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Smart Mind

A new vision of the science and philosophy of Mind

Sena Fernando

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© Sena Fernando 2008

Copies may be ordered from http://www.smartmindonline.co.uk or from

http://stores.lulu.com/smartmind

The cover illustration is an example of Australian aboriginal rock art in the public domain.

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Contents

The Study of the Mind .................................................................................................. 5 The Philosophies of Death.......................................................................................... 10

Consciousness Studies ............................................................................................ 11 Dualism............................................................................................................... 16

Materialism and Strong AI ..................................................................................... 18 The Philosophy of Life ............................................................................................... 22

Near Death Experiences.......................................................................................... 27 Deathbed Visions................................................................................................ 30 Scientific Theories on NDE................................................................................ 32

Past Life Regression and the New Age Lifestyle ................................................... 36 Cases of the Reincarnation Type ............................................................................ 39 Nightmares due to Past Life Experiences ............................................................... 42 Transmigration of the “Soul” or the Accessing of Past Memories? ....................... 43

Transpersonal Psychology .......................................................................................... 46 Mystical Experiences .............................................................................................. 46 The Murky Depths and Lofty Heights of the Mind – Psychosis ............................ 51 Parapsychological Research ................................................................................... 54

The Heart Brain .................................................................................................. 55 Distant Intentionality and Healing.......................................................................... 58

Possible Harmful Effects of Direct Mental Influence ........................................ 59 The Power of the Mind – Healing and Biological Psychokinesis .............................. 60

The Placebo Effect.............................................................................................. 64 The Smart Unconscious Mind – Hypnosis ......................................................... 65

What exactly is the hypnotic state?................................................................. 65 Healing with Hypnosis.................................................................................... 66

By-passing the Brain Filter – Psychedelic Drugs ................................................... 69 Aldous Huxley and Mescalin.............................................................................. 70 MDMA (Ecstasy)................................................................................................ 71 Ibogaine .............................................................................................................. 72 Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) ............................................................................... 76

The Smart Mind Hypothesis ....................................................................................... 78 Unus Mundus .......................................................................................................... 84 Smart Mind May Be Independent of Time............................................................. 87 Where Mind Meets Matter – Astrology and the Holomovement ........................... 92

Does the Human Mind Need to be Purified? ...................................................... 96 The Dreamtime and Shamanism............................................................................. 98 Crossing a Boundary............................................................................................. 102

Many Worlds .................................................................................................... 107 The Smart Mind and Evolutionary Ethics ............................................................ 108 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 116

Recommended Books ............................................................................................... 118 Index ......................................................................................................................... 120

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The Study of the Mind

t is a paradox that the phenomenal advance of science in the past hundred years has not led to a better understanding of the mind, with modern

scientists and philosophers now seemingly vying with each other to prove that the mind does not exist at all! There was reason for optimism at the turn of the nineteenth century when F.W.H. Myers attempted to lay the foundations of a philosophical psychology with a scientific basis. In succeeding decades Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung worked on the new discipline of psychoanalysis. These hopeful developments in the early part of the twentieth century did not bear fruit; Myers, Freud, and Jung are largely ignored in scientific and philosophical academia; neither Freud nor Jung was considered worthy of a Nobel Prize. The study of the mind is not considered a respectable scientific activity in the early twenty-first century.

Respectable or not, the study of the mind is worthwhile because it is the one

thing that sets Man apart from other animals; the tiger is stronger, some birds are more beautiful, the cobra is better defended, but none has our reasoning power. We do not know whether the equivalent of the human mind exists elsewhere in the Universe; organisms with silicon-based brains may have evolved in other solar systems with immense computing power but not a trace of consciousness. Such organisms would not have the curiosity to attempt to communicate with us, as curiosity appears to be something that goes along with consciousness, and is what motivates the intrepid minority of scientists who are now engaged in studying the mind.

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F.W.H. Myers (1843 - 1901) studied classics at Cambridge and later became a school inspector in the same city. He educated himself in science over the years and became one of the founders of the British Society for Psychical Research. His motivation for reviewing this research was the idea that “if a spiritual world exists, and if that world has at any epoch been manifest or even discoverable, then it ought to be manifest or discoverable now”.1 This means that, instead of being asked to believe in something invisible, he was seeking scientifically verifiable information. He developed the view that certain phenomena like telepathy were manifestations of the subliminal mind, what Freud later referred to as the Unconscious.

Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939), was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist

who attracted great popular fame as the discoverer of the Unconscious Mind, although this concept had been mentioned by philosophers like Schopenhauer previously, and Goethe had preceded Freud in locating the origin of poetic inspiration in the unconscious. Freud’s lasting achievement was the development of the technique of psychoanalysis as a method of helping an individual to overcome his mental and psychosomatic problems by talking to a therapist who encourages him to look for the roots of these problems in past events which have long been forgotten. This approach is a scientific one in the sense that the therapist does not tell the patient what is wrong with him but gently guides him into discovering the truth about his mind by his own efforts.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961), a Swiss psychiatrist, built an impressive

edifice on the foundations laid by his mentor Sigmund Freud. When they first met, Jung was 31 years old and Freud 50; it is said that their first conversation lasted 13 hours! There followed an intense correspondence and collaboration that continued for more than six years. Taking up Freud’s idea that “dreams were the royal road to the unconscious”, Jung undertook an exhaustive study of his own dreams and those of his patients. As his ideas developed his interpretation of dreams diverged fundamentally from that of Freud, and he developed a conception of the mind that went far beyond the familiar confines of individual consciousness.

The American Buddhist philosopher Alan Wallace has pointed out that there

are historical reasons for the neglect of the mind by Western philosophy and science.2 Descartes, whose writings in the 17th century have had a profound influence on Western thought, “effectively removed the human mind from the natural world by decreeing that the soul is divinely infused into the body, where it exerts its influence on the body by way of the pineal gland.” Another phenomenon which discouraged the study of the mind in Europe was the persecution of witches by the Christian Church, which was particularly intense from the fifteenth century to

1 Myers, F.W.H. (1903). Human personality and its survival of bodily death London: Longmans, Green. 2 “A Science of Consciousness: Buddhism (1), the Modern West (0)” by Alan Wallace. The Pacific World: Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies, 2003.

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the middle of the seventeenth century. Anyone who exhibited exceptional mental powers, including the power of spiritual healing, was immediately suspect of being a witch.

Scientists and philosophers in the twentieth century, with a few exceptions,

have unwittingly carried on the crusade of the Church against the study of the mind. There is now a view widespread in the academic world that the mind is “not smart”, that the apparent workings of the mind can all be explained by physical happenings in the brain. These philosophers and neuroscientists could be grouped together under the heading of “physicalists”. My book is entitled Smart Mind because I will try to show that the physicalist hypothesis is inadequate to account for all the known facts about the mind. The main reason for the lack of advance in the science of the mind has been the reluctance of psychologists and other scientists to give up their physicalist hypotheses in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.

It is well known in science that a technological advance often precedes the

rapid acquisition of knowledge in the relevant field. The study of the mind received a boost with the invention of the cardiac defibrillator machine - Thoracic surgeon Claude S. Beck of the University Hospitals in Cleveland, U.S.A., was the first person to save a human life with the use of a defibrillator in 1947. Once the use of this machine became widespread, many people who would previously have died of cardiac arrest could now have their hearts re-started. A significant proportion of these people began to report near-death experiences (NDE’s) which had occurred in the period of unconsciousness before they were resuscitated. These experiences had been written about since ancient times, but now their scientific study became more feasible because they occurred much more frequently. The term “near-death experience” was coined by Raymond Moody in 1975. The startling findings of these studies have been dismissed by physicalists as the mere imaginings of diseased minds; philosophers in general have ignored the findings in their theoretical outpourings.

“Proper science” is a three-stage process involving observation, formulation

of hypotheses to explain the observed facts, and then experimentation to test the validity or otherwise of one’s hypotheses. This kind of science has yielded information of a high degree of validity and reliability in the fields of physics, chemistry, and biology. However, there are other sciences which could be described as “descriptive sciences” where the potential for experimentation is limited – Astronomy, topography (the charting of the surface of the Earth), paleontology, and anthropology; astronomy yielding easily verifiable information, while the findings of anthropology are more debatable. Psychology is a more complex matter; certain branches of it such as the assessment of personality or the susceptibility to hypnosis being matters amenable to experiment, while “anomalous phenomena” may be difficult to reproduce. (Anomalous data in science refers to data that contradict established views). Much of the evidence presented in this book is in the form of meticulously researched case histories of anomalous phenomena.

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While the study of the mind became disreputable in the second half of the twentieth century, it had a new incarnation in the guise of “consciousness studies”. Consciousness seemed to be a more limited concept than mind, and if a philosopher published something on the subject it was easier to defend from the dozen or more of his peers eager to shoot it down. Consciousness defined as “the having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings” is a more limited area of study than the Mind, which I would define as “that which experiences bodily sensation and emotion, that which reasons, that which asks metaphysical questions, and that which wills”. The word consciousness is used in a much broader sense by teachers of Eastern religions, but the definition given above is the one used by modern Western philosophers. Thus consciousness in the limited sense is what is experienced, whereas the concept of Mind implies a Subject who experiences.

It is as if philosophers have given up trying to defend the “concept of mind”

and have retreated into what they feel is a small fortified enclosure named Consciousness which they can defend. Daniel Dennett has blasted even this small enclosure stating that, while acknowledging that there is something unique in what it is like to taste an apple, this kind of experience is not much of a mystery. He goes on to say, “The time has come to put the burden of proof squarely on those who persist in using the term. The philosophical sense of the term is simply ridiculous”.

It seems to me that philosophers made a mistake when they gave up the

study of the mind. “Mind” is a term used in everyday language, easily understood by the common man, and also with a venerable history in philosophy going back to the Greek Parmenides in the fifth century B.C. and to the Indian scholar Patañjali in the third century B.C. The approach that I will be taking in this book is to arrive at an understanding of mind taking into account the factual material gathered by neuroscientists, psychologists, and parapsychologists, and considering the views of philosophers while not being enslaved by their apparent materialist bias. When the history and philosophy of science are studied it becomes evident that anomalous data are often ignored or re-interpreted to make them fit established theories. The “Smart Mind” theory which I shall be proposing is one which attempts to account for some of the more well-documented anomalous psychological phenomena.

The debunking of the mind since the middle of the twentieth century has

coincided with a sharp increase in illnesses affecting the apparently non-existent mind, accompanied by an astronomical rise in the profits of companies manufacturing “psychotropic” drugs. Perhaps the marketing divisions of these companies believe that the drugs will be less appealing to patients if they are more accurately termed neurotropic drugs; there is no way a drug can act on the mind except through the brain. These companies understand that the general public has not shared in the skepticism of academics with regard to the existence of the mind. The need for the public to understand the mind is greater than ever before because there are new psychotropic drugs coming on to the market all the time which get the approval of Big Brother in the shape of the regulatory authorities, while psychedelic

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drugs which may be useful in psychotherapy but are unprofitable as their patents have expired are subjected to draconian laws.

Religious faith has been declining in the West since the Darwinian revolution

of the nineteenth century, but the perennial questions remain: What is the nature of the human being? What is the nature of mind? Does the mind persist after the death of the physical body? We may never have the final answers to these questions, but most of us need a “working hypothesis”, a framework of ideas with which to make sense of our lives. The search for such a hypothesis has been hampered by one of the salient characteristics of the twentieth century – intellectual and academic specialization; philosophy and psychology are twain and rarely shall meet. The religions of the East – Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism – have not had to take the battering from scientific advance which Christian theology has been subjected to, and I shall be considering whether insights from these religions can help us answer the perennial questions of human existence. In Western philosophy and psychology, mind is “a phenomenon which perceives, thinks, experiences, and reacts to the environment”. In Eastern philosophy, as in the Buddhist scriptural text the Dhammapada, a different meaning is given to the word: “All things are preceded by the mind, led by the mind, created by the mind”. The definition of mind which I shall be adopting in this book veers towards that in the Dhammapada, but with significant modifications to take account of recent scientific knowledge.

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The Philosophies of Death

he study of the Mind is no mere theoretical exercise; we have to consider the possibility that erroneous ideas about the Mind may have adverse effects

on the mental health of the public and consequently even increase the incidence of suicide. While it is true that only a small minority of people actually read books on philosophy, we should not under-estimate the power of the mass media. When a popular newspaper or magazine carries a sensational article saying, “Scientists prove that the Mind is nothing but a computer program in the brain”, this could become a part of modern folk belief. Although there is much psychiatric research on what causes suicide – alcohol and drug abuse, social breakdown etc. – not much thought is given to what sort of thought patterns could help to prevent suicide in an individual. Some people who have a Near-Death Experience when they attempt suicide find that the experience has enabled them to see new meaning in life and are less likely to attempt suicide in the future. This was the experience Sheila Berry described, referring to a suicide attempt fifteen years previously3: “I had taken an overdose of aspirin and alcohol and had been pumped out at the hospital. It was late at night and I was put into a ward. I don't know whether you would call this a NDE but at the same time my spirit was so low I felt that I could die if I really wanted to……I was lying in the dark and felt myself drifting. I felt as though I was in a warm cocoon. I became aware that I was moving down a dark country lane with high hedges. At the bottom of the lane there was a cottage with a light in the window. I wanted to reach the cottage but a voice in my head said that I had to go back. I can still remember someone taking my hand and I had a feeling of great peace and a oneness with what I can only describe as the universe. I can remember returning to the weight of my body. For some time after this happened I kept hearing the most wonderful music. I feel since that time that my life has a spiritual dimension, although I do not practice any established religion.”

3 http://www.near-death.com/experiences/suicide02.html

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It is unfortunate that most modern philosophers, other than those in the “transpersonal” field, do not take account of such transcendent experiences in their theorizing. John Searle, one of the more open-minded of modern philosophers, has written about The Mystery of Consciousness, but the examples he chooses of this great mystery sound rather trivial – “the taste of wine”, “trying to remember your mother-in-law’s phone number”. It is becoming aware of existence that is the starting point of all philosophy, the origin of the urge to philosophize. Awareness of existence precedes awareness of self. The awareness of existence cannot be derived from anything else, although it is simultaneous with the act of perception. I look around me, I become aware of my sensations then, at a certain moment in time, I may begin to wonder about existence. Can the awareness of existence be derived from the use of language? It cannot, for it is quite possible that primitive man at a stage in his evolution when he had only a few words to express his basic needs may from time to time have become aware of existence even though he did not have the words to ask, “What is existence?” It would have been a momentous experience for him when that awareness came to him, and he probably wanted to express it in music, dance, or painting. He made flutes from the bones of animals 36,000 years ago; he started painting pictures on the walls of caves around the same period. These musicians and painters were the first philosophers. These primitive musicians and artists did not have the words or the desire to circumscribe their experience by saying, “I exist”, thereby cutting themselves off from the rest of the Universe. They simply wanted to share their experiences with their fellow men. Smart Mind had not yet been buried under an avalanche of words. We start, therefore, with the awareness of existence. Personal identity is essentially a social construct which need not intrude into our discussion at this point. The awareness of existence neither excludes the “I” nor the external material world; it is neither Idealist nor Materialist. No scientific theory up to now has explained how the awareness of existence could arise de novo from the combination and re-combination of matter. Modern philosophers have ceased to ask the question, “Who is it that experiences consciousness?” Alan Wallace has written that “taking into account the role of human subjectivity appears to be equally taboo in both religious and scientific fundamentalism”. Philosophy now wants to study consciousness as an objective phenomenon, something to be taken apart like the chemical composition of marmalade.

Consciousness Studies The contemporary sense of the word consciousness, associated to the idea of personal identity, was introduced by John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). In Chapter XXVII of this book, entitled "On Identity and Diversity", he conceptualized consciousness as the repeated self-identification of oneself, through which moral responsibility could be attributed to the subject. This association of consciousness, personal identity and moral responsibility points to the

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historical origin of the word “consciousness” from “conscience” as understood in Christian theology, derived from the Latin conscientia, which means “moral conscience”. Thus the meaning given to consciousness by Locke can be characterized as a “forensic definition” which delineates the individual human mind as an independent entity capable of making moral choices and can therefore be legitimately rewarded or punished. Eastern philosophy, Vedanta in particular, does not muddle its understanding of consciousness with forensic associations, as is evident in these quotations from the Vedanta-Sutras4 (The Sanskrit word vijñāna is translated into English as consciousness): “Consciousness is not eternal.” “There is no consciousness without object.” “Consciousness is the attribute of a permanent conscious Self. This consciousness, which is also termed vijñāna, is a particular attribute belonging to a conscious Self and related to an object; as such it is known to every one on the testimony of his own Self.” One could say that the error made by Locke in confusing the psychological concept of consciousness with the social construct of personal identity was avoided by Vedanta. This stripping away of personal identity from the concept of consciousness has been adopted by modern philosophers, but they have also excluded the notion of Self found in Vedanta. Is it logical to consider consciousness without the Self? John Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, defines consciousness as comprising “those states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue until we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma or die.”5 Searle accepts that dreams are a form of consciousness, but quite different from full waking states. Consciousness so defined switches off an on, and is an inner, first-person, qualitative phenomenon. By this definition a system is either conscious or it isn’t. Searle says that consciousness is not something “frightfully difficult to define”. The dictionary definition of awareness is “having or showing realization, perception, or knowledge”. What we find when we try to define consciousness is that we keep coming up with synonyms, which means that, because we are conscious beings, we all know what it is but are not able to define it in terms of other things. What is important in trying to define consciousness is to be clear what we exclude from our definition. Thus, unlike John Locke, modern philosophy does not want to include personal identity in the definition; self-consciousness is also excluded.

4 Thibaut, George, (translator) 1848-1914: The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja — Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 5 Searle, John: “The Mystery of Consciousness (New York Review Books Collections)” Publisher: New York Review Books. Published: 1990

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I shall now return to my previous question of whether it is logical to study consciousness without relating it to a Self or Subject. Searle attempts to tilt the argument in a particular direction by writing, “a system is either conscious or it isn’t”. Has he discovered a “system” other than a human being or animal which is conscious? The reality is that I only have direct access to my own conscious experiences; I infer that other human beings have such experiences because they look and behave like me. I notice that there are certain similarities between my behaviors and that of certain other animals such dogs, so I infer that they too probably possess a consciousness similar to mine, but not exactly so. In my view, consciousness can only be logically considered in the context of an attribute of a living being. During the past fifty years consciousness studies have become quite popular in academic circles, and the key question in the study of consciousness as it is now defined is how the activity of the brain (“a piece of meat” as Colin McGinn puts it) can give rise to a sensation such as pain. The current picture that neurophysiologists give us of the brain is that it is an inter-connected system of nerve cells and their elongated fibres. Electrical activity passes along nerve fibres as “waves of depolarization”, meaning that the rate of conduction is much slower than that of an electric current passing through a metal wire. This passage of electrical activity is referred to as a “nerve impulse”. The “junction” between one nerve fibre and the next is referred to as a synapse; chemicals called neurotransmitters are responsible for the passage of a nerve impulse across a synapse. Based on this neurophysiological information we can picture an intricate network of trillions of nerve cells in constant communication with each other. One question we can ask is, “Is this an intelligent network or a purely mechanical one like an electronic computer?” If we say that it is a purely mechanical one we mean that the actions of the brain are determined by (a) its innate structure and functional capabilities, (b) the sensory stimuli it receives, and (c) its memory of sensory stimuli it has received in the past. This would correspond to the philosophical position of determinism, and to the psychological doctrine of behaviourism. According to the behaviourist model if a dog bites a certain individual, this could happen because (a) the dog’s brain has been pre-programmed to initiate biting behaviour under certain circumstances and (b) the victim gave off certain sounds and smells which triggered a memory of another individual who had beaten the dog some time in the past. John Searle has neatly expressed his view of the problem of consciousness in philosophical terminology: A conscious experience such as the subjective experience of pain can be causally reduced to the electrical activity of brain cells, but it cannot be ontologically reduced in this way. In other words, we know that the activity of brain cells is the cause of the painful experience, but the two are not the same thing. Ontology is a study of the mode of existence and the nature of being. Conscious experiences are a part of reality and we cannot explain them away by elucidating their cause.

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Searle goes on to explain the difference between epistemology and ontology with reference to consciousness. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy which is concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge. He takes the example of the sensation I feel when I pinch my arm. This sensation is accessible to me in a way in which it is not accessible to other people. The fact that I can have knowledge about the sensation in a way that others cannot is referred to as an epistemic difference. Apart from the epistemic difference, the mode of existence of this sensation as a first-person or subjective mode of existence in contrast to the third-person or objective mode of existence of the neural pathways in my arm is an ontological phenomenon; the neural pathways exist independently of being experienced in a way that the sensation does not. Visual experiences are not exactly bodily sensations, yet these, together with the stream of conscious thought also have the quality of ontological subjectivity mentioned above. In Searles’s view all these subjective feelings are the data which a philosophical theory of consciousness has to explain. The behaviorist and physicalist philosopher Daniel Dennett on the other hand denies the existence of the data. He states that there are no such things as subjective experiences or first-person phenomena. It appears rather dishonest of Dennett to continue writing about consciousness, using the word with a private meaning that excludes subjective experiences. The cognitive neuroscientist C.D. Frith is more honest in stating where he stands in the debate on the nature of mind.6 Frith writes that for many years psychologists pretended to be real scientists by studying only behavior, but studying behavior is never enough. Subjective experiences like perceptions, recollections and intentions are also worth studying. He argues that psychology can become real science by using instruments like functional brain scanners. Unlike structural brain scanners, functional brain scanners show us which parts of the brain are using up more or less energy at a given moment. These scanners are currently of two types, those used for positron emission tomography (PET) and those for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Frith acknowledges that while brain activity can provide an objective marker of subjective experience detectable by a scanner the two phenomena are by no means identical. Then he goes on to claim that in his book he has proved that the distinction between the mental and physical is only an illusion created by the brain. Frith admits that he is not a philosopher so he can’t be expected to understand the difference between epistemology and ontology that was explained by John Searle. He says explicitly that his book is not about consciousness. It is a clear and interesting account of the progress made in functional brain imaging. A different approach to the study of the mind and consciousness is taken by Robert Pepperell, Reader in Fine Art at the Cardiff School of Art and Design, in his book The Post-human Condition, where he points out that our minds, our bodies, and the world are in fact continuous. Because of the perpetual exchange of matter and energy between

6 Frith, C. D. (2007) “Making up the mind: How the brain creates our mental world”. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK

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the living human organism and its surroundings, there can be no fixed state of being a living human. Modern philosophers and scientists are not able to appreciate this if they follow reductionist lines of thoughts, namely breaking down complex processes into a series of definable steps that they then try to rebuild as a logically consistent sequence. Reductionism, or the analytic method, is an excellent way of solving a mathematical problem but when confronted with the complexities of the human organism it runs the risk of losing touch with reality. It then leads to dubious conclusions like “The mind is a product of the brain”. It is like the blind man trying to describe an elephant by detailed examination of a small part of it. A child sees something which makes him smile in delight, and we infer that he is happy. Is this happiness an isolated phenomenon of the child’s brain, or is it a process which is happening in the world, the universe, of which the child, his brain, and the rest of his body is a part? This is an example of how analytical thinking, which seeks to break down a phenomenon into easily analyzable parts, can distort reality. Such thinking is obviously essential when one is trying to solve a mathematical problem, but is of limited use in understanding the nature of Mind. I watch the sun rise and I say, “I saw the sun rise”. An example of analytical thinking is to ask, who is the “I”? We know that light rays from the sun have impinged on the retinae of my eye, and the resulting nerve impulses have travelled to the occipital cortex at the back of my head; so can I say that my occipital cortex is the “subject” that has seen the sun rise? The problem is that if I use the phrase “my occipital cortex” I am assuming that there is an “owner” of the occipital cortex”. Who is the owner of the occipital cortex? There are some attempted philosophical solutions of this problem: Philosophy Definition Proponents Reductive materialism

This is a philosophical position holding that the distinction between the mental and physical is only an illusion created by the brain. Mental phenomena can be “reduced” to physical phenomena.

John Bickle C.D. Frith

Biological materialism

Mental phenomena cannot be “reduced” to physical phenomena, but will be eventually explained by the science of biology.

John Searle

Strong artificial intelligence (AI)

The view that the mind is nothing but a computer program, or a set of such programs, working on the “hardware” of the brain.

Ray Kurzweil Daniel Dennett

Weak AI Some, but not all, aspects of the mind can be simulated on a computer.

Gerald Edelman

Substance Dualism This view postulates that Mind or the Soul is a separate substance from the Body.

Thomas Aquinas Descartes

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Property Dualism The world is constituted of just one kind of

substance - the physical kind – but there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties.

David Chalmers

Idealism This is the doctrine that ideas, or thoughts, make up either the whole or an indispensable aspect of any full reality.

Hegel J. M. E. McTaggart

Dualism Dualism of “soul” and body has been the official teaching of the Catholic Church from the time of Thomas Aquinas in the 14th century. According to Aquinas, all things connected with the body, even personal memories, are cancelled out at the time of death. His teaching that the soul is created by God from nothing “immediately” at the time of conception was re-affirmed by John Paul II in 1996. There is now some evidence, which I shall be outlining in a later section, which indicates that people who have had a heart transplant are sometimes affected by the personality of the donor.7 Even Christian tradition recognizes the heart as the seat of sublime emotions such as love. For these and other reasons it is difficult to accept the drastic separation of the “soul” from the human body envisaged in substance dualism. David Chalmers, however, presents a modern version of dualism in his 1996 book, The Conscious Mind8. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University in Canberra. He points out that, as almost everything in the world can be explained in physical terms, it is natural to hope that consciousness can be explained in this way too. Primitive people thought that illnesses were caused by “spirits” or “devils”, but now we know that many illness are caused by physical agents such bacteria or viruses; if I am bitten by a mad dog I don’t have to simply hope that prayer will keep me well, I can take injections to prevent rabies. Chalmers argues that consciousness cannot be explained in physical terms in the same way that rabies can: “No explanation given wholly in physical terms can ever account for the emergence of conscious experience.” In other words, according to him, consciousness cannot be reductively explained, in the sense that conscious experiences cannot all be “reduced” to physical phenomena in the brain. To demonstrate this in philosophical terminology we need to show that “consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical.” 7 Pearsall, Paul: “The Heart’s Code” Publisher: Broadway Books, New York. Published: 1998 8 Chalmers, David: “The Conscious Mind” Publisher: Oxford University Press. Published: 1996

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“Supervenience” is an idea developed by analytical philosophers of the twentieth century, and was first applied to the philosophy of mind by Donald Davidson in 1970, He wrote: “Mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics.” The implications of this statement are: (a) No two objects can differ in their mental properties without differing in their physical properties. (b) A single object cannot change its mental properties without changing its physical properties. In other words, there are no mental differences without physical differences. My understanding of the idea of supervenience is that if two individuals have the thought, “I believe in God”, at a particular moment, both their brains undergo the same kind of change at that moment. Leaving that controversial statement aside, it is generally held that biological properties supervene on (depend on) physical properties. Biological properties may be regarded as high-level properties, while physical properties are low-level ones. Chalmers goes on to make a distinction between natural supervenience and logical supervenience. Natural supervenience will hold when, among all situations that could occur in nature, those with the same distribution of A-properties have the same distribution of B-properties. For example, the weight of an object (the gravitational pull exerted on it) is always proportional to its mass in all known natural situations. We are then asked to imagine “another Universe” in which the laws of physics are different, and where the relationship of gravitational pull to mass is different. In that case, gravitational pull is not logically supervenient on mass, although it is naturally supervenient. B-properties supervene logically on A-properties if no two logically possible situations are identical with respect to their A-properties but distinct with respect to their B-properties. An example is that biological properties are logically supervenient on physical properties. If there are two Universes are physically identically down to the last atom, then the animals and plants in the two Universes should be identical. Chalmers goes on to consider the logical possibility of a zombie: Someone physically identical to me but with no conscious experience whatever. We can also consider the possibility of a zombie world where everyone is a zombie. My zombie twin will be able to report the contents of his internal states but this will not be accompanied by any real conscious experience. There will be no phenomenal feel. While there is something like it is to be a bat, as described by Thomas Nagel, there is nothing like it is to be a zombie. We need to note here that, unlike the zombies depicted in Hollywood movies, my zombie twin behaves quite normally just like most other human beings. Chalmers thinks it is unlikely that a zombie like my twin would be empirically possible, but it is logically possible. The notion of this kind of zombie is entirely intelligible. A materialist may argue that my zombie twin’s behaviour, which is exactly like mine, proves that he does have conscious experiences. My answer would be that it

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is quite plausible that the zombie’s behaviour would have evolved due to social conditioning rather than due to conscious experience. For instance, he would have learnt as a child that smiling and saying please would induce his parents to give him food even though smiling is not accompanied by any warm feeling inside. If it is logically possible for a zombie to exist in the sense that he behaves like any other human being but lacks conscious experience, it follows that consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical. Consciousness is a surprising feature of the Universe, and our grounds for belief in consciousness derive solely from our own experience of it.

Materialism and Strong AI Joseph Levine in his book Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness has written, “There are those who argue that without a clear definition of the term “physical” the doctrine of materialism is without content”. The problem is that when we try to define the word “physical” we come up against Hempel’s Dilemma, which may be outlined as follows: If everything in the world is ultimately explicable in the terms of physics, what are we to consider as the proper terms of physics? We define the physical as whatever is currently explained by our best physical theories, e.g., quantum mechanics, general relativity. However, current theories of physics cannot explain the working of the mind. If we counter that more advanced physics will be able to do so in the future, materialism becomes the circular claim that all phenomena are explicable in terms of physics because physics properly defined is whatever explains all phenomena. Noam Chomsky has pointed out that, according modern physical concepts like quantum physics, there is no longer any definite conception of body, and therefore mind-body dualism has become meaningless. The Australian philosopher J. J. C. Smart attempts to overcome Hempel’s Dilemma by arguing that the laws of physics are pretty clear in defining the properties of “bulk matter”, as opposed to the physics of subatomic particles; the brain is bulk matter, so we do understand the physics of the brain. Although it appears at first glance that Strong AI is a version of materialism, John Searle argues that this is not so. The Strong AI project is based on the separation of software (the mind) from hardware (the brain). Searle writes that this is “a kind of last gasp of dualism”. When Ray Kurzweil, a proponent of strong AI, estimates that computer power will sufficient for a complete brain simulation by the year 2029, he is envisaging the possibility of running the software of the mind on hardware which is independent of the brain. Searle presents a neat argument against strong AI:

(1) Computer programs are entirely syntactical (They deal with the relationships between symbols, usually 0’s and 1’s).

(2) Minds have semantics (Refers to aspects of meaning). (3) Syntax is not the same as, nor by itself sufficient for, semantics. (4) Therefore computer programs are not minds.

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Even though he rejects Strong AI it thus appear that John Searle is more materialist than Daniel Dennett, for he believes that “the mind and consciousness are concrete, physical, biological processes like growth, life, or digestion”.9 Searle specifically rejects dualism: “To accept dualism is to deny the scientific worldview we have painfully achieved over the past several centuries”, “One can accept the existence and irreducibility of consciousness as a biological phenomenon without accepting the ontology of traditional dualism”. Searle goes on to confess his ignorance about how the brain produces consciousness, but he is optimistic that the “next generation of neurobiologists” will come up with an answer. He states: “If we know anything about the world, we know in fact that brain processes do cause our states of consciousness”. It is my view that Searle is contradicting himself: In stating categorically that brain processes cause our states of consciousness, he is in fact saying that consciousness is reducible to brain processes. He regards consciousness as being irreducible only insofar as it is not reducible to a computer program. I have to however acknowledge that Searle’s position is referred to by other philosophers like David Chalmers as “nonreductive physicalism” or biological materialism. Chalmers disagrees with physicalism, reductive or nonreductive; he states that even if we knew every last detail of the physics of the universe, that information would not lead us to postulate the existence of conscious experience. My knowledge of consciousness comes from my own case, not from any external observation. To put it in another way, there is an epistemic asymmetry in our knowledge of consciousness that is not present in our knowledge of other phenomena (epistemology is that branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge). Chalmers states that, if a physicalist gives any account of the physical processes purported to underlie consciousness, there will always be a further question: Why are these processes accompanied by conscious experience? This is not the case with other physiological phenomena in the brain or other parts of the body; it should be quite possible to work out the physical processes involved in something like control of heart rate, and the explanation given will be a comprehensive one. The explanation of consciousness is not just a case of working out the structure and function of the brain. There is an explanatory gap between the physical level and conscious experience. This does not mean of course that physical facts are irrelevant to the explanation of consciousness; it is very useful to know the neuronal pathways that lead to the experience of pain, but the pathways don’t tell us how the subjective experience is produced. Having argued his case admirably thus far, Chalmers seems to go astray by postulating an implausible variety of mind-body dualism. He disagrees with the dualism of Descartes, who conceived of a separate realm of mental substance that exerts its own influence on physical processes. Chalmers goes along with the consensus view of modern science that the physical world is more or less causally closed; for every physical event, there is a physical sufficient 9 Searle, John: “The Mystery of Consciousness (New York Review of Books Collections)” Publisher: New York Review Books. Published: 1990

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cause. In other words, he believes that science has disproved Cartesian dualism. Chalmers puts forward instead a kind of property dualism: Conscious experience involves properties of an individual that are not entailed by the physical properties of that individual. Consciousness is a feature of the world over and above the physical features of the world, but it is not a separate “substance”. Chalmers further characterizes his view of dualism as naturalistic dualism. Although he believes that a theory of physics will never explain consciousness, he thinks it will be possible to discover the fundamental properties of consciousness and the new fundamental laws which govern it. These will be psychophysical laws which will not interfere with physical laws. Chalmers admits that according to his theory consciousness seems to lack causal efficacy, but seems blasé about the far-reaching implications of such a view. If I feel angry about a certain state of affairs in the world and feel motivated to do something about it, according to Chalmers’ view my anger has nothing to do with the course of action I “decide” to follow. Although I have feelings which set me apart from my zombie twin, my actions are exactly the same as his. Not many people would agree with this point of view. One may not agree with Searle’s views but he is always interesting to read. He writes that “the dirty secret of contemporary neuroscience is that so far we do not have a unifying theoretical principle of neuroscience” in the way that we have an atomic theory of matter, a germ theory of disease, or a blood-pumping theory of the heart. The basic theories of how impulses are conducted along nerve fibres by electrical activity, and transmitted from one neuron to the next by chemical transmitters, can account for simple phenomena like reflex activity, how touching a hot stove makes one immediately withdraw one’s hand. What we don’t understand is how nerve impulses going round and round in Beethoven’s brain resulted in him composing the 9th Symphony. John Bickle, Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, is a reductive materialist: “The implications of recent experimental work are clear: molecular and cellular consciousness studies are following in the ruthlessly reductive footsteps of molecular and cellular cognition more generally. Who says we can’t do a molecular biology of consciousness?”10. Although John Bickle is primarily a philosopher he dabbles in neuroscience. He claims that the features of phenomenal consciousness are related to “agonistic activities at subunits of gamma-amino-butyric acid type A (GABA) receptor proteins”. To prevent the reader being blinded by science as Bickle appears to be, I will explain that there are several chemicals in the brain, including GABA, which are referred to as neurotransmitters. This means that they enable the transmission of electrical nerve impulses from one nerve cell to the next. Bickle quotes an experiment in which a drug affecting a particular GABA receptor had an effect on the conscious awareness of mice! He hopes that if this kind of research continues scientists will eventually be able to explain consciousness in terms of molecular biology. Bickle’s position is one of reductionism, the

10 “Who Says You Can't Do a Molecular Biology of Consciousness?” in Maurice Schouten and Huib Looren de Jong (Editors) “The Matter of the Mind, Philosophical Essays on Psychology, Neuroscience and Reduction” Oxford: Blackwell (2007)

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belief that all phenomena including mental phenomena can be reduced, first to cellular physiology, then to chemical reactions, and ultimately to physical equations. Reductionism has been wonderfully effective in the physical sciences, enabling for instance the reduction of all the millions of chemical substances to just three constituent particles – protons, neutron, and electrons. It is understandable that philosophers and scientists dream of doing the same thing in the study of the mind, but unfortunately their dream does not coincide with reality. Any attempt to reduce the mind to its constituent parts results in the death of the mind. This is why these reductionist philosophies are Philosophies of Death. They are quite popular as, according to the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, necrophilia (love of death) is a prominent feature of modern civilization.11

11 Fromm, Erich: “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness” Publisher: Henry Holt & Co. Published: 1973

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The Philosophy of Life Having briefly surveyed the field of Consciousness Studies, we see that as long as consciousness is regarded as an “object” such studies will not yield useful information about the nature of Mind. The Smart way of studying Mind is not by taking it apart, but rather by accepting its subjective nature and then by investigating how it is related to the rest of the Universe. Science and philosophy are laboring under the taboo of not being able study the Mind from the inside; they will not ask the question, “Who is it that experiences consciousness?” The theologian Alan Watts has referred to this as “the taboo against knowing who you are”. The following is a “working model” of Mind which acknowledges the reality of human subjective experiences, and also accommodates most of the facts about Mind which have been revealed by scientific research: (1) Mind is (a) that which comprehends and utilizes information, (b) that which perceives, and (c) that which wills. Matter is the carrier of information and that which is perceived. (2) As far as we know, neither Mind nor Matter exists without the other. (3) Mind and Matter are different categories, not different “substances”. I shall deal first with an immediate objection that may be raised against this approach to the study of the Mind, namely that the distinction between subject and object is an artificial one, a mere convention of language. I acknowledge that I have only presented a model of Mind which does not claim to be the ultimate reality but which, I feel, is a useful concept in view of the limitations of the human intellect. The ultimate reality may be something like the unus mundus (one world) postulated by Carl Jung, described as “beyond the separation of reality into physical and mental” and “outside the human categories of time and space”.12 I shall be considering the unus mundus in more detail in a later section.

12 Storr, Anthony: “The Essential Jung: Selected Writings Introduced by Anthony Storr”, p.331 Publisher: Fontana, London. Published: 1983

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“Matter is the carrier of information”; what does this mean? The genetic code is an obvious example of this – The storage of information in the DNA molecule according to the sequence of four building blocks called nucleotides in very long chains. It is generally assumed that information accessible to the Mind is stored in the brain in a material form, the nature of which has not been fully elucidated. This information only becomes meaningful if and when Mind attempts to access it in the living state. If someone dies carrying a vital secret we cannot discover the secret by cutting open the brain and applying the most sophisticated techniques to it. I am here using the term “Mind” as roughly equivalent to the “Self” as used in the Vedanta-Sutras as mentioned previously. According to Vedanta, “Consciousness is the attribute of a permanent conscious Self”. I prefer the term “Mind” to “Self” because “Self” is a term associated with the concept of personal identity, which is essentially a social construct. What is consciousness, and how does it arise? Consciousness is the subjective experience of Mind when it perceives, and when it comprehends and utilizes information. The weight of current scientific evidence is in favour of the view that most conscious phenomena are related to the activity of the brain; the brain processes information but cannot comprehend it. There can be no consciousness without the Mind. When the Mind is processing and utilizing information, the subjective experience of this is “thinking”. Neurophysiologists have observed that thinking is associated with electrical activation of the muscles of his larynx, as if he is speaking his thoughts silently to himself. However, we cannot assume that thinking is “nothing but” this neurophysiological process. Furthermore, there can be awareness in the absence of thinking. It is possible that consciousness was an attribute of Mind before brains evolved, but I do not know that. What I know is that consciousness did evolve, implying that the information-utilizing power of Mind was directed towards that end. There is of course no reason for supposing that the evolution of consciousness as we know it is the final goal of Mind; the evolution of conscious organisms has resulted in an exponential increase in the volume and quality of information being generated, and it is quite possible that the moral implications of such information are now being processed as will become clearer in later chapters. While it is true that consciousness as we experience it depends on the activity of the brain, we cannot say that this is the only form of consciousness. Near-death experiences provide evidence of a more intense kind of consciousness at a time when the brain is dying. It appears that the kind of consciousness mediated by the brain is a restricted one appropriate to the functioning of that particular organism. With regard to the meaning of mind in the Buddhist Dhammapada - all things are preceded by the mind, led by the mind, created by the mind - I differ from the Dhammapada in stating clearly that, as far as we know, Mind does not precede Matter. I do however agree with the interpretation of Buddhism which states that all creation exists as a manifestation of one underlying Attribute-less Mind.13 This view is linked to the

13 Todd Lorentz: “Nonduality, Language, and the Buddhist Doctrine of Anatman” Crossing Boundaries – an interdisciplinary journal. VOL 1, No 2 - Spring 2002

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Buddhist doctrine of Anatman, meaning “non-selfhood, the absence of limiting self-identity in people and things”. Todd Lorentz of the Department of Religious Studies, University of Alberta, interprets this teaching with the idea that a reflection of this all-encompassing Mind arises in the human brain as ego or self-awareness. Mind comes to identify itself through the many individualized “loci of awareness” in creation. The reader may object that he does not agree with statement (2) because it is obvious that Matter, as exemplified by a rock in his garden, can exist perfectly well independent of Mind. My reply to that is that I am here referring to Matter in general, not to individual features of the landscape. Another reader may say that there were no “minds” in the Universe until human beings or other intelligent creatures evolved; therefore, Matter existed for billions of years before Mind made its appearance. Again, my response is that I am referring to Mind in general, not to individual minds. We as human beings can only know Matter from the standpoint of Mind. The conventional explanation of the Universe given to us by astronomers and physicists is that Matter originated from the Big Bang 15 million years ago, and it is implied that Mind was absent at that time. I disagree with the idea that the origin of Mind can be arbitrarily dated to coincide with, for instance, the appearance in evolution of Homo sapiens; the human mind as we know it is the culmination of a process that is at least 15 million years old. The ideas of process philosophy have a venerable history going back to Heraclitus of Ephesus (b. ca. 540 B.C.), and continuing to the twentieth century with Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). It is a philosophy that can be considered in opposition to atomism, which is the theory that all the objects in the universe are composed of very small, indestructible building blocks. Quantum physics, by demonstrating that subatomic particles like electrons exist simultaneously as waves, has called into question the validity of atomism as a fundamental philosophy. We have to now conceive of matter not as planetary system of particle-like objects, but as a collection of fluctuating processes organized into relatively stable structures by statistical regularities. Furthermore, the theory of biological evolution is perfectly consistent with process philosophy. Am I then advocating panpsychism? As the philosopher Colin McGinn puts it, panpsychism is the idea that “all matter, not merely brain matter, has a little touch of consciousness inside it”. This is a counter-intuitive idea that I don’t agree with; humans and other animals with complex brains are able to have conscious experiences, and that has ethical consequences. I may want to kill an animal for its meat, but I don’t want to cause it unnecessary pain. There is, therefore, a fundamental difference between a lamb and a rock, and that difference is what we refer to as consciousness. In statement (3), I use the phrase “as far as we know”, because we do not know the state of affairs which existed before the Big Bang. Some may say that Pure Mind existed in the absence of Matter before the Big Bang, but I do not know that; I am agnostic on that point. Dualism with reference to Mind and Matter is a concept which states that these are different “substances” which can exist independently of each other. Christian theology is dualist because it states that Mind (the Soul) can exist independent of Matter. My position is that, as far as we know, Mind and Matter always go together, and therefore my position is not a dualist one.

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Am I then advocating monism? I am not doing so because I am not saying that Mind and matter are the same substance. I do not accept that, with regard to Mind and Matter, dualism and monism are mutually exclusive concepts. To say that Mind arises from the activity of the brain is a “category-mistake” like saying that evil arises from iron. The term category-mistake was introduced by Gilbert Ryle in his book Concept of Mind.14 He gives this illustration to show what he means by a category-mistake: “A foreigner watching his first game of cricket learns what are the functions of the bowlers, the batsmen, the fielders, the umpires and the scorers. He then says 'But there is no one left on the field to contribute the famous element of team-spirit. I see who does the bowling, the batting and the wicket-keeping; but I do not see whose role it is to exercise esprit de corps.’ Once more, it would have to be explained that he was looking for the wrong type of thing. Team-spirit is not another cricketing-operation supplementary to all of the other special tasks. It is, roughly, the keenness with which each of the special tasks is performed, and performing a task keenly is not performing two tasks. Certainly exhibiting team-spirit is not the same thing as bowling or catching, but nor is it a third thing such that we can say that the bowler first bowls and then exhibits team-spirit or that a fielder is at a given moment either catching or displaying esprit de corps.” Ryle’s point is that “team-spirit” is in a different category from the activities of the game of cricket such as batting and bowling. He then applies this concept to the mind/matter problem: “My destructive purpose is to show that a family of radical category-mistakes is the source of the double-life theory. The representation of a person as a ghost mysteriously ensconced in a machine derives from this argument. Because, as is true, a person's thinking, feeling and purposive doing cannot be described solely in the idioms of physics, chemistry and physiology, therefore they must be described in counterpart idioms. As the human body is a complex organised unit, so the human mind must be another complex organised unit, though one made of a different sort of stuff and with a different sort of structure.” Ryle’s purpose in his book is to argue against what he sees as the error made by Descartes in postulating the dualism of mind and body. I agree with him insofar as I do not postulate a human mind which is “another complex organised unit” residing within the brain. He does not make the category-mistake of assuming that the mind, or consciousness, can be derived from physico-chemical processes in the brain. Is my position one of dualism? It is dualistic in the sense that Mind and Matter are two ontologically separate categories. (Ontology is the study of conceptions of reality and the nature of being). My view, however, differs from both substance dualism and property dualism. 14 Ryle, Gilbert: “The Concept of Mind” Publisher: Hutchinson’s University Library. Published: 1949

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Substance dualism is famously associated with Descartes and postulates that Mind or the Soul is a separate substance from the Body. This view puts Mind and Body into the same category, that of substance, and I am unable to agree with that. I would not even describe Mind as non-material because that would put it into the same category as Matter. Property dualism holds that while the world is constituted of just one kind of substance - the physical kind - there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties. I cannot see how a physical object can have mental properties, although a computer can create an illusion of being able to think. While the conscious experience of pain is correlated with neurophysiological changes, it is misleading to regard pain as a “property” of the brain. We can say that a dog appears to be in pain, but nobody says that the dog’s brain is in pain. I am therefore neither a substance dualist nor a property dualist. If Mind and Matter are ontologically distinct categories, one may ask how Mind “acts on” Matter and vice versa. There is evidence that this relationship has existed from the time of the Big Bang 15 million years ago, or even before that. The Big Bang which gave rise to the Universe, rather than being a mindless explosion, appears to have been exquisitely fine-tuned, delicately balanced for the production of life. This means that the physical “constants” are such that the galaxies, stars, and planets were able to evolve. If the numerical constants had deviated by even 2% either way, such evolution would not have been possible. The only chemical elements present immediately after the Big Bang were hydrogen and helium; the heavier elements such as carbon, essential for life, were produced much later in stars.15 The reader may ask why, in the account of the relationship between Mind and Matter I have given above, I am referring to Mind in general rather than to individual human minds. It is true that when I think of Mind I usually think of “my mind”. This is because the social construct of personal identity has become associated with the idea of Mind. This convention of ordinary speech is not helpful when considering the ultimate nature of mind. When I go to the barber and say, “I would like a hair-cut”, I am asking him to cut my hair and not anyone else’s. However, if I start thinking of my mind as something inside my head I am losing touch with reality. It is reasonable to think of Mind in general just as we can legitimately think of Matter in general. Those who have been fortunate enough to have a mystical experience appear to have been able to surpass the boundaries of self and thereby have a direct experience of the nature of Mind. Bernadette Roberts is a modern mystic who was a cloistered Carmelite nun for ten years. She later left the Carmelite order, married, and had four children. She describes the mystical experience as the “experience of no-self”. She writes, “…. I was all the more surprised and bewildered when many years later I came upon a permanent state in which there was no self, no higher self, true self, or anything that could be called a self”.16 It appears that she was

15 Laszlo, Ervin: “Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything” Publisher: Inner Traditions. Published: 2004 16 Bernadette Roberts: “The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center” Publisher: Shambhala Publications. Published: 1985

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experiencing the true nature of Mind as “that which perceives and knows”, something empty and luminous, without differentiation into many individual minds. The Philosophy of Life is based on open-minded scientific inquiry. I shall now consider the implications of several strands of scientific research for my hypothesis regarding the nature of Mind.

Near Death Experiences Death, as Hamlet observed, is the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, but some people do return with their stories from the fringes of this territory. Near-death experience (NDE) has become much more common in the past half-century because of modern methods of cardiac resuscitation often including the use of a defibrillator machine, enabling those who have suffered cardiac arrest to be revived before permanent brain damage has occurred. One of the first people to systematically study NDE’s was Raymond Moody. In 1965, when he was an undergraduate student studying philosophy at the University of Virginia, he heard from the professor of psychiatry in the School of Medicine an account of the fantastic experience he personally went through when he was “clinically dead” (The term “near-death experience” had not yet been coined). Some years later, after Moody had received his Ph.D. in philosophy, he became a lecturer at a university and one of the topics he taught was on the possibility of human survival of biological death. He was careful not to mention the two cases of NDE he had come across up to that point. He found that in every class of about thirty students at least one would meet him after the lecture and relate an experience of NDE he or she had personally heard about. This led Moody to actively search for cases, resulting in a number of doctors referring patients whom they had resuscitated. By the time he published Life After Life in 1975 he had collected one hundred and fifty cases, out of which he interviewed fifty people in great detail.17 Moody noticed that, while each case had its unique features, there was also a great deal of similarity in the experiences, enabling him to describe a “typical case” as follows: A man is dying and, as he reaches the point of greatest physical distress, he hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor. He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a loud ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel. After this, he suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body, but still in the immediate physical environment, and he sees his own body from a distance, as though he is a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from this unusual vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval. 17 Moody, Raymond: “Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon--Survival of Bodily Death” Publisher: HarperOne. Published: 1975

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After a while, he collects himself and becomes more accustomed to his odd condition. He notices that he still has a "body," but one of a very different nature and with very different powers from the physical body he has left behind. Soon other things begin to happen. Others come to meet and to help him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died, and a loving, warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered before-a being of light-appears before him. This being asks him a question, nonverbally, to make him evaluate his life and helps him along by showing him a panoramic, instantaneous playback of the major events of his life. At some point he finds himself approaching some sort of barrier or border, apparently representing the limit between earthly life and the next life. Yet, he finds that he must go back to the earth, that the time for his death has not yet come. At this point he resists, for by now he is taken up with his experiences in the afterlife and does not want to return. He is overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love, and peace. Despite his attitude, though, he somehow reunites with his physical body and lives. Later he tries to tell others, but he has trouble doing so. In the first place, he can find no human words adequate to describe these unearthly episodes. He also finds that others scoff, so he stops telling other people. Still, the experience affects his life profoundly, especially his views about death and its relationship to life. One of the characteristics of NDE Moody emphasizes is their ineffability – The experience is so out-of-the-ordinary that the person has difficulty finding words to describe it. Many people describe extremely pleasant feelings and sensations during the early stages of the NDE. The next stage, when they have the sensation of being pulled very rapidly through a dark tunnel, may not be so pleasant. An NDE sometimes includes an out-of-body experience, as in this account of a female subject: About a year ago, I was admitted to the hospital with heart trouble, and the next morning, lying in the hospital bed, I began to have a very severe pain in my chest. I pushed the button beside the bed to call for the nurses, and they came in and started working on me. I was quite uncomfortable lying on my back so I turned over, and as I did I quit breathing and my heart stopped beating. Just then, I heard the nurses shout, "Code pink! Code pink!" As they were saying this, I could feel myself moving out of my body and sliding down between the mattress and the rail on the side of the bed -actually it seemed as if I went through the rail-on down to the floor. Then, I started rising upward, slowly. On my way up, I saw more nurses come running into the room-there must have been a dozen of them. My doctor happened to be making his rounds in the hospital so they called him and I saw him come in, too. I thought, "I wonder what he's doing here." I drifted on up past the light fixture - I saw it from the side and very distinctly - And then I stopped, floating right below the ceiling, looking down. The physical sensation of vision appears to be intact when the subject is “out of his body”, sometimes even more acute than normal, whereas smells and tastes are never reported. It is not clear whether the sense of hearing is present, but subjects may report that they were able to “pick up the thoughts” of people in the vicinity. One lady described the experience thus:

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“I could see people all around, and I could understand what they were saying. I didn't hear them, audibly, like I'm hearing you. It was more like knowing what they were thinking, exactly what they were thinking, but only in my mind, not in their actual vocabulary. I would catch it the second before they opened their mouths to speak.” Many people become aware of the presence of other spiritual beings in the vicinity, who may be there to ease the transition of the person to death, or possibly to tell him that he needs to return to earthly life. These beings may be people known to the individual who have already died. However, one of the most memorable and wonderful aspects of the experience is the encounter with the “being of light”. A Gallup poll conducted in 1980 found that of an estimated eight million Americans who had experienced an NDE, 14% experienced “light phenomena” and 23% encountered other beings”. Raymond Moody’s work on NDE was first published forty years ago, and there have been many reports on the subject since then. The NDE experience of Anita Moorjani is remarkable because it was apparently associated with the unexplained healing of a malignant condition – Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.18 Moorjani is of Indian descent, British-educated, and a citizen of Hong Kong. She had the NDE in 2006, 3 ½ years after the onset of her illness. The diagnosis was confirmed by needle biopsy of a swollen lymph gland in her neck. As she was afraid of chemotherapy she got herself treated by a naturopath. In 2005 she developed fluid in her chest cavity, a known complication of the disease, and the fluid had to be removed several times. By February 2006 she was extremely ill and was rushed to hospital.

The scans showed that the lymphoma had spread throughout her body. Moorjani was

drifting in and out of consciousness. While in this state she claims to have heard a conversation between her husband and the oncologist outside her room, 40 feet away. The oncologist said, “Her organs have already shut down – She is dying of organ failure. She is too unstable to even perform a biopsy to determine what drugs to inject.” She was given chemotherapy, intravenous fluids etc.

After hearing this, she states, “Then I actually "crossed over" to another dimension,

where I was engulfed in a total feeling of love. I also experienced extreme clarity of why I had the cancer, why I had come into this life in the first place, what role everyone in my family played in my life in the grand scheme of things, and generally how life works. The clarity and understanding I obtained in this state is almost indescribable. Words seem to limit the experience – I was at a place where I understood how much more there is than what we are able to conceive in our 3-dimensional world. I realized what a gift life was, and that I was surrounded by loving spiritual beings, who were always around me even when I did not know it.”

These spiritual beings seemed to communicate with her in some way. She was made to

understand that she had a choice of whether to come back to life or go towards death. One of the things Moorjani wanted to know was, if she chose life would she come back to a very sick body? She was made to understand that if she chose life her body would heal very quickly, 18 http://www.anitamoorjani.com

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starting within days. She chose life after much deliberation. When she began to wake up after a number of hours she was greeted by doctors saying, “Good news – we got the results and her organs are functioning – we can’t believe it!! Her body really did seem like it had shut down!”

A lymph node biopsy done two weeks later showed no evidence of Hodgkin’s, and she

recovered completely over the next few weeks. When asked about religion, Moorjani’s reply was, “I was never very religious to begin with. I still don't believe in any particular religion; however this has strengthened my belief in spirituality, and my faith in the after life, and the power of our own higher self (soul).” There is no reference to either Moorjani or anyone else praying for her recovery from the illness.

Death is a “boundary condition” or a transitional state when the individual conscious mind apparently ceases to exist. Apart from near-death experiences other paranormal phenomena such as apparitions may occur at this time.

Deathbed Visions While near-death experiences occur in individuals who return to health after a life-threatening illness or accident, terminally ill patients sometimes report similar experiences, when they are referred to as “deathbed visions”. Deathbed visions were studied in the 1920’s by Sir William Barrett, a professor of physics at the Royal College of Science in Dublin. One of the cases was reported to him by his wife, Lady Barrett, who was an obstetrician. She was called to see a patient, Mrs. B., who was in labour and suffering from serious heart failure. This was her account: "When I entered the ward Mrs. B. held out her hands to me and said, 'Thank you, thank you for what you have done for me - for bringing the baby. Is it a boy or girl?' Then holding my hand tightly, she said, 'Don't leave me, don't go away, will you?' And after a few minutes, while the House Surgeon carried out some restorative measures, she lay looking up towards the open part of the room, which was brightly lighted, and said, 'Oh, don't let it get dark - it's getting so dark ... darker and darker.' Her husband and mother were sent for. "Suddenly she looked eagerly towards one part of the room, a radiant smile illuminating her whole countenance.’Oh, lovely, lovely,' she said. I asked, 'What is lovely?' 'What I see,' she replied in low, intense tones. 'What do you see?' 'Lovely brightness - wonderful beings.' It is difficult to describe the sense of reality conveyed by her intense absorption in the vision. "Then - seeming to focus her attention more intently on one place for a moment - she exclaimed, almost with a kind of joyous cry, 'Why, it's Father! Oh, he's so glad I'm coming; he is so glad. It would be perfect if only W. (her husband) could come too.' "Her baby was brought for her to see. She looked at it with interest, and then said, 'Do you think I ought to stay for baby's sake?' Then turning towards the vision again, she said, I can't - I can't stay; if you could see what I do, you would know I can't stay.'

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"But she turned to her husband, who had come in, and said, 'you won't let baby go to anyone who won't love him, will you?' Then she gently pushed him to one side, saying, 'Let me see the lovely brightness.' "I left shortly after, and the Matron took my place by the bedside. She lived for another hour, and appeared to have retained to the last the double consciousness of the bright forms she saw, and also of those tending her at the bedside, e.g. she arranged with the Matron that her premature baby should remain in hospital till it was strong enough to be cared for in an ordinary household.”19 Miriam Castle, the Matron of the hospital, gave further information: "I was present shortly before the death of Mrs. B., together with her husband and her mother. Her husband was leaning over her and speaking to her, when pushing him aside she said, 'Oh, don't hide it; it's so beautiful.' Then turning away from him towards me, I being on the other side of the bed, Mrs. B. said, 'Oh, why there's Vida,' referring to a sister of whose death three weeks previously she had not been told. Afterwards the mother, who was present at the time, told me, as I have said, that Vida was the name of a dead sister of Mrs. B.'s, of whose illness and death she was quite ignorant, as they had carefully kept this news from Mrs. B. owing to her serious illness.” To summarize, Mrs. B saw figures in the room which were not seen by others present. The technical term for this is “hallucination”. The question which arises is whether this was a delusive hallucination, meaning that there was no reality in what she saw, or a veridical hallucination, implying that there was a basis in reality. Another strange phenomenon occurring just after death was reported by Erlendur Haraldsson of the University of Iceland; this was the case of an “apparition” of a recently dead person occurring to an Indian doctor named Iyengar when she ill in bed with an infection, in a drowsy but conscious state.20 The granddaughter of the dead person, a medical student named Miss Kirti was with Dr. Iyengar at the time the latter had the apparition. Miss Kirti’s grandfather appeared to Dr. Iyengar and said to her, “Would you not send my child home”. In response to this, Dr. Iyengar asked Miss Kirti to go to her grandfather but she was reluctant to do so. Eventually she agreed to telephone her grandfather; an uncle came to the phone and informed her that Kirti’s grandfather had died half an hour before.

19 Barrett, Sir William “Death-Bed Visions - The Psychical Experiences of the Dying” Publisher: Rider & Co. Published: 1926 20 Erlendur Haraldsson (1987). The Iyengar-Kirti case. An apparitional case of the by-stander type. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 54, 64-67.

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Scientific Theories on NDE

Materialist scientists attempt to dismiss the NDE phenomenon by saying that these are “hallucinatory experiences due to hypoxia”. It is of course possible that cardiac arrest could lead to the brain being starved of oxygen (hypoxia), but other features of hypoxia such as myoclonic convulsions, retrograde amnesia for events prior to unconsciousness, and confusion and disorientation upon are awakening, are not usually found in patients reporting NDE’s. The use of the term “hallucination” here is an attempt to equate the NDE experience with the hallucinatory experiences of those with psychotic illness. A hallucination is defined in psychiatry as a sensory experience in which a person can see, hear, smell, taste, or feel something that is not there.

Some people who have an NDE report a “life review” in which almost their entire life

flashes into their consciousness in a very brief period of time. The scientist who wishes to prove that the life review is a hallucination must prove that the events seen in the NDE did not actually happen in that person’s lifetime; as far as I am aware this has not been demonstrated by any scientist. If the person sees a “being of light” in his NDE, we have to prove that the being of light does not exist.

Scientists who attempt to devalue NDE’s as hallucinations are guilty of a fundamental

logical error, because the only person who can logically say that his experience is a hallucination is the experiencer himself. Even in a patient with severe mental illness I cannot say that a particular experience is a hallucination; if he reports that he can hear a voice in the room which I cannot hear, it is possible that he has a special ability which I do not have. The clinical diagnosis of pathological hallucinations is only made if the patient shows other evidence of mental or physical impairment. People who have experienced NDE’s, by contrast, are rarely impaired by the experience; many people say that their NDE was a life-enhancing experience which has given them a new understanding of the meaning of life. Bruce Greyson, Professor of Personality Studies in the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has pointed out that many NDE’s are characterized by exceptionally clear thinking and peacefulness which are unlikely to arise from a hallucinatory state.21 After having experienced an NDE many individuals become more spiritual, have a renewed sense of purpose, appreciate life more, and show more concern for others. These changes may sometimes lead to social problems because the relatives and friends of the individual may have difficulty adjusting to them, and a relatively high divorce rate has been reported. Some individuals may need counseling or psychotherapy to help with emotional problems which have arisen from the experience. A support group where people who have had NDE’s can discuss their experiences among themselves is often very helpful.

It has been claimed that a drug called ketamine can produce most of the features of an

NDE. However, ketamine experiences usually involve bizarre imagery, are frightening, and recognized as illusions, whereas NDE subject usually find their experiences “realer than real”.

21 Greyson, B. / Rev. Psiq. Clín. 34, supl 1; 49-57, 2007

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Some Christians argue that NDE’s are proof of the existence of the individual soul and of “survival”. Unfortunately, this is not true as NDE’s are by definition “near-death” experiences; therefore such an experience is not evidence of life after death. What they do tell is that it is possible to have an intense perceptive and emotional experience when the brain is significantly impaired, strongly suggesting that the mind is not causally dependent on the brain.

From the scientific point of view one needs to consider whether the wide publicity

given to NDE’s since Raymond Moody published Life after Life in 1975 could influence people to give biased descriptions of their experiences. Geena Athappilly and colleagues at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois, compared the frequency of 15 phenomenological features Moody defined as characteristic of near-death experiences in 24 accounts collected before 1975 and in 24 more recent accounts matched on relevant demographic and situational variables.22 Near-death experience accounts collected after 1975 differed from those collected earlier only in increased frequency of tunnel phenomena and not in any of the remaining 14 features defined by Moody as characteristic of near-death experiences. These data challenge the hypothesis that near-death experience accounts are substantially influenced by prevailing cultural models.

Dr Pim van Lommel, Division of Cardiology, Hospital Rijnstate, Arnhem, Netherlands,

who carried out a prospective study on near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest in the Netherlands23, has written on the implications of NDE phenomena for our understanding of the mind. He points out that the belief that death is the end of mental as well as physical life is a factor which contributes to the fear of death.

When van Lommel began to ask his patients who had recovered from a cardiac arrest

about their experiences, fifty of them over a two year period described NDE’s. This observation led him to design the prospective study, which was the first of its kind. Previous studies of NDE had been retrospective studies in which 5-30 years may have elapsed between occurrence of the experience and its investigation, leaving open the possibility of the embellishment of memories over time.

In the prospective study, 344 consecutive survivors of cardiac arrest in ten Dutch

hospitals were interviewed within a few days of resuscitation, and 62 patients (18%) reported some recollection of the time of the arrest. Of these patients 41 (12%) had a “core experience” with the typical features of NDE. 30% of these reported moving through a tunnel, had an observation of a celestial landscape, or had a meeting with deceased relatives. About 25% of the patients with an NDE had an out-of-body experience and had communication with “the light”, and 13% experienced a “life review”. An NDE was more frequently reported at ages lower than 60 years. Unexpectedly, they found that significantly more patients who had an NDE, especially a deep experience, died within 30 days of CPR (p<0.0001).

22Athappilly GK, Greyson B, Stevenson I.(2006) Do prevailing societal models influence reports of near-death experiences?: a comparison of accounts reported before and after 1975. J Nerv Ment Dis.;194(3):218-22. 23 Lancet 2001; 358: 2039-45

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The holographic life review is described in detail: “All that has been done and thought

(during the person’s life) seems to be significant and stored. Insight is obtained about whether love was given or on the contrary withheld. Because one is connected with the memories, emotions and consciousness of another person, you experience the consequences of your own thoughts, words and actions to that other person at the very moment in the past that they occurred. Hence there is during a life review a connection with the fields of consciousness of other persons as well as with your own fields of consciousness (interconnectedness). Patients survey their whole life in one glance; time and space do not seem to exist during such an experience. Instantaneously they are where they concentrate upon (nonlocality), and they can talk for hours about the content of the life review even though the resuscitation only took minutes.” This is a quote from a patient: “Not only did I perceive everything from my own viewpoint, but I also knew the thoughts of everyone involved in the event, as if I had their thoughts within me. This meant that I perceived not only what I had done or thought, but even in what way it had influenced others, as if I saw things with all-seeing eyes. And so even your thoughts are apparently not wiped out. And all the time during the review the importance of love was emphasized.” Nearly all people who have experienced an NDE lose their fear of death.

van Lommel also performed a longitudinal study with taped interviews of all late

survivors with NDE 2 and 8 years following the cardiac arrest, along with a matched control group of survivors of cardiac arrest who did not report an NDE. This study was designed to assess whether the transformation in attitude toward life and death following an NDE is the result of having an NDE or the result of the cardiac arrest itself. In this follow-up research into transformational processes after NDE, they found a significant difference between patients with and without an NDE. The process of transformation took several years to consolidate. Patients with an NDE did not show any fear of death, they strongly believed in an afterlife, and their insight into what is important in life had changed: love and compassion for oneself, for others, and for nature. The long lasting transformational effect of an experience that lasts only a few minutes was a surprising finding.

The possible metaphysical significance of the NDE experience is discussed by van

Lommel in a chapter he contributed to a book entitled, “Brain Death and Disorders of Consciousness”.24 He points out that “the concept that consciousness and memories are localized in the brain has been thus far assumed but never scientifically proven”. How could a clear consciousness outside one’s body be experienced at a time that the brain no longer functions during a period of clinical death, with flat EEG? Complete cessation of cerebral circulation is found in cardiac arrest due to ventricular fibrillation (VF) during threshold testing at implantation of internal defibrillators. The cessation of cerebral blood flow results in the brain being starved of oxygen. Through many studies in both human and animal models electrical activity in the cerebral cortex and the deeper structures of the brain has been shown to be absent after a very short period of time during cardiac arrest. Progression to

24 “Brain Death and Disorders of Consciousness” Machado, C. and Shewmon, D.A., Eds. New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers, Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology Adv Exp Med Biol. 2004; 550: 115-132.

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isoelectricity (flat EEG) occurs within 10 to 20 seconds from the onset of cardiac arrest. In acute myocardial infarction the duration of cardiac arrest (VF) in the Coronary Care Unit (CCU) is usually 60-120 seconds and on the cardiac ward 2-5 minutes.

Patients with an NDE usually report a clear consciousness, in which cognitive

functioning, emotion, sense of identity, and memory from early childhood was possible, as well as sometimes perception from a position out and above their “dead” body (out-of-body experience). There are occasional cases of “veridical” out-of-body experience during cardiac arrest, giving further evidence for the experience occurring during the period of unconsciousness. One such case was reported by a nurse who participated in van Lommel’s study. She had removed the dentures of a patient while he was unconscious and placed them in the “crash car” (trolley with equipment for resuscitation). When she visits the ward a week later, the patient says, “That nurse knows where my dentures are”. He described floating above his body while unconscious and observing the doctors and nurses resuscitating him. He said that the nurse had put his dentures in the drawer of the crash car.

A brain starved of oxygen and with a flat EEG couldn’t hallucinate; it couldn’t do

anything at all. van Lommel considers the occurrence of vivid mental experiences in these circumstances as evidence for the nonlocality of consciousness. Although in everyday life the phenomena of consciousness are correlated with brain activity this relationship appears to break down when death is near. Even in a normally functioning brain, the correlation of consciousness with brain activity does not prove a causal relationship. Van Lommel states, “Specific areas of the brain have been shown to become metabolically active in response to a thought or feeling. However, those studies, although providing evidence for the role of neuronal networks as an intermediary for the manifestation of thoughts, do not necessary imply that those cells also produce the thoughts.”

One of the scientists currently researching this field is Dr. Sam Parnia, Senior Clinical

Research Fellow, University of Southampton, U.K.; Fellow in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Weill Cornell Medical Center New York. Reviewing the literature in 2007, he observed that, in different studies, 10-20% of those resuscitated after a cardiac arrest report some sort of near-death experience.25 The conclusion to be drawn from these studies appears to be that the occurrence of lucid, well-structured thought processes together with reasoning and memory formation as well as an ability to recall detailed accounts of events from the period of resuscitation is a scientific paradox. This is due to the fact that studies of cerebral physiology during cardiac arrest have shown that cerebral blood flow and cerebral function are severely impaired and therefore one would expect loss of consciousness during this time.

Parnia writes that EEG monitoring during a cardiac arrest has shown an initial slowing

of the EEG waves which then progress to an isoelectric (flat) line within approximately 10 to 20 seconds and remain flat during the cardiac arrest until the resumption of cardiac output. Even after the heart is re-started it could take 10 to 15 minutes for the electrical activity of the brain to return to normal. One would expect that if any thought processes occurred in such a

25 Sam Parnia (2007) “Do reports of consciousness during cardiac arrest hold the key to discovering the nature of consciousness?” Medical Hypotheses, Volume 69, Issue 4, Pages 933-937

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globally disordered brain they would be fragmentary and meaningless. What are in fact being reported by 10 to 20% of such patients are experiences which are by no means confusional but on the contrary indicate heightened awareness and attention.

Near-death experiences are admirably suited for scientific study because the relevant

“material” is readily available for any prospective researcher. Any cardiac ward in any city will have patients who have had a cardiac arrest and been resuscitated. The most significant feature of these experiences, in my view, is that they are meaningful to the person concerned and sometimes even life-changing. This would not be the case if they were merely accidental by-products of a diseased brain, such as the hallucinations which occur during alcohol withdrawal in the condition known as delirium tremens. One never hears of someone writing about the memorable experiences they had while detoxing from alcohol, whereas there are thousands of accounts of NDE on the internet, and a number of books written by survivors. Near death experiences provide prima facie evidence that there are dimensions of the mind which cannot be explained by the electrical activity of brain cells.

Past Life Regression and the New Age Lifestyle When my wife and I lived in Bristol, England, we enjoyed occasional excursions to the town of Glastonbury, about 30 miles to the South West, a pleasant drive through the lush green countryside. This town had been the site of a famous Roman Catholic Abbey, laid waste a few centuries ago by the robber barons of Henry the VIIIth. Further back in time were legends of King Arthur and his Knights and even the Holy Grail. The town is now famous as one of the epicenters of the New Age Movement in Britain. A stroll down the quaint High Street will take you past scores of shops selling colourful esoteric objects and books, their windows plastered with posters and cards advertising every kind of therapy to help you regain your lost soul. One of the therapies available in Glastonbury is “past-life regression”. The New Age lifestyle has been embraced by many in the West fed up of the materialism which is constantly forced down their throats, but one is wary of a certain lack of discernment which seems to characterize that philosophy. Charismatic individuals give their backing to the latest fad which is then claimed to be the solution to many problems. Past life regression is one of these popular themes, and one wonders whether the people who describe their previous lives on the great island of Atlantis which sank in the ocean 10,000 years ago are allowing their imaginations to run riot. It is therefore interesting to note that two individuals who did not subscribe to New Age beliefs and who had been trained in rigorous scientific methods have written books on the subject; they are the Clinical Psychologist Helen Wambach and the Psychiatrist Raymond Moody. Professionals working in these disciplines are taught to take the stories their patients tell them with a pinch of salt, not because the patient would deliberately lie, but because we are all capable of self-deception at times.

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Moody is a practising Christian and does not believe in reincarnation. His view is that Past Life Regression does not provide scientific evidence for reincarnation as it is almost impossible to find objective evidence that the subject being hypnotized was “actually there” in the historical period he describes. He does, however, acknowledge the usefulness of this procedure as a psychotherapeutic tool. Psychologist Helen Wambach, who practiced in the San Francisco Bay area, studied the phenomenon more systematically than Moody and applied some ingenious methods to determine whether memories of past lives were pure fantasy or had some objective basis in reality.26 Psychiatrist Anthony Storr has argued that recall of past lives is really an example of cryptoamnesia, suggesting that these are “hidden memories” of incidents read about in historical novels or seen in movies. The task faced by Wambach was to show if possible that the past life memories reported by her subjects related to real events in the past and could not be explained in terms of cryptoamnesia or conscious fabrication. As the small university at which she taught refused to fund her research, she decided to run a past lives workshop charging thirty dollars for an eight-hour session with four hypnotic trips. The hypnosis was conducted in a group setting, approximately 14 subjects attending each session. The research was conducted over several years, and she eventually obtained two samples, the first of 804 cases, and the second of 293. In her preliminary studies Wambach had found that, irrespective of the sex of the subject, the past life described could be of either sex. A particular individual could have some past lives as a male and others as a female. One of her hypotheses was that if her subjects were describing real past events the overall sex ratio should be close to the biologically expected figure. It has been known since 1926 that, in mammals, male births invariably occur slightly in excess.27 Sex is determined at conception in mammals, in contrast to reptiles and fish where it is determined after conception, during embryogenesis, according to ambient environmental temperature. The male to female ratio of live births is generally expressed as the ratio of male live births divided by total live births (M/F), and the human M/F is expected to be 0.515, with approximately 3% more males born than females. The reason for this discrepancy is uncertain as testicles produce equal numbers of X-bearing and Y-bearing spermatozoa. A recent study has shown that in Mediterranean countries M/F ratio is just over 0.515, while in more northern countries M/F ratio is 0.513.28 The sex ratios obtained by Wambach for the “past lives” of her subjects are as follows:

26 Wambach, Helen: “Reliving Past Lives: The Evidence under Hypnosis” Publisher: Harper & Row, New York. Published: 1978 27 Parkes AS. “The mammalian sex ratio”. Hum Reprod 1926;2:1–51 28 Grech V, Vassallo-Agius P and Savona-Ventura C (2003) “Secular trends in sex ratios at birth in North America and Europe over the second half of the 20th century”. J Epidemiol Community Health 57,612–615.

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Male Female Sample One (804 cases) 50.3 49.7 Sample Two (293 cases) 50.9 49.1 This is a remarkable result. If the ratios had deviated markedly in either direction, one would have suspected that the subjects were indulging in wish-fulfillment. The observed closeness of the figures to the expected biological ratio strongly suggests that the past lives had a basis in reality. As the figures were only obtained by analysis of the data at the end of the study, a “conspiracy” among the subjects to produce these results was not possible. Apart from the bare statistics, the details of life in the past described by her subjects are fascinating and convincing. For instance, in response to a standard question asked by Wambach they described a typical meal. In B.C. periods a number of people described eating wild animals. This was rarely a large animal, more usually a small creature such as a squirrel. One subject described it thus: “It’s very greasy, and as I bite into it I can feel the grease on my mouth”. From 2000 B.C. onwards, the most common meal was cereal grain in the form of a mush, ground up, mixed with water and warmed. It would appear that bread-making technology was not available to poorer people in the past. The proportion of past lives in the lower classes, defined as a peasant working on the land or a soldier who had no authority over other soldiers, ranged from 59% to 77% in different periods. Wambach’s comment on this was, “If my subjects were fantasizing, their fantasies were bleak and barren”. British Jungian analyst Roger Woolger continues to practice Past Life Regression, having incorporated it into a kind of therapy he terms Deep Memory Process. An interesting case history he has published is that of a woman patient named “Veronica”, in her fifties when she came to him for therapy.29 She had suffered from severe sinusitis since late adolescence, unresponsive to medical treatment. Conventional psychotherapy revealed a connection between the onset of her chronic sinusitis and a certain residual sense of loneliness and mild depression, but failed to find any emotional upheaval around adolescence which might account for her problem. When she underwent Deep Memory Processing therapy she found herself re-living the past life fantasy of a young Englishman who had been conscripted into the army at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. He had found the short period of boot camp and the camaraderie of the trenches an intensely emotional experience, but this was cut short after a few weeks when a mustard gas assault wiped out his whole unit. As Veronica re-lived his death, she fell into paroxysms of intense weeping, and she reported afterwards that she had been weeping for her lost comrades for whom she had not been able to grieve previously. She later reported that her sinuses had fully cleared for the first time in thirty years. Woolger’s interpretation is that her blocked grief had remained lodged in her 29 Roger J. Woolger and Andy Tomlinson.: “Deep Memory Process and the Healing of Trauma” (2003) http://www.rogerwoolger.com/pages/trauma.html

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sinuses until she was able bring her emotions to consciousness. In his view it is not imperative that the therapist believes in reincarnation, but he should be able to empathize with what the patient is going through and support her in that process. Of the various hypotheses advanced to explain past life memories, the one I prefer is the idea that all minds are linked in some way and that the death of an individual does not wipe out all of his/her memories.

Cases of the Reincarnation Type While Past Life Regression is difficult to verify objectively, there is another phenomenon which does permit of such verification. In the Cases of the Reincarnation Type (CORT) reported by Ian Stevenson, Godwin Samararatne and others, children usually below the age of ten have described the memories of another individual who died several years before and had lived in a location which was not known to the family of the child. About 50% of these children described their previous life ending in a violent death. The researchers were then able to verify that the individual described did in fact live in the location mentioned, and the description was correct in many details but not in all. Godwin Samararatne, one of the best known lay meditation teachers in Sri Lanka in recent times, collaborated with Ian Stevenson in his investigation of cases of reincarnation in Sri Lanka. Stevenson wrote about him: “Godwin's contribution to the investigation of the cases so far exceeded his tasks as an interpreter that it became appropriate for him to become a co-author of published papers.” One case reported by Erlendur Haraldsson was that of a girl named Purnima in Sri Lanka who described memories of a man named Jinadasa. Purnima had prominent birthmarks on her lower chest, left of the midline.30 Haraldsson and his colleagues were able to identify the family of a man named Jinadasa who had died several years previously. When Purnima was taken to visit this family, she showed her birthmark and said, “This is where I was hit by a bus”. The researchers were able to obtain the post-mortem report on Jinadasa, which had recorded fractures of the ribs on the left side, damage to the lungs, and a ruptured spleen. Cases of this type seems to show that memories of such traumatic events involving premature death are sometimes stored in Smart Mind and then manifested in a newly-born individual, perhaps because the previous “experiment” was incomplete. It appears far-fetched to infer that all or even most human beings who die are re-incarnated. When we look at Purnima’s case from a psychological point of view, we can see that she is in the unique position of having some memories of a previous life. Purnima’s personality is described thus by Haraldsson: “She is highly gifted, has excellent vocabulary and memory…. She is a demanding child for her parents, is argumentative and independent-minded, wants to be perfect, is much concerned with neatness and cleanliness, and at times is hot-tempered and boastful; in short a vivid and memorable personality.” 30 Erlendur Haraldsson (2000). Birthmarks and claims of previous life memories I. The case of Purnima Ekanayake. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 64(858), 16-25.

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From what we know of Jinadasa, he was a rootless individual who did not achieve much in life and who had no stable relationships. One might suppose that Purnima learnt some lessons from what she imagined was her previous life, and this strengthened her resolve to do things differently this time around. What I am suggesting is that even though Purnima’s belief that she herself had lived before was a false one, her having access to the memories of someone who had actually lived previously was of psychological benefit to her. The Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia now has a database of 2500 such cases. Poonam Sharma, a medical student, and Jim B. Tucker, Assistant Professor of Psychiatric Medicine, at the University Of Virginia School Of Medicine, analyzed this database to determine the frequency of “intermission memories” reported by these subjects.31 These are memories of the intervening period between the present life of the individual and the reported previous life, reported by a minority of individuals in this sample (276). Those subjects who reported such memories were classified as CORT-I subjects and were regarded as a subset of the 2500 CORT subjects. Statistical analysis showed that CORT-I subjects made significantly more statements about the previous life that were verified to be accurate than their CORT counterparts. They remembered more names from the previous life in addition to the name of the previous personality. The statements by the CORT-I subjects about the mode of death were much more likely to be independently verified than those of other subjects, and in those cases, 84 percent of their reports of the death were either accurate in most details (74 percent) or totally accurate (10 percent). The results indicate that those subjects who report intermission experiences also appear to have an unusually strong memory for details of their previous personality. When the results were analyzed for the country of origin it became evident that claimed memories of an intermission experience were relatively more commonly reported by children from Burma than by those from other countries. 52 out of 230 Burmese cases included such reports. Sharma and Tucker investigated any possible similarities between intermission experiences and Near-Death Experiences by applying two rating scales previously used for NDE to the data about the CORT-I subjects. All of the 35 cases of Burmese CORT-1 which were analyzed in detail reported “a subjective sense of being dead”. Nine of these subjects had reported “encountering a presence/hearing a voice”, which is a significant item on the NDE scales. The presence usually offered guidance through a period of transition. Fourteen cases referred to “encountering visible spirits”. There were also significant differences between the two types of experience: None of the CORT-I subjects reported a speeding-up of time, and none claimed to experience a universal understanding. Only a small minority of these subjects reported a feeling of

31 Sharma, P., Tucker, J.B.: Cases of the reincarnation type with memories from the intermission between lives. Journal of Near-Death Studies 23 (2): 101-118, 2005.

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peace or pleasantness, which is common in NDE. None suggested a feeling of harmony or unity with the universe, or felt surrounded by a brilliant light. Although the similarities between the two types of experience are limited, they are interesting when one recalls that the CORT-I subjects are young children around the age of five years. It is remarkable that such young children, who would not be thought able to comprehend the concept of death, were yet able to report “a subjective sense of being dead”. Further studies on reincarnation have been carried out by Antonia Mills, anthropologist at the University of Northern British Columbia. She points out that the most convincing cases are those in which the person identified as the deceased person the child is claiming to be (called the Previous Personality, or PP, by Ian Stevenson) is someone initially entirely unknown to the child and its family.32 In only a proportion of these cases will the Previous Personality be identified, and these are designated as “solved” cases. When a written record exists of the statements the child made before the case was solved, the possibility of falsification of these statements later is eliminated. Such cases are rare, and Ms. Mills reports on one of them, that of Ajendra Singh Chauhan of northern India. She took Ajendra and some of the family to visit the family of the Previous Personality for the first time when he was 13 years old. The initial written record of this case was made by Mr. Gaj Raj Singh Gaur, an Indian teacher who had previously collaborated with Dr. Ian Stevenson. Gaur obtained the history from Ajendra’s father in 1992 when Ajendra was 13 years old. The father had described Ajendra as being aggressive in nature. Ajendra made the statements between the ages of 3 and 5 years. He said he had lived in a place called “Fariha”. “One street goes into the town. On the corner of that street is the store of a merchant named Lala. Our groceries used to come from that store”. He continued: “There was a widow of fair complexion who used to cook our food. She tried to mix poison in the food. Then I beat her a lot…..Ashok Kumar Sharma lived in a village nearby….There is a gun in the wardrobe….The dacoits (gangsters) came. I started shooting and a bullet hit me.” The parents were disturbed by this violent history and decided not to make attempts to trace the previous family described by Ajendra. They had never been to a place called Fariha. After Gaur recorded the history in 1992, he discovered that there was a town named Fariha 75 kilometers from Ajendra’s home. When Gaur visited that place he was able to find a man named Ashok Kumar Sharma who had been a close friend of Naresh Chandra Gupta who was shot dead by dacoits on the 30th of December 1977. The shooting had taken place at Naresh’s home in the nearby village of Shekanpur. The Gupta family also had a home in Fariha, a town of 10,000. The family shifted back and forth between these residences. Naresh was 20 years old at the time of his death.

32 “Inferences from the Case of Ajendra Singh Chauhan: The Effect of Parental Questioning, of Meeting the "Previous Life" Family, an Aborted Attempt to Quantify Probabilities, and the Impact on His Life as a Young Adult” Journal of Scientific Exploration Volume 18: Number 4: Article 4, 2004

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When Ms. Mills visited Ajendra and his family in 1992, she was shown a scar on Ajendra’s brother’s back caused by Ajendra throwing a knife at him. As mentioned previously, Ajendra was said to be of an aggressive nature. Ms. Mills videotaped the visit of Ajendra and his family to Fariha and Shekanpur in 1992. Although Ajendra never claimed to recognize anyone in these places, the women of the Gupta family gave him a warm and tearful reception. Ajendra was visibly pleased and smiling at the attention. He said he would definitely return to Fariha again. Regarding Ajendra’s statement that a fair-complexioned woman cooked his food, Naresh’s family stated that it was Naresh’s sister-in-law who cooked his food, and confirmed that she was fair-complexioned. Naresh’s sister-in-law declined to meet Ms. Mills, perhaps sensitive to the accusation Ajendra had made that Naresh’s food had been poisoned by her. Naresh’s family acknowledged that he and his sister-in-law had a tempestuous relationship. Ms. Mills returned to India in 2003, when Ajendra was 25 years old, with a master’s degree in economics and working for a multinational company. He said that he no longer remembered the previous life. Minimal contact had been maintained between the two families, being invited to each other’s weddings. She was of the view that Ajendra showed every sign of being a well-adjusted young adult. One wonders whether the visit to his previous family would have been of psychotherapeutic benefit to him as it enabled the previous bad memories of discord and violence to be replaced by the effect of the warm reception he received from the family when he was 13 years old.

Nightmares due to Past Life Experiences Antonia Mills has also reported on three North American (non-tribal) children who had recurrent nightmares that did not seem to relate to any experience the child had had.33 One of these children was Heidi, the eldest of the two daughters of a European-Canadian couple. She had hearing tests and psychological tests at the age of 4 years and 2 months old because of delayed speech development. The tests showed that Heidi's hearing was normal, but that she had other "perceptual problems." For example, when asked to duplicate a three-block bridge structure or a tower of blocks, Heidi would always make a two-dimensional structure horizontally along the floor. She had difficulty perceiving or drawing certain letters such as T, F, and L. Heidi's parents were told that Heidi would not be able to ride a bicycle and that her school performance could be expected to be impaired by her perceptual problems. When Heidi was 5, her kindergarten class repeatedly practiced making a house-like structure out of cardboard blocks painted to look like bricks for a school 33 http://www.childpastlives.org/library_articles/mills.htm

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presentation. Heidi avoided going anywhere near the structure and became very upset on the numerous occasions when the structure was knocked over. The following night she went running into her parents' bedroom trembling and saying that bricks had fallen on her head. She insisted that there was blood on her head, that her head hurt terribly, and that she could not see, although there was no sign of injury or loss of sight. This nightmare and the accompanying sensation (after she was awake) of pain in the head recurred about three times a week for four months. Apparently describing the contents of her dream, Heidi insisted that the house had fallen on her head and that the animals were very hungry, did not have enough to eat, and were dying. She was referred to a pediatrician who ordered an EEG and a cranial CT scan, which revealed no abnormalities. Having ruled out physical causes of the distress, the family physician proposed that Heidi might be recalling a previous life in which bricks had fallen on her head and suggested that the mother reassure her that the event was from a previous life and need not trouble her any more. The concept of previous lives was not something with which Heidi's parents were familiar, and her engineer father found it unacceptable. However, her mother noted that this interpretation of Heidi's nightmares accounted for Heidi's complex set of problems. For instance, the letters T, F, and L which Heidi had difficulty perceiving may have reminded her of the unstable walls and roof of a house. Heidi's mother began a pre-bedtime routine of massage, soothing music, talking about positive things, and telling Heidi that she did not need to be worried about bricks falling on her head because that was an experience that had happened in another life that was over. Four months after the onset of the nightmares, Heidi woke up early in the morning, went to her parents, and announced, "It is over. I'm not having that anymore.'' Thereafter, her kindergarten teacher noted that her school performance had improved to average (she mastered the letters T, F, and L) and her self-confidence had increased markedly. Heidi was no longer fearful and tearful when her younger sister made and broke block structures, and she learned to ride a bicycle with ease.

Transmigration of the “Soul” or the Accessing of Past Memories? We have seen three different but apparently related phenomena: (a) The apparent spontaneous recollection of a previous life by children below the age of 10 (labeled by Ian Stevenson as Cases of the Reincarnation Type). (2) The occurrence of nightmares in children with indirect evidence of past life memories. (3) The recollection of past life memories by adults under hypnosis. There are several possible explanations for these phenomena. One theory, put forward by Plato and also roughly corresponding to the ideas of Hinduism, is that of transmigration of the soul; every human being has a soul which persists after bodily death and may “migrate” to another body and be reborn. Paul Edwards has claimed that the apparent increase of the human population during recorded history automatically invalidates the hypothesis of reincarnation. His argument

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is based on the assumption that if there were x number of human beings and therefore x number of souls in 4000 B.C., and if the human population has increased hundred-fold since then, where did all the extra souls come from? This argument has been examined in detail by David Bishai of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.34 Bishai quotes estimates of the human population in 8000 B.C. at 5 million, and around 1 A.D. at 300 million. As the current population of Earth is about 6 billion, there has been an approximately 20-fold increase in the past 2000 years. Bishai points out that Edwards appears to make the assumption that a soul is instantaneously conceived into a new body after death. If we do not make such an assumption, and suppose instead that souls could spend very variable lengths of time in an “in-between life state” or “unobserved state”, Edwards’ argument fails. When the visible human population is low, it is presumed that souls spend much longer periods of time in the unobserved state pending the availability of a new body to reincarnate into. The real problem with the theory of transmigration of souls from the scientific point of view is that it violates Ockham’s Razor. Ockham’s Razor is a methodological principle in science named after the Franciscan friar William of Ockham (1285-1349), and is the principle of parsimony, stating the one should seek the simplest possible explanation for a given set of phenomena. In Ockham’s phrase, translated from the Latin, “entities should not be proposed beyond necessity”. With regard to the theory of transmigration of souls, proposing the concept of a soul appears to be an unnecessary complication. In my view, the most parsimonious explanation for the observed reincarnation-type phenomena is that some individuals are able to access memories of another deceased individual, implying that some memories are stored outside the physical body. The mechanism of such memory storage is unknown at present, but it should be borne in mind that there is yet no adequate scientific explanation for the storage of memories in the brain either. Ervin Laszlo has proposed the existence of an Akashic Field (A-field), a cosmic information field. “Understanding that it is the A-field – the information field of the cosmos – that confers immortality on us and not an immortal individual soul gives us a different perspective on reincarnation.”35 According to Laszlo, when a child reports ideas, images, and impressions from a previous life this does not mean that the child has “reincarnated” that life; the child merely retrieves this information from the cosmic information field. It is our individual experience, not an individual soul, which achieves immortality. “All that we experience becomes part of the collective memory bank of humankind, to be read out again and again”.

34 “Can population growth rule out reincarnation? A model of circular migration” Journal of Scientific Exploration Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 411–420, 2000 35 Laszlo, Ervin: “Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything” Publisher: Inner Traditions. Published: 2004, p.162

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Transpersonal Psychology

lthough the term “trans-personal” was first introduced to the English language by the psychologist William James in 1905, he used it in a rather different sense to its present connotation. Walsh and Vaughan (1993) have

defined transpersonal experiences as “experiences in which the sense of identity or self extends beyond (trans.) the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche or cosmos.”36 Transpersonal psychology is not formally recognized by the American Psychological Association (APA), but a Transpersonal Psychology Section has been established within the British Psychological Society. Examples of transpersonal experiences are near-death experiences, mystical experiences, experiences with psychedelic drugs, past life memories, mental healing etc. Transpersonal psychology is based on the observation that human minds appear to be able to communicate with each in modes other than the obvious ones of exchanging verbal and non-verbal messages.

Mystical Experiences

W.T. Stace wrote in 1960 that mystical experiences have five characteristics: They are noetic, ineffable, and holy, are characterized by a positive affect, and are paradoxical. The word noetic is derived from the Greek word nous, meaning intellect; in the present context it means that the person having the experience perceives it as a valid source of knowledge and not just a subjective experience. That the experience is ineffable means that it cannot simply be described in words. The experience is paradoxical in the sense that it defies logic.

36 Walsh, R. & Vaughan, F. (1993). On transpersonal definitions. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 25 (2) 125-182

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Stace is here in agreement with William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience37. James described the noetic quality of the experience thus: “Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” James quotes the example of the 14th century German mystic Henry Suso who adopted extreme ascetic practices. It is said that Suso’s undergarment was crawling with lice because he never took a bath over a period of twenty-five years!

Although James called the mystical experience a religious one, it appears that

neither religion nor asceticism is a necessary precursor. Olga Kharitidi, a Russian doctor who immigrated to the United States, describes the case of a Siberian psychiatrist named Anatoli who had a mystical experience while hunting deer. He came across a beautiful deer which stood motionless watching him. He stated, “I lost all track of time. I was looking into the soft black eyes of nature itself. Then something happened inside me and I realized that these were my own eyes that were looking back at me. The boundary between me as a human being and the deer as an animal completely dissolved, and we were one. I became hunter and prey at the same time…..At the next moment, my hand moved without thought and pulled back the hammer of my rifle. It was all part of the same flow of energy that connected me with the deer….I aimed and pulled the trigger in one motion. At first I heard no sound. I saw only that this beautiful wild animal, the deer swayed slightly and then started to sink….And at the same time I felt that it was me falling down, falling out of this life. I was overwhelmed. I sat on the dead, wet grass and started to cry.”

Some Westerners naively assume that Buddhism is a mystical religion,

understanding mysticism in Buddhism to be the same as what it means in the West. The Sri Lankan Buddhist teacher Anagarika Dharmapala wrote in 1926:

“The psychology of Buddhism is transcendentally mystic. It is founded on purifying altruistic ethics without the least tinge of selfishness…….European philosophers have no idea of the transcendental mysticism laid down in Buddhist psychology. The ordinary religionist thinks of heaven as the supreme goal of existence, where he thinks he can enjoy a sensuous existence in a sublimated form. Buddhism repudiates attachment to celestial existence as unworthy of the perfect Brahmachari. Even the higher forms of Brahmaloka existence is held in loathsomeness by the great Teacher because of the inexpressible sublimity of the eternal state of unconditioned Nirvana.”

The Japanese Zen Buddhist D.T. Suzuki, on the other hand, considered the

experience of satori as being equivalent to the mystical experience as described in the West. I think what Dharmapala objected to was the idea that a mystical experience is in some sense a short-cut to enlightenment; it is nothing of the sort. The meaning of enlightenment in Buddhism is the realization of what it is that will bring all sentient beings to liberation and freedom from suffering; a bodhisattva in Buddhism is one who 37 James, William: “Varieties of Religious Experience” Publisher: Vintage Books. Published: 1970 (Original work published 1902)

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seeks to work unceasingly towards this goal. Buddhism does not seek merely to encourage individual humans to seek their own salvation, unlike Christianity which teaches that it is the duty of each person to save his soul from eternal damnation.

The "Good Friday Experiment" carried out on April 20, 1962 by trainee

psychiatrist Walter Pahnke (1931-1971) as part of his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard was designed to investigate the potential of psychedelic drugs to facilitate mystical experience.38 Before services commenced in Boston University's Marsh Chapel, Pahnke administered small capsules to twenty Protestant divinity students. Half the capsules contained psilocybin (30mg), an extract of psychoactive mushrooms, and the other half contained a placebo. Psilocybin is the principal psychoactive component of a genus of mushrooms (Psilocybe). Pahnke hypothesized that psychedelic drugs, in this case psilocybin, could facilitate a "mystical" experience in religiously inclined volunteers who took the drug in a religious setting. He further hypothesized that such experiences would result in persisting positive changes in attitudes and behavior.

The study was designed as a randomized controlled, matched group, double-blind

experiment using an active placebo (nicotinic acid). The double-blind was even sustained for a portion of the Good Friday service itself because of the use of nicotinic acid as an active placebo. Nicotinic acid acts more quickly than psilocybin and produces a warm flush as a result dilation of blood vessels in the skin. Psilocybin's powerful subjective effects were eventually obvious to all subjects who received it, even though they had not previously ingested the drug or anything similar to it.

This is how one of the subjects (T.B.) described his experience: “I can think of no

experiences [like the Good Friday experience] quite of that magnitude. That was the last of the great four in my life….. (My first experience) was when I [was about nine and] had scarlet fever and rheumatic fever, apparently at either similar or at the same times. And they thought that I was going to die. And I saw a light coming out of the sky, this is in the dream, and it came toward me and it was like the figure of Christ and I said, "No, let me live and I'll serve you." And I'm alive and I've served…..And I also went for an experience with God at the Good Friday experience. And those were similar.”

Each of the psilocybin subjects felt that the experience had significantly affected

his life in a positive way and expressed appreciation for having participated in the experiment. This is how another of the subjects (K.B.) described the long-term effects of his experience: “It left me with a completely unquestioned certainty that there is an environment bigger than the one I'm conscious of. I have my own interpretation of what that is, but it went from a theoretical proposition to an experiential one….. I have gotten help with problems, and at times I think direction and guidance in problem solving. Somehow my life has been different knowing that there is something out there.”

38 "Drugs & Mysticism: An Analysis of the Relationship between Psychedelic Drugs and Mystical Consciousness" By Walter M Pahnke, Harvard University, 1963

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Several of the psilocybin subjects discussed their deepened involvement in the politics of the day as one result of their Good Friday experience. Feelings of unity led many of the subjects to identify with and feel compassion for minorities, women and the environment. Subject H.R. tells of his experience in the following way: “I just stopped worrying about time and all that kind of stuff ... there was one universal man, personhood, whatever you want to call it... a lot of connectedness with everybody and every thing. I don't think Christ or other religious images that I can remember came into it….. I didn't think I had experienced a God that was particularly outside of me. What I experienced was a God that was inside of me.”

Rick Doblin conducted a long-term follow-up of Pahnke’s subjects, twenty-four to

twenty-seven years after the original experiment.39 He was able to trace 19 of the 20 subjects and tape recorded personal interviews with sixteen of them. Nine of these were from the control group and seven from the experimental group. Of the remaining three subjects from the experimental group, one was deceased, the identity of another was unknown, and the third declined to participate, citing concerns about privacy. All psilocybin subjects participating in the long-term follow-up, but none of the controls, still considered their original experience to have had genuinely mystical elements and to have made a uniquely valuable contribution to their spiritual lives. The positive changes described by the psilocybin subjects at six months, which in some cases involved basic vocational and value choices and spiritual understandings, had persisted over time and in some cases had deepened. The long-term follow-up interviews cast considerable doubt on the assertion that mystical experiences catalyzed by drugs are in any way inferior to non-drug mystical experiences, a critique of the Good Friday experiment advanced primarily by the philosopher of religion, Professor R.C. Zaehner, who was a Roman Catholic. The lack of long-term negative effects or dysfunction is not surprising. Strassman's literature review (1984) of all controlled scientific experiments using psychedelics in human volunteers found that panic reactions and adverse reactions were extremely rare.

R.R. Griffiths and his team at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

conducted a more recent study on the effects of psilocybin.40 This study used methylphenidate as the active placebo, instead of nicotinic acid which was chosen by Pahnke. Methylphenidate, also known as Ritalin, is a stimulant drug with similarities to amphetamine. It would be expected that the subjects would find it less easy to distinguish the placebo from psilocybin as this placebo is psychoactive unlike nicotinic acid. The participants were recruited from the local community through flyers announcing a “study of states of consciousness brought about by a naturally occurring psychoactive substance used sacramentally in some cultures.” 35 of the 36 volunteers selected were college graduates. All those selected indicated at least intermittent participation in religious or spiritual activities such as religious services, prayer, meditation, church choir, or

39 The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1991, Vol. 23, No.1 40 R. R. Griffiths et al. "Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance." Psychopharmacology 2006; DOI 10.1007/s00213-006-0457-5.

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educational or discussion groups. The participants had an average age of 46 years (range 24 to 64).

This study was a double-blind, crossover design that involved two or three drug

sessions at two-monthly intervals. Unlike in the Pahnke study, the setting used was not a religious one, but was a pleasant comfortable room with classical music being played and two “monitors” providing emotional support. The subjects were assessed using the “States of Consciousness Questionnaire” and other rating scales designed to test whether they had in fact had a mystical experience. It was found that there were highly significant differences (P < .001) between the psilocybin and methylphenidate experiences on items such as “internal unity” ((pure awareness; a merging with ultimate reality); “external unity” (unity of all things; all things are alive; all is one); “noetic quality” (claim of intuitive knowledge of ultimate reality); and deeply felt positive mood (joy, peace, and love). 33% percent of the volunteers rated the psilocybin experience as being the single most spiritually significant experience of his or her life, whereas none rated the methylphenidate experience so highly. A further 38% rated it to be among the top five most spiritually significant experiences, compared to 8% who put the methylphenidate experience in this category.

Skeptics may say that it is the long-term effects of psilocybin they are worried

about. This study, however, found that two months after the sessions, there were highly significant differences in “positive attitudes about life and/or self”, “positive mood changes”, “altruistic/positive social effects”, and “positive behavior changes”. The skeptic may again object that these were self-reported changes that could not be given much credence. This study in fact included reports from “community observers”, three adults designated by each participant who were expected to have continuing contact with the participant (e.g., family members, friends, or coworkers/colleagues at work). These individuals were interviewed by telephone 7 to 8 weeks after each drug session. The ratings provided by them showed that, compared to methylphenidate, psilocybin sessions were associated with small but significant positive changes in the participants’ behavior and attitudes.

It is to be noted that 31% of the group of carefully screened volunteers

experienced significant fear and 17% had transient ideas of reference/paranoia. The authors observe that “Under unmonitored conditions, it is not difficult to imagine such effects escalating to panic and dangerous behavior. Also, the role of hallucinogens in precipitating or exacerbating enduring psychiatric conditions should remain a topic of research”. Subject to these provisos, which emphasize the need for proper medical screening and emotional support during and after the sessions, this study shows that psilocybin could provide a very positive mental experience for an individual and also possibly improve his functioning in society. Although psilocybin is regulated by the federal government under the most restrictive category (Schedule I) of the Controlled Substances Act, the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse does not consider psilocybin and the other classical hallucinogens to be drugs of addiction because they do not produce compulsive drug-seeking behavior as do classic addicting drugs such as cocaine, amphetamine, heroin, and alcohol.

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Commenting on the study by Griffiths et al, Charles Schuster, former Director of

the National Institute on Drug Abuse, observed that a spiritual experience such as those induced by psilocybin may have a beneficial effect in those being treated for addictive states.

The Murky Depths and Lofty Heights of the Mind – Psychosis The currently favored concept of psychosis is the “medical model”, which assumes that such conditions are due to an imbalance in brain chemicals which can be corrected by anti-psychotic drugs. Much research has, however, not yet given us a clear picture of exactly which chemicals are involved and how they are altered in someone suffering from psychosis. Expensive drugs are being brought out by pharmaceutical companies, but these are only partially effective in more than half the patients who take them. Those who have studied psychosis in unconventional ways have come up with some interesting insights into the nature of Mind. Wilson Van Dusen was a clinical psychologist at a State Mental Hospital in the United States in the 1960’s. Out of purely personal interest, he began to catalogue the hallucinatory voices of the inmates there.41 Once he had obtained the trust and permission of a given patient, he would create a dialogue between the patient’s hallucination and himself, using the patient to relay the dialogue. Many of these patients felt they had contact with another world or order of beings, and they thought these other persons were living persons. They had coined terms like The Other Order or the Eavesdroppers for these beings. Van Dusen came to the conclusion that the voices could be classified into the lower and the higher order. Lower order voices are like the voices of drunkards at a bar who like to tease and torment just for the fun of it. They find a weak point of conscience, something the patient may feel guilty about, and work on it interminably, sometimes even driving the patient to suicide. The vocabulary and range of ideas of the lower order are limited. They seem imprisoned in the lowest level of the patient’s mind, giving no real evidence of any higher order thinking or experiencing. One patient heard a male voice claiming he was Jesus Christ, but his bragging and argumentativeness gave him away as of the lower order. Higher order hallucinations are rarer, making up a fifth or less of the patients’ experiences. The higher order seldom speaks, whereas the lower order can talk endlessly. In one instance the higher order appeared to a man as a lovely woman who entertained him while showing him thousands of mystical symbols. Though the patient was a high-school educated gas-pipe fitter, his female vision showed a knowledge of 41 “Hallucinations as the World of Spirits”, Wilson Van Dusen, Psychedelic Review, No. 11, Winter 1970/71

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religion and myth far beyond the patient’s comprehension. Van Dusen writes, “At the end of a very rich dialogue with the female vision (the patient reporting her symbols and responses) the patient asked for just a clue as to what she and I were talking about”. This seems to clearly indicate that the communication from the higher order being was a not a part of the patient’s mind as we normally understand this term. The only way to make sense of this phenomenon reported by Van Dusen is to broaden our concept of mind to include a transpersonal dimension.

Van Dusen does not tell us how he responded to the patient’s request to “give him a clue”, but it seems to me that this points the way to a possible method of psychotherapy with a psychotic patient; i.e. by interpreting the messages coming to him from higher order beings. How Van Dusen put it is that, “I’ve learned to help the patient approach the higher order because of its great power to broaden the individual’s values”. He comments that the higher order looks most like Carl Jung’s archetypes, whereas the lower order looks like Freud’s id (the lower unconscious). A female patient described a lady of the higher order as “an emanation of the feminine aspect of the divine”. Jung did in fact write that sometimes a patient with schizophrenia has a “big dream” in which “the imagery makes use of motifs analogous to or even identical with those of mythology. I call these structures archetypes because they function in a way similar to instinctual patterns of behavior….They occur in the folklore of primitive races, in Greek, Egyptian, and ancient Mexican myths, as well as in the dreams, visions, and delusions of modern individuals entirely ignorant of all such traditions.” The Jungian interpreter Anthony Storr writes that it was Jung’s intimate acquaintance with the phenomena of schizophrenia which led him to postulate a “collective” unconscious.42 He found that the delusions and hallucinations of these patients could 42 Storr, Anthony: “The Essential Jung: Selected Writings Introduced by Anthony Storr” Publisher: Fontana, London. Published: 1983

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seldom be entirely explained as products of the patient’s personal history, and he put forward the idea they arose from “a myth-producing level of mind which was common to all men”, the collective unconscious. It is interesting that two of Van Dusen’s patients spoke about “ladies” of the higher order. Storr writes that, in Jung’s view, changes in the collective unconscious which might take centuries to complete were responsible for alterations in the way in which men viewed the world and thought about themselves. Jung felt that one of the reasons for the decline of religious belief in Europe was that the excessive ecclesiastical emphasis on the “maleness” of God was at odds with the collective psyche of the majority of people. Storr writes: “It was only in 1950 that the Pope proclaimed the Assumption of the Virgin Mary as part of divine revelation. Jung considered this as a significant step towards incorporating femininity into the image of the divine.” The impulse for this doctrinal change came from the Catholic masses, and Jung interpreted this as the urge of the archetype to realize itself. Having looked at psychosis from this unusual angle, it is important to remember that psychosis can cause tremendous disruption in the life of the individual who is affected by it. It is interesting to consider the experience of the British psychologist Peter Chadwick who suffered a severe psychotic illness in 1979. He recovered from the illness and currently lectures in psychology for Birkbeck College Faculty of Continuing Education and for the British Open University. He corroborates the findings of Wilson Van Dusen regarding the X-factor in psychosis, but also testifies to the efficacy of the anti-psychotic drug haloperidol of which he takes 2.5 mg. everyday without fail.43 He is convinced that he could not lead a normal life without this medication.44 David Lukoff, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist in California and Professor of Psychology at Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco, has written about his personal experience of psychosis. He has written about a “psychotic crisis” that occurred at the age of 23, four days after taking a dose of LSD. The belief suddenly came to him that he had been Buddha in a previous life, that Buddha had been reincarnated as Jesus Christ, and therefore he had also been Jesus Christ. He decided to write a “new Bible”, a Holy Book that would unite all people in a single belief. He finished writing a book of 47 pages in five days, and sent copies of it to his close family and friends. After several months he began to feel miserable and depressed, with severe headaches and insomnia. He had a recurrence of Crohn’s disease with internal bleeding. Six months after the onset of this illness, while walking near the bay of Cape Cod, Lukoff heard a voice saying, “Become a healer”. This was the only voice he had heard emanating from outside himself. He took this “advice” seriously and trained in a number of alternative healing practices. He went on to train as clinical psychologist, and it was during

43 “Is there an 'X Factor' in Schizophrenic Illness?” http://www.scimednet.org/Articles/MHchadwick.htm 44 “Peer-Professional First-Person Account: Schizophrenia From the Inside—Phenomenology and the Integration of Causes and Meanings” Schizophrenia Bulletin 2007 33(1):166-173

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this training that he realized that the psychosis he had suffered was what was termed, “Delusional disorder, grandiose type”. Several years later he met the medical anthropologist Joan Halifax who is an expert on shamanism. The word Shaman originated from Siberia and other parts of Northern Asia extending to Northern China, being the Turkic-Tungus word for a traditional healer and literally meaning "he or she who knows”. Joan Halifax has written that, “A crisis of a powerful illness can also be the central experience of the shaman's initiation; it involves an encounter with forces that decay and destroy... Illness thus becomes the vehicle to a higher plane of consciousness.” Lukoff now understood the possible meaning of his psychotic illness, and went on to train with traditional Native American shamans. He experienced once again a feeling of oneness with the universe and began to comprehend the meaning of life itself. His teachers taught him to exercise voluntary control over these experiences so that he was able to continue with his work as a psychologist.

