Perception // Current TV

Can the Peace Drug Help Clean Up the War Mess?

At a conference last weekend, researchers reported positive results on the... more

cosmobirdie
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Do we live in a Multiverse?

WHEN cosmologist George Ellis turned 70 last year, his friends held a party to... more

cosmobirdie
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Have we cracked the DMT Puzzle?

James Kent attempts to tie a knot in the meme of autonomous elves and other DMT entities...

Hey Clifford, a friend recently pointed me to your article on DMT, Moses and Aliens. Since you asked people to voice their opinion I shall. I have studied this issue very closely for the past fifteen years, and though I have not published the results of all my research I would like to share with you some of the conclusions I’ve made about DMT and the dramatic phenomena it produces.

In short, I do not believe DMT is a gateway to an alternate dimension, nor does it induce contact with autonomous elves and alien entities. Yes, DMT produces a vivid other-worldly landscape when ingested, often including elves, aliens, insects, snakes, jaguars, etc. This is true for the majority of people who try it. Some people do not have such vivid responses, but many do. Although this may appear at first glance to be “shocking,” it is actually no more shocking then the fact that most people dream at night, or that most people see geometric patterns (pressure phosphenes) when they close their eyes and press against their eyeballs. But the difference between pressure phosphenes and DMT is that DMT is illegal and very hard to come by, so most people never have the opportunity to experience it. If we could all hold our breath for a minute and produce vivid hallucinations of alien landscapes it would seem quite mundane, no more than a mere curiosity of the human condition. However, since this particular alien landscape is produced by a specific rare substance (DMT), people seem to think it is akin to unlocking the mysteries of the universe when they actually get their hands on it.

Now don’t get me wrong, DMT is stunning in its effect, no doubt. But, like anything, when you do it many times the magic tends to wear off and reveal itself for what it is; an exotic aberration of the brain’s perceptual mechanics. To illustrate this point I would like to offer the following observations:

Read the full article at http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/04/07/have-we-cracked-the-dmt-puzzle/James Kent attempts to tie a knot in the meme of autonomous elves and other DMT... more

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Don’t Retreat, Instead – RETHINK!

In order to take a concrete stand on an issue we must betray our very nature. Doubt, a... more

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Is the Drug War legitimizing Racism?

Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the... more

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THE MACHINE STOPS

Anybody who uses the Internet - and that's pretty much everyone - should read E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. It is a chilling, short story masterpiece about the role of technology in our lives. Written in 1909, it’s as relevant today as the day it was published. Forster has several prescient notions including instant messages (email!) and cinematophoes (machines that project visual images).

THE MACHINE STOPS
Arts — POSTED BY Charlotte Walsh on March 22, 2010 at 10:27 am | Edit

Anybody who uses the Internet should read E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. It is a chilling, short story masterpiece about the role of technology in our lives. Written in 1909, it’s as relevant today as the day it was published. Forster has several prescient notions including instant messages (email!) and cinematophoes (machines that project visual images).

by E.M. Forster (1909)

I
THE AIR-SHIP

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.

An electric bell rang.

The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.

“I suppose I must see who it is”, she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately.

“Who is it?” she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.

The the full story fro free at http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/03/22/the-machine-stops/Anybody who uses the Internet - and that's pretty much everyone - should read... more

cosmobirdie
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EYE SPIRITS

The mysterious Charles Bonnet Syndrome causes complex and realistic hallucinations in... more

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Eric Mead: The Magic of the Placebo -- can you explain the hatpin illusion? [video]

Sugar pills, injections of nothing -- studies show that, more often than you'd... more

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Chief Exorcist says Devil is in Vatican

The Devil is lurking in the very heart of the Roman Catholic Church, the... more

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Prayer: A Challenge for Science

Since ancient times, a strong and pervasive belief in the efficacy of prayer–for the living and the dead–reinforces the notion that consciousness is not limited to the physical body. Not only do traditions throughout the world share a belief that prayers may in some way help (or invoke help from) deceased ancestors, many cultures throughout history have believed that prayer can bring about changes in the physical circumstances of the living.

