to be true but is no reason for disqualifying them from being evidence that bears on the issue, for scientific hypotheses are never proven.
Theorems in logic and mathematics can be proved, but in empirical science, hypotheses are never proved.
They are rendered more or less probable by the empirical findings that relate to them.
Moreover, some deliverances in NDEs, Grossman adds, can be empirically checked.
There is a growing repository of cases in which subjects report information they could not possibly have acquired through their physical senses: information such as what was said in waiting rooms several floors below while their bodies were lying unconscious on the operating table.
In one such case, the subject’s body temperature had been lowered to 60 degrees and all the blood was drained from her body.
Her electroencephalogram was silent, her brainstem response was absent, and no blood flowed through her brain.
A brain in this state cannot create any kind of experience, yet the patient experienced a profound NDE that included detailed veridical perceptions of what transpired in the operation.
From the drift of Grossman’s paper we can imagine the kind of response he has gotten when he has tried to interest his colleagues in this kind of evidence. “Drug-induced hallucinations,” “last gasp of a dying brain,” “people see what they want to see”—these were the kinds of retorts he commonly heard.
I say that this does not surprise us because I suspect that as card-carrying members to the academy, most of us, myself included, have to labor to keep similar retorts from bubbling up in our own minds.
With this I conclude the second section of my lecture, reminding you as I do so that my overarching objective is to present empirical evidence that might soften the current prejudices against immortality that Carol Zaleski last year targeted so tellingly from the theological side.
One evening last spring while I was dining in a New York City penthouse that overlooked the kingdoms of this world, my hostess turned to me and said, “Many years ago, while lying on a carpet and listening to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, I had a profound experience of the death of my ego and simultaneously of my identity with all that is. With that identity my fear of death dropped away.”
She was describing her first encounter with an entheogen, one of that small class of non-addictive plants and chemicals that can alter consciousness dramatically.
(Recreational users continue to call them psychedelics, but serious seekers feel that that word is too tied to the psychedelic 1960s to be serviceable.)
Aldous Huxley anticipated my hostess’s report.
In a 1955 letter to Humphry Osmond, the Canadian chemist who introduced him to the entheogens, he wrote, “I remember saying and feeling that I don’t think I should mind dying, for dying must be like this passage from the known (constituted by life-long habits of subject-object existence) to the unknown cosmic fact.”
Behind these two firsthand testimonials lie entheogenic histories that stretch back into the twilight zones of protohistory.
One of the hymns to Soma in the Rig Veda—Soma has been identified by Gordon Wasson as the psychoactive mushroom Amanita muscaria—reports,
We have drunk Soma and become immortal;
We have attained the light the gods discovered.
What can hostility now do against us?
And what, immortal gods, the spite of mortals?
We have attained the light the gods discovered.
What can hostility now do against us?
And what, immortal gods, the spite of mortals?
And there is Eleusis.
Grounded in the agricultural cycle and extended from there to human beings, its mystery of Demeter and Persephone is the story of life resurrecting from death.
Initially that mystery was of local significance only, but it soon became an important part of Athenian citizenship, and eventually developed into a pan-Hellenic institution, attaining universal significance by the time of the Roman Empire.
The power of Eleusis derived not only from its message—that bodily death is not the end of the road—but in the fact that its initiates were shown that that is the case.
It did this by transporting them to a place that outsiders would call mythical but that participants saw as the place where the final realities were directly perceived.
What transported them to that place was an eight-day ritual that climaxed in the drinking of the kykeon, which contained an entheogen.
I say it was an entheogen as if this were established fact, which it is not, the thesis is controversial.
But I put it forward as fact to challenge the classics establishment which has ignored the evidence rather than considering it seriously.
That evidence derives from the triangulation of three disciplines— chemistry, mycology, and classics—as assembled most accessibly in a book, The Road to Eleusis, by authorities in all three fields: the mycologist Gordon Wasson; Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD; and the classicist Carl Ruck, who teaches at Boston University.
One would think that if classicists considered their thesis wrong they would take it as their professional responsibility to point that out.
As it is, the wide berth they have given the book suggests, on the one hand, psychological resistance to the idea that Eleusis was implicated with (to use the inflammatory word) a drug; and on the other hand, epistemic resistance, the refusal to accept exceptional states of consciousness as valid sources of knowledge.
I am reminded of the answer the late Indian philosopher T.M.P. Mahadevan gave me when I asked him for the basic difference between Indian philosophy and Western.
He answered, “Western philosophy philosophizes from a single state of consciousness only, the waking state, whereas India philosophizes from all four states: waking, dream, dreamless sleep, and a fourth, turiya, that defies description.”
When other states of consciousness are taken into account, loss of the fear of death is reported so frequently that it would be difficult to choose from them so I shall quote what Stan Grof and Joan Halifax say in the most important compendium of such reports that has thus far been compiled, The Human Encounter With Death.
The book is based on Grof’s 20-year study of the results of psychedelic therapy, which involved hundreds of patients and thousands of sessions, a study that began in Prague and ended 20 years later at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center.
On page 20 of that book Grof writes: “Many individuals . . . reported that their attitudes toward dying and their concepts of death underwent dramatic changes. Fear of their own physiological demise diminished, they became open to the possibility of consciousness existing after clinical death and tended to view the process of dying as an adventure in consciousness rather than the ultimate biological disaster.”
Again, as once before in this lecture, I will admit that the West is enough in my bones to make it seem passing strange that microscopic changes in brain chemistry can open us to the deepest truths of existence.
But then the whole mind-brain interaction is passing strange, indeed, completely inexplicable.
For, as Colin McGinn and others on the cutting edge of cognitive science now admit, in the more than 300 years since Descartes split the world into res cogitans and res extensa we have advanced not one iota in understanding the two-way interaction between mind and brain—how thoughts can engage (to put the matter crudely) a piece of meat, the brain, and vice versa.
Neurotheologians are busy trying to see if our rapidly expanding knowledge of brain mechanisms can throw light on theological claims.
They will discover that they cannot—neurotheology is no more than the latest form of reductionism.
Its practitioners may be able to discover what brain processes are working when think theologically and experience mystically, thereby refining somewhat the discovery of some decades standing that the left brain undergirds our use of language.
But some day they will wake up to the fact that this discovery tells us nothing about the truth status of what we say with language, or by extension, about the validity of what we experience when regions of the brain that are associated with various kinds of experience are active.
The events of contemporary history have so discredited the presuppositions of modern culture that epistemologically we must almost begin from scratch. Agnosticism has a place in this, for in many areas it is prudent simply to say we do not know.
But Pascal is still with us.
In the world of action, deeds, and choices, where we must decide, we cannot be loftily neutral.
We have to stake out our life trajectories.
That’s why religion matters, and in an Ingersoll Lecture it is appropriate to add that religion invariably wagers on immortality.
I have tried in this hour to suggest that there are empirical as well as theoretical reasons for thinking that the wager is not an irrational bet.