Parapsychological Research

One of the problems in assessing parapsychological research is what is referred to as confirmation bias, which means a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs. For example, if you believe that during a full moon there is an increase in admissions to the emergency room where you work, you will take notice of admissions during a full moon, but be inattentive to the moon when admissions occur during other nights of the month.

Confirmation bias could skew the results of research either way depending on

whether one is enthusiastic about confirming psi phenomena, or skeptical about such things. One way of overcoming this problem is for a parapsychological researcher to collaborate with a skeptical researcher, and this in fact took place in a study conducted by Marilyn Schlitz, Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California and Richard Wiseman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K.45 Richard Wiseman started his career as a conjurer and is well known in Britain as a media skeptic. He regularly appears on radio and TV programs as a debunker of psychical phenomena.

This was a study of the “remote detection of staring”, based on the feeling we

sometimes have of being stared at by someone behind us. The experimental design was that the experimenter was in a room 20 meters away from where the subject was sitting, and was able to stare at the subject via closed circuit television. The subject, of course, was not able to see the experimenter. During each session the experimenter randomly alternated 30 second periods of “staring” (quietly directing his/her attention) at the subject via the television or quietly directing this attention away from the television receiver. The electrodermal activity (EDA) of the subject was measured using the RelaxPlus system, a commercially available 45 “Experimenter effects and the remote detection of staring” Journal of Parapsychology, Sept. 1997 by Richard Wiseman, Marilyn Schlitz

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biofeedback package. This involved the attachment of electrodes to two fingers of one hand, enabling the recording of “skin resistance level” (SRL) on a computer. If for instance the subject sweated a little when stared at, the skin resistance would be lowered. The experiment was conducted at the University of Hertfordshire so that the skeptical researcher Wiseman could take several precautions to prevent fraud or other undue influence. 32 subjects were studied, of whom half each were experimented on by Wiseman and Schlitz respectively, either one of them taking on the role of staring at the subject on the television receiver.

For the 16 subjects stared at by Wiseman there was no statistically significant

difference between the “stare trials” and the “non-stare trials” (p=.64). In contrast, participants run by Schlitz showed a significant effect (p=.04). This means that, for Schlitz’s trials, the probability of such a result being obtained by chance was less than 4 in 100. This is significant, but not highly significant. It is possible that the artificial situation involving closed-circuit television and a gap of 20 meters caused the effect to be less than if the staring was carried out from a closer proximity. It is still a remarkable result which shows that the mind of one person has the ability to affect the nervous system of another person at a distance of 20 meters simply by staring at the image of the latter on a television screen albeit, in this study, with the consent of the subject to be psychically influenced. Another conclusion which can be drawn from this study is that Schlitz possesses some psychic ability which Wiseman appears to be deficient in.

The Heart Brain Smart Mind is not a prisoner of the brain; it may also function through the heart. Neurocardiologist Dr. J. Andrew Armour of the University of Montreal has introduced the concept of a functional “heart brain” which is an intricate network of around 40,000 neurons. This operates and processes information semi-independently of the brain, and is what allows a heart transplant to work. Rollin McCraty, Ph.D., Director of Research at the Institute of HeartMath in California, has studied the role of the heart in “intuition” (published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2004). Intuition is defined as “immediate apprehension by the mind without reasoning”. This study investigated the temporal dimension of intuition, the proposition that the body’s psychophysiological systems begin reacting to a stimulus before the stimulus is actually perceived. 26 adults, 11 males and 15 females, participated in this study. There were two testing sessions two weeks apart. For the first session (condition 1) the subjects were instructed not to engage in any meditative practices on the testing day. For 15 minutes before the second session (condition 2), they practiced a specific meditation technique involving intentional heart focus together with the generation of a positive emotion such as appreciation or care. Each participant was seated in a comfortable chair with a video monitor located in front of him, and viewed 45 pictures in each of the two sessions; 30 of the pictures had a

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“calm” content while 15 had an emotional content, and these were shown in a random order. The emotional pictures included erotic, violent, or other emotionally stimulating subjects. When the participant pressed the mouse button the screen remained blank for 6 seconds, then the picture was displayed for 3 seconds, followed by a blank screen for 10 seconds. The electrocardiogram (ECG) and electroencephalogram (EEG) of the subject was monitored continuously during the procedure. The main results are shown in the diagram:

The graphs show heart rate variability (HRV) on the Y axis plotted against time on the X axis. In condition 1, the “emotional trials” curve begins to diverge from the “calm trials” curve 4.5 seconds before viewing the pictures. This appears to indicate that the subjects were “sensing” the content of the pictures before they were shown. This is compelling evidence that the heart plays a role in the processing of pre-stimulus information. In the second part of the analysis event-related potentials (ERP) were calculated from the EEG data. A significant relationship between the ERP curve and the heart rate curve emerged for the 15 female subjects only. When emotionally charged pictures were shown to female subjects, ERP showed a sharp positive shift approximately 3.5 seconds prior to the stimulus, whereas the divergence in the heart rate curves began 4.8 seconds prior to the stimulus. This positive shift in the ERP indicates when the brain “knew” that an emotionally charged picture was going to be shown. The time difference between these two events suggests that the heart received the intuitive information about 1.3 seconds before the brain. Smart Mind has by-passed the brain. This study has shed new light on what was previously known in parapsychology research as “precognition” or “presentiment”. Precognition implies that cognition (knowing) is involved, whereas the results of this study suggest that the body’s intuitive awareness of a future event is independent of conscious cognition. Although the initial intuition appears to be unconscious, the mind may then become aware of the alteration in heart rate and try to interpret this.

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These data suggest that the apprehension of information pertaining to future emotional events is a system-wide process rather than one that is localized to the brain alone. The heart in particular appears to play an important role in the processing of intuitive information. The deceleration in heart rate is usually interpreted as being due to the influence of the parasympathetic nerves emanating from the brain, but it is also possible that the deceleration originated within the heart itself. This is consistent with other recent research pointing to the heart being a sensory organ and an information encoding and processing center with its own miniature nervous system. It may also be inferred that intuitive processes involve the body accessing a field of information that is not limited by the constraints of space and time. Dr. McCraty speculates that “the interaction between the body and the ambient field of energy surrounding it operates as a holographic-like information processing system that informs the body about a future event.” I prefer a simpler but rather staggering interpretation: Smart Mind exists outside of time. How is the heart affected by an event occurring in the future? We do not know, but something we do know is that the heart produces a magnetic field which is 5000 times stronger than the magnetic field of the brain and can be detected at a distance of several feet from the body with sensitive magnetometers. The heart generates a continuous series of electromagnetic impulses in a complex rhythmical pattern. There is new evidence emerging that the heart’s electromagnetic field can transmit information between people who are at a distance of up to five feet from one another. This may be one of the mechanisms of telepathic communication; we cannot assume that such communication is always brain-to-brain. It is said that the Mamas, religious leaders of the Kogi tribe in the Amazon, "talk" telepathically to each other, speaking from the heart in images. They make little sounds, but these sounds are not logically arranged into any pattern such as an alphabet. These sounds come from the heart, not the mind, and create images inside your head, and you can “see” what the other person is communicating. Some recipients of heart transplants have had strange experiences. On May 29, 1988, a woman named Claire Sylvia received the heart of an 18-year-old male who had been killed in a motorcycle accident. After the operation she noticed some changes in her habits and tastes; she found herself acting more masculine and craving foods like green peppers and beer which she had always disliked before. She began having recurring dreams about a mystery man named Tim L., who she had a feeling was her donor. She eventually met the family of Tim L. and discovered that she had taken on some of his habits and tastes. It has been written that the transplanted heart carried “cellular memory” from the donor, but I feel the real explanation could be more mysterious than that.

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Distant Intentionality and Healing Marilyn Schlitz and William Braud have published a meta-analysis of 19 “healing analog” experiments that test the distant healing hypothesis by measuring biological changes in a target system while ruling out suggestion as a counter-explanation.46 The general method of these experiments involved the generation of specific intentions by one person, and the concurrent measurement of autonomic nervous system activity in another person. Throughout the experiment the two persons occupied separate, isolated rooms, and all conventional sensorimotor communication between them was eliminated to ensure that any obtained effects were truly attributable to distant intentionality. In a typical experiment, person A was instructed to try to induce a specific physiological change in person B. The expected psychophysiological effect was assessed by measuring the skin resistance or electrodermal activity (EDA) of person B. During half of these instances, interspersed randomly throughout the session, person A generated imagery designed to produce a specific somatic effect (decreased sympathetic nervous system activity in some cases, increased sympathetic activation in other cases). In between these instances were control periods during which person A did not generate the relevant intention. During influence periods the influencer used the following strategies in an attempt to influence the somatic activity of the distant influencee: 1. The influencer used imagery and self-regulation techniques to induce the intended condition (either relaxation or activation, as demanded by the experimental protocol) in himself or herself, and imagined (and intended for) a corresponding change in the distant subject. 2. The influencer imagined the other person in appropriate relaxing or activating settings. 3. The influencer imagined the desired outcomes of the polygraph pen tracings (i.e., imagined few and small pen deflections for calming periods and many and large pen deflections for activation periods). Of the 19 trials, 15 were carried out by Braud and Schlitz themselves, one by Dean Radin et al at the University of Edinburgh, one by Delanoy and Sah at the University of Edinburgh, one by Wezelman et al at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and one by Rebman et al at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Two main statistical measures were used in assessing the overall results: The “P value” and the “effect size”. It is generally considered that a P value of less than 0.5 is statistically significant, as the likelihood of the event occurring by chance is less than 5%. In the present study the overall results yielded a P value of .0000007, which is highly significant. The concept of effect size, developed in 1988, is a statistical measure that attempts to represent the magnitude of the treatment effect in standard deviation units regardless of sample size. Although effect size ranges from minus to plus infinity, -1

46 ALTERNATIVE THERAPIES, November 1997, VOL. 3, NO. 6

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(less than effect) to +1 (better than effect) is the typical range for behavioral sciences. Jacob Cohen has suggested that 0.2 is indicative of a small (15%) effect, 0.5 a medium (33%) and 0.8 a large (47%) effect size. If we take an example from medicine, statin drugs to reduce cholesterol would lead to a relatively small 21% decrease in mortality in patients with coronary artery disease, whereas stopping smoking would result in a moderate 35% decrease.47 In the present study, effect sizes varied from -0.25 to +0.72, with a mean r=+.25, and compare favorably with effect sizes typically found in behavioral research projects. Whereas the distant intentionality effect sizes are small, they are comparable to—or, in some cases, eight times larger than—those reported in some recent medical studies.

Possible Harmful Effects of Direct Mental Influence In many scientific studies of parapsychology, for example studies of psychokinesis where the subject attempts to move or otherwise influence material objects such as dice, the effect size even if significant is very small. Studies of “direct mental influence” by contrast, where the subject attempts to alter autonomic nervous system activity in a distant individual, produce a larger effect size of the order of r=+.25. Although it has been generally assumed that such effects are beneficial, and may explain phenomena like distant healing, it should theoretically be possible for harmful effects to occur either deliberately or inadvertently. There have been reports of distant intentional retardation of bacterial growth. Professional parapsychologists have expressed fears about possible harmful effects of psychic phenomena. Caroline Watt, John Ravenscroft and Zachary McDermott, of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh decided that it would be unethical to ask volunteers to be intentionally subjected to harmful psychic effects in a scientific study.48 Instead, they tested this indirectly by asking one group of subjects to “block” psychic influences, while another group was asked to co-operate with such influences. They found no difference in the two groups. They suggest that a future study of this phenomenon could use a more realistic scenario such as attempting to remotely disrupt the concentration of chess players by direct mental influence.

47 Prevention of Coronary Heart Disease by Diet and Lifestyle: Evidence From Prospective Cross-Cultural, Cohort, and Intervention Studies Kromhout et al. Circulation 2002;105:893-898. 48 “Exploring the Limits of Direct Mental Influence: Two Studies Comparing 'Blocking' and 'Co-operating' Strategies”. Watt, C., Ravenscroft, J. & McDermott, Z. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1999, (13)3, 515-535

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The Power of the Mind – Healing and Biological Psychokinesis The conscious or unconscious mind exerts its healing effect by means of prayer, which can be defined as a silent or vocalized invocation produced with the intention of benefiting oneself or another conscious being. Even an atheist who says “Good morning”, “Good night”. “Happy birthday” or “Happy New Year” is praying. To whom the prayer is addressed does not seem a critical factor in determining its efficacy, and a Buddhist invocation such as “May all beings be well and happy” could well be non-denominational. It has to be said that the “controlled trials” of prayer conducted up to now have yielded conflicting results. It is however possible for any individual to conduct an “experiment” on himself/herself. My suggestion is to say a prayer like “May all beings be well and happy”, accompanied by a feeling of compassion towards another human being or animal. It is probably better not to have a great expectation of one’s own health improving, and patience is necessary to persist with this practice for several months or even years. You may notice a gradual improvement in your health, but even if you don’t you probably have not lost anything. (See “health warning” below) It is one of the marvelous things about the Mind that the more you heal others the more you heal yourself. It appears to be that a few individuals have extraordinary healing powers, but I believe that healing is within the potential of every human being. American psychiatrist Daniel Benor defines healing as the intentional influence of one of more people upon one of more other living organisms, without intervention through physical or chemical means.49 Healing may be done through the laying-on-of-hands or through mental influence alone, and appears to be effective from a distance of a few inches to thousands of miles. He has observed that modern human beings, accustomed to the ideas of scientific materialism, actually fear the possibility of mental healing. According to Freudian theory, when faced with an uncomfortable emotion such as fear, we may resort to “projection”, which is a defense mechanism. In this case the projection may be that ordinary people like us don’t have the power of healing; we project that power on to “special people” or to supernatural entities. Another manifestation of this fear is the application of unreasonably strict criteria in assessing a case of healing, expecting instantaneous healing and permanence of changes. In reality, mental healing may be incomplete, delayed, and temporary, just like the effects of drugs or surgery. Healers may often not be able to perform on demand, making controlled studies difficult. Benor is of the view that psi functions, including the ability to heal, are present in everyone but may often be repressed into the unconscious. If one accepts the possibility of mental healing, one has to also consider the effect of negative thoughts and verbalizations, which can be an uncomfortable topic to deal with. Benor wrote a letter to the British Medical Journal in 2003 expressing his concern that when a doctor 49 http://www.esolibris.com/articles/healing/fears_of_healing_01.php

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makes a prediction that a patient with cancer will die in x number of months, this may turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.50 Benor, interpreting the ideas of Rex Stanford, has suggested that the needs of an organism may influence the environment via psi processes, acting most easily upon random events to bring about results more desirable for the organism.51 That is, you can scan your environment, often unconsciously, using telepathy or precognition, identifying people and opportunities that might be favorable to your needs. Then, using this information, you can unconsciously use telepathy and PK to influence the environment in favorable ways to meet your needs. The key requirement here is that there should be a “system in random flux” which could be acted upon by mental influences to affect the final outcome. According to Benor, meiosis in sexually reproducing organisms is such a system. Meiosis is the process, involving the random genetic recombination of chromosomes, resulting in the formation of ova and spermatozoa each of which will have a unique genetic blueprint encoded in its DNA. Benor suggests that the psi abilities of the American botanist Luther Burbank (1849 – 1926) may partly explain his phenomenal success in producing new varieties of fruits and vegetables. His creations included 10 varieties of strawberries, 11 of raspberries, the July Elberta peach, the Santa Rosa plum, the Flaming Gold nectarine, and the Burbank potato, altogether 800 varieties. His friend and admirer, the Indian yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, testified to Burbank’s spiritual, mystical side. His method was to plant thousands of seed then select those plants with desirable new traits to inbreed. In selecting the plants, he said, “Probably there is more to it than merely this sensory response in me – it may be a sixth sense, it may be purely intuitive.” This statement may suggest that he was relying on precognition – He sensed how the plant was going to develop in the future – but it appears that he may have also been actively influencing the breeding process: “Every one of these was obtained by using natural processes or adaptations of them, and every one was there because I needed it in my search for a definite quality or characteristic. . . I took Nature’s mind and added to it my own, that knew exactly what it wanted and was in a hurry (comparatively speaking) to get it!” He also admitted that he sometimes got down on his knees and talked to plants! He is mentioned as repeatedly being able to summon his sister from miles away telepathically, and he also worked occasionally as a healer. Benor’s view is that Burbank’s methods probably involved biological psychokinesis (PK). The closest anyone else has come to matching his achievement, using modern methods of selective plant breeding, is to produce about 100 new varieties of plants. While some people are interested in psychic phenomena like telepathy, there are at least an equal number who vehemently deny the reality of such phenomena. I have not had many psychic experiences but when I was relating the story of one such an experience to a friend she reacted with skepticism and, unexpectedly, with barely-concealed fear. She did not openly

50 British Medical Journal 2003;327:1048-1049 (1 November) 51 http://www.wholistichealingresearch.com/mentalinfluenceongenesmutationandevolution.html

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acknowledge her fear but I surmised that, as she is a devout Roman Catholic, she may have thought that my experience was mediated by “the devil”. Charles Tart has analyzed the possible origins of the fear of psychic abilities and how to deal with such fears when doing scientific research in this area.52 The burning of so-called witches by the Christian Church in medieval times may have been partly due to this fear. One theory about the development of this fear historically is that it may have coincided with the setting up of patriarchal societies in which the men in power feared the subversive influence of intuition and other “feminine qualities”. The occurrence of mental healing even to a very limited degree has profound implications for the prevailing scientific worldview which is based on presumptions of atomism and mechanistic interactions between objects. Professor Harald Walach of the University of Northampton/UK and Dr. Stefan Schmidt of University clinic Freiburg/Germany have investigated the possible responses of science to such “anomalous” data.53 The scientific view is that a direct unmediated interaction should not occur between one brain/mind system and another distant mind/brain system, or between a mind/brain system and a physical system. One single observation of action at a distance can, however, refute a proposition (the locality hypothesis) that denies this possibility in general. According to the French psychoanalyst Robert Desoille (1890 - 1966) there are four ways in which the mind of one person could affect the mind of another person, with the possibility of healing taking place54:

52 Tart Charles, Acknowledging And Dealing With The Fear Of Psi, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Volume 78, 1984, pp. 133-143 53 “Repairing Plato's Life Boat with Ockham's Razor: The Important Function of Research in Anomalies for Consciousness Studies”. Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 12, Number 2, 2005 , pp. 52-70(19) 54 Quoted in: Dossey, Larry: “Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine” Publisher: Harper San Francisco. Published: 1993

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The implication is that, as unconscious healing is possible, making an excessive “mental effort” to heal may be counter-productive; just a thought may suffice to set the unconscious process in motion. The American physician Larry Dossey states that prayer and mental healing share some of the characteristics of “nonlocality” in quantum physics. This is in contrast to the view that mental healing involves the transfer of energy in some way from the healer to the patient. “If prayer were a conventional form of energy, it should weaken as distance is increased, and this does not happen”.55 He goes on to state that if quantum physics is involved in healing, some peculiar consequences follow: “In a nonlocal world it seems impossible that a previously thought-out message could be sent from one entity to another….One can never know ahead of time what these instantly correlated changes between distant entities will be; it is only in retrospect that we know they have taken place.” It would therefore seem pointless to ask for a specific outcome such as the healing of a particular individual at a given moment in time. It is more logical to make a general invocation such as, “May the best thing happen for the inhabitants of all worlds”. Finally, a “health warning” about mental healing. American psychiatrist Elisabeth Fischer Targ wanted to investigate the effect of distant healing on advanced cases of AIDS. When she conducted a pilot study before applying for funding, one of the patients in the study developed brain cancer, a lethal type called glioblastoma multiforme. He amazingly made a full recovery and it was later found that he had been in the treatment group – He had been prayed for, although not for healing of the cancer. The pilot study was published in 1998.56 Four years later Targ, who was 40 years old, became ill herself. An MRI scan revealed that she was suffering from a rapidly growing grade 4 glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor.57 This was a stunning coincidence because such tumors are very rare with an incidence of 3 cases in 100,000. Targ was dead four months later. Was it just coincidence, or did she unconsciously “take on” the illness of the man she healed? We can only speculate. Is it dangerous to practice mental healing? Columbus would not have discovered America if he was unwilling to take risks, but my personal feeling is that it is better not to try to heal major illnesses like AIDS or cancers unless and until one is fairly clear about the nature of this healing process. It may be that attempting to heal with the brain-restricted conscious mind leads to problems; it may be safer to heal with the “heart-mind”. Paul Pearsall has written: “Healing is a matter of the heart, not the head….so long as you see to it that your heart sends loving signals to other hearts even when you are sad, your heart will get loving signals back.”58

55 Dossey, Larry: “Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine”, page 83. Publisher: Harper San Francisco. Published: 1993 56 Sicher F, Targ E, Moore D 2nd, Smith HS. A randomized double-blind study of the effect of distant healing in a population with advanced AIDS: report of a small-scale study. West J Med 1998;169: 356-63 57 http://psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20040715-000008.html 58 Pearsall, Paul: “The Heart’s Code” Publisher: Broadway Books, New York. Published: 1998

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The Placebo Effect The randomized double-blind controlled clinical trial is the “gold standard” for the scientific study of the efficacy of medical treatments. Doctors in Western countries now have less and less freedom in choosing treatments for their patients as they are supposed to practice “evidence-based medicine”, meaning that they should only use treatments which have been proven to be effective by the above method. The group of patients who volunteer for such a research study and randomly allocated to “treatment” and “placebo” groups. If the treatment being compared is an orally administered drug, the placebo group is given an inert substance in a tablet that looks and tastes exactly like the actual drug. The first clinical trial that used randomization for patient allocation, on the recommendation of the statistician Sir Austin Bradford Hill, was the trial of streptomycin for the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis performed in 1946. The purpose of randomization is to ensure that there is no bias such as the allocation of less seriously ill patients to the placebo group. Beecher noted in 1955 that, when clinical trials had been conducted by this rigorously scientific method for a number of years, a significant proportion of patients on placebo improved during the trial. This was termed the “placebo effect”. A recent review of many clinical trials showed that objective measurements of conditions like high blood pressure, bronchial asthma, and partial urinary obstruction due to prostate enlargement were improved with placebo by one-third of the effect observed with the active drug. This was not merely an improvement in symptoms reported by the patient, but objective evidence that the mind can partially heal these apparently physical conditions. Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein from Westwood Lodge Hospital in Needham, Massachusetts, carried out a meta-analysis of 19 antidepressant drug trials in 1998.59 They concluded that antidepressants in these trials probably relied on the placebo effect for 75% of their effectiveness. They argued further that even the 25% "real" drug effect might be little more than a disguised placebo effect because many patients would have been able to identify the real drug by its side-effects like nausea or dry mouth. Patients on placebo may be able to deduce that they were being given an inert substance by the absence of side-effects, so would be psychologically less likely to get well. The above discussion relates to drug treatment; what about surgical operations? A surgical operation is not a pleasant thing to go through, and before I submitted myself to one I would want solid scientific evidence that it was likely to be effective. If it is a case of removing a cancerous lump, one need not bother about clinical trials because it is fairly obvious that the operation needs to be done. It is otherwise, however, with an operation like 59 Prevention & Treatment. 1998 Jun Vol. 1(2)

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a coronary bypass for angina. One would ideally need to carry out a “placebo operation” on a control group of patients if one is to prove with a degree of certainty that the operation is effective, but the medical and legal professions have decided in recent years that it is unethical to carry out placebo surgery if there is a even a slight but significant risk to the health of the volunteers. What this means is that hundreds of thousands of coronary bypass operations are now being carried out without solid scientific evidence for the efficacy of the procedure. I am not suggesting that coronary bypass operations should stop; I am drawing attention to this is as another example of our having to make important decisions without the backing of science. The surgeon will advise the operation based on the best evidence available to him; the patient has to make use of the mysterious quality of mind called “intuition” to decide whether to accept the doctor’s advice.

The Smart Unconscious Mind – Hypnosis There are instances when our unconscious mind is smarter than the conscious one, and the phenomenon of hypnosis may provide an illustration of this. Hypnosis is defined as a trance-like state of focused attention that resembles sleep, and is usually induced in a willing subject by the suggestions of a hypnotist. Different people differ in their susceptibility to being hypnotized, and this can be measured by the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales. To assess susceptibility subjects are given tests like being ask to hold an arm outstretched and then being told that they are holding a very heavy ball, and they are scored as "passing" that suggestion if their arm sags under the imagined weight. It is incorrect to suppose that someone with a vivid imagination is more hypnotizable; hypnotizability appears to be an innate characteristic of a person like his I.Q.

What exactly is the hypnotic state? It is often said the hypnotic trance is “like sleep”, but this is not an accurate comparison as the hypnotized subject is much more alert to his surroundings than an individual who is asleep. Whether the hypnotic state is a distinct mode of consciousness is still a matter for debate. One of the key features of consciousness is “self-representation”, how we represent our body-self to ourselves; thus, how we experience our body-self in a dream is different to that in waking life. The alterations in self-representation in the hypnotic state are defined as pertaining to the subject’s representation, monitoring, and regulation of his own body-self and mental state, Pierre Rainville has pointed out that (a) an increased feeling of automaticity and (b) an altered sense of agency are the most distinct features of the hypnotic state. Other dimensions of the hypnotic experience include feelings of deep mental relaxation and “mental absorption”, meaning that the subject is in “a state of total attention that results in imperviousness to distracting events”. Mental absorption during hypnosis is induced by suggestions for continued focus on the hypnotist’s voice and on the conveyed instructions.

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Pierre Rainville’s study found that rCBF (regional cortical blood flow) was altered in different areas of the brain depending on whether relaxation or absorption was predominant. Reduced rCBF in the mesencephalic brainstem appeared to be exclusively associated with relaxation, while increased rCBF in the thalamus and the mid-anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) appeared to be exclusively associated with absorption. To summarize, neural activity in the brainstem, the thalamus, and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) contribute to the experience of being hypnotized. In previous studies, rCBF decreases in the brainstem have been related to low arousal and decreased vigilance, and this is consistent with the relaxation aspect of hypnosis also correlated with an increase in slow (delta) EEG activity observed in this state. Although hypnotic states are clearly distinct from sleep, certain features like slow EEG activity are common to both. The increase in thalamic activity which is associated with the absorption aspect of hypnosis could be a compensatory mechanism that permits the maintenance of stable levels of performance in states of low arousal, and prevents the generalized thalamo-cortical synchronization that would lead to sleep. This may be how high levels of focused attention are maintained in deeply relaxed subjects during hypnosis. In this regard, there could be a similarity between the hypnotic state and the meditative state, which is also a condition of deep relaxation distinct from both sleep and normal wakefulness. Is the hypnotic state a distinctive mode of consciousness? The representation of the body-self is central to the neurophenomenology of consciousness, and the evidence shown above that there is a clear alteration of how the body-self is perceived is in favour of the idea that the hypnotic state is in fact a distinctive mode of consciousness.

Healing with Hypnosis Is healing with hypnosis the same as healing with a placebo? A scientific experiment carried out by Thomas H. McGlashan of the University of Pennsylvania in 1969 showed that this is not so. This study was carried out on 24 healthy college students who volunteered to undergo some pain in order to test the efficacy of hypnosis. They were subjected to ischaemic muscle pain by the application of a tourniquet to the upper arm. Of the subjects selected, 12 were highly susceptible to hypnosis while the other 12 had low susceptibility. All 24 subjects were given a placebo capsule containing an inert substance, but were told that they were being given a powerful analgesic drug. An apparatus was rigged up which would enable the subject himself to tighten the tourniquet by squeezing a rubber bulb, then stopping when the pain became unbearable. In the first stage of the experiment the procedure was carried out without the placebo or hypnosis and the subjects were asked to mark the severity of pain on a chart. In the second stage hypnosis was induced for about 15 minutes by a standard procedure, involving eye fixation and counting. The subjects were told under hypnosis that they would not feel any pain in the arm. The tourniquet was tightened and the pain intensity was recorded. In the third stage a similar procedure was carried out after administering the placebo capsules.

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The results are graphically represented here:

“Pain threshold” in the lower part of the chart records the number of minutes the rubber bulb was pumped before the subject reported pain; “pain tolerance” in the upper part refers to the time duration before the subject had to stop pumping due to unbearable pain. The results show that the placebo did significantly increase the pain threshold, but not the pain tolerance. There was no relationship between the magnitude of the placebo effect and susceptibility to hypnosis. This confirmed the hypothesis of the researchers that susceptibility to hypnosis is not intrinsically correlated with placebo responsivity. Hypnosis did significantly increase the pain threshold even in those with low susceptibility, but the change was only of the same magnitude as that obtained with the placebo and therefore could be attributed simply to the effect of suggestion. What these subjects experienced was the placebo effect of the hypnotizing process. The highly hypnotizable subjects on the other hand experienced a significant threefold increase in both the pain threshold and pain tolerance over and above the change observed with the placebo medication. The healing of psychosomatic illness with hypnosis is a well-established phenomenon, as in this case report by Dr. Ian Wickramasekera, past-president of the Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback in the United States. The patient was a 22-year-old female with a four-year history of episodic vomiting and social anxiety resistant to medical and

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psychiatric therapy.60 She had previously experienced 50 sessions of psychodynamic psychotherapy. She denied any history of physical or sexual abuse. At age 15 she started dating infrequently. She denied any sexual activity other than kissing and holding hands up to the time of coming for psychophysiological psychotherapy with Dr. Wickramasekera. Her parents were gravely concerned about her persisting bodily symptoms which were not relieved by antidepressant and tranquillizer medication. The therapy sessions involved the continuous monitoring of muscle electrical activity (electromyography - EMG) with two cup electrodes placed one inch above each eye. It was noted that during the tenth session the EMG voltage was at a high level of 30.1 microvolts, indicating a high level of muscle tension, compared to 7.8 microvolts at the previous session. The session had started at 9 a.m. From 9.18 a.m. to 9.35 a.m. the therapist was attempting to explore what the patient was consciously thinking and feeling that could account for her muscle tension. She denied feeling muscle tension in her head or any headache. She stated, however, that earlier that morning she had a very scary dream of which she could remember no details whatever. At 9.35 a.m. the therapist asked her to enter the hypnotic mode using the self-hypnosis technique she had been taught, and suggested that in this state she might recall the dream as if she were seeing it with detachment on a TV screen. After nine minutes in self-hypnosis she opened her eyes and was able to describe the dream. She recalled an actual three-month relationship she had over five years previously with a lover. She had sexual intercourse with him on a number of occasions until he told her that he was bisexual. She immediately dropped the relationship, mainly because of her fear of contracting HIV. She was, however, too afraid to get an HIV test. After a time – She was not sure after how long – she “forgot” about the entire episode. At 9.51 a.m. the therapist asked her to switch back in to hypnotic mode, and while in this mode he assured her that an HIV infection was unlikely as she had developed no symptoms in the past five years. Her EMG voltage dropped from 30.1 to 3.3 microvolts. She later had an HIV test which proved negative. When the patient’s parents were spoken to later they stated that they had known about the relationship but denied that it had any connection to her symptoms. It appeared that there had been a tacit conspiracy of silence between the patient and her parents on this issue. The patient’s symptoms were relieved by the therapy and there was no relapse at follow-up two years later. Wickramasekera’s interpretation of this case is that it is an example of “secrets being kept from the mind, but not from the body.” The repressed history of the love affair was there in the unconscious mind, revealing itself through the physical symptoms and the EMG recording. A combination of psychophysiology (EMG monitoring in this case) and hypnosis was effective in working on the unconscious mind and healing the patient.

60 “A CASE STUDY: ELECTROMYOGRAPHIC CORRELATES IN THE HYPNOTIC RECALL OF A REPRESSED MEMORY” DISSOCIATION, Vol . X, No . I, March 1997

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By-passing the Brain Filter – Psychedelic Drugs If we cling to the unproven hypothesis that the brain produces mind like a computer producing a print-out, we will be unable to account for many properties of mind which scientific observation has brought to our attention. The basis of this theory is the postulate that the brain does not produce consciousness but instead transmits and filters it. I postulate the existence of a Universal Consciousness, which I shall henceforth refer to as Smart Mind, manifesting itself through intelligent living organisms. What is the evidence for supposing that the brain filters Mind?

(a) When psychedelic drugs are taken by stable subjects under controlled conditions they often experience expanded consciousness, implying that the brain filter has been temporarily disabled. A similar effect is reported with the use of the “holotropic breathing” technique developed by Stanislav Grof.

(b) Those whose brains are rendered almost non-functional by hypoxia sometimes report near-death experiences which may include expanded consciousness.

(c) Some of the symptoms of the brain disease schizophrenia are suggestive of expanded consciousness, again indicating a breakdown of the brain filter.

The skeptic could argue that it defies common-sense to suppose that the mind does not arise from the brain. I would ask him to consider how members of a primitive tribe would react the first time they heard voices on a radio set; “common-sense” would tell them that there was a “spirit” inside the radio set. According to Smart Mind theory the brain is like a highly sophisticated radio set which “transmits” mind in an intelligent fashion. The brain filters and processes information from the mind to maximize the survival potential of the individual. For instance, there would not be much point in someone being fascinated by the movement of stars in distant galaxies when confronted by a ferocious and hungry lion.

Some may object that this is insufficient evidence. It is true that an NDE is experienced only by a minority of people and the experience cannot be reproduced at will. The reports of those suffering from schizophrenia may be unreliable and difficult to interpret. The effects of psychedelic drugs, however, can be easily reproduced, the only constraints being legal ones. The scientific hypothesis that the brain filters Mind can be tested experimentally and is falsifiable. What is required is, firstly, to obtain legal consent for the experiment, secondly, to randomly select about a hundred psychologically stable and intelligent subjects and, thirdly, to administer a relatively safe psychedelic drug under medical supervision. Random