If prayer affects things in the physical world, its effects should be measurable, and scienceshould be able to investigate it. There is a very scattered literature on this, but when you bring it all together as Larry Dossey has done in his recent book, Healing Words (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), you see there is quite a large number of interesting experiments with challenging results. Out of 131 controlled experiments on prayer-based healing, more than half showed statistically significant benefits. One of the best known is a double blind study of 393 patients in the coronary unit at San Francisco General Hospital. In this experiment, 192 patients, chosen at random, were prayed for by home prayer groups, the others were not. The prayed-for patients recovered better than the controls, and fewer died. In order to make sense of these data on the efficacy of prayer, science will have to change its underlying assumptions about the nature of causality. Currently, the standard view is still purely mechanistic–notwithstanding all the recent talk about chaos and complexity theory. When applied to the life sciences, chaos and complexity theory–even with the help of highly sophisticated computer modeling–still explain the world in terms of mechanical causes involving known physical and chemical processes.

The data from empirical studies of prayer, as well as from the large literature reporting psi research in telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis, seriously challenge the mechanistic view. Some other causal agent besides the mechanics of electrochemical interactions is required to make sense of the observed phenomena.

Read the full article at http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/03/11/prayer-a-challenge-for-science-2/Since ancient times, a strong and pervasive belief in the efficacy of prayer–for... more

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50 Simple Science Facts Everyone Should Know (But Doesn’t)

This list in this article compiles many frequently overlooked or misunderstood... more

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MUSHROOMS IN WONDERLAND

Was Alice in Wonderland and Victorian fairy art and lore in general inspired by actual experiences with mind-altering fungi?

The first well-documented hallucinogenic mushroom experience in Britain took place in London’s Green Park on 3 October 1799. Like many such experiences before and since, it was accidental. A man subsequently identified only as ‘J.S.’ was in the habit of gathering small field mushrooms from the park on autumn mornings, and cooking them up into a breakfast broth for his wife and young family. But this particular morning, an hour after they had finished eating, the world began to turn very strange. J.S. found black spots and odd flashes of colour bursting across his vision; he became disorientated, and had difficulty in standing and moving around. His family were complaining of stomach cramps and cold, numb extremities. The notion of poisonous toadstools leapt to his mind, and he staggered out into the streets to seek help. but within a hundred yards he had forgotten where he was going, or why, and was found wandering about in a confused state.

© Mike Jay

By chance, a doctor named Everard Brande happened to be passing through this insalubrious part of town, and he was summoned to treat J.S. and his family. The scene that he discovered was so bizarre and unfamiliar that he would write it up at length and publish it in The Medical and Physical Journal later that year. The family’s symptoms were rising and falling in giddy waves, their pupils dilated, their pulses and breathing becoming fluttering and laboured, then returning to normal before accelerating into another crisis. They were all fixated on the fear that they were dying, except for the youngest, the eight-year-old Edward S., whose symptoms were the strangest of all. He had eaten a large portion of the mushrooms and was ‘attacked with fits of immoderate laughter’ which his parents’ threats could not subdue. He seemed to have been transported into another world, from which he would only return under duress to speak nonsense: ‘when roused and interrogated as to it, he answered indifferently, yes or no, as he did to every other question, evidently without any relation to what was asked’.

Dr.Everard Brande would diagnose the family’s condition as the ‘deleterious effects of a very common species of agaric [mushroom], not hitherto suspected to be poisonous’. Today, we can be more specific: this was clearly intoxication by Liberty Caps (Psilocybe semilanceata), the ‘magic mushrooms’ which grow plentifully across the hills, moors, commons, golf courses and playing fields of Britain every autumn. But though Dr.Brande’s account of the J.S. family’s trip would not be forgotten, and would continue to be cited in Victorian drug literature for decades, the nineteenth century would come and go without any conclusive identification of the Liberty Cap as the species in question. In fact, it would not be until Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, turned his attention to hallucinogenic mushrooms in the 1950s that the botanical identity of these and other mushrooms containing psilocybin, LSD’s chemical cousin, would be confirmed.

Read the full article at http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/03/01/mushrooms-in-wonderland/Was Alice in Wonderland and Victorian fairy art and lore in general inspired by actual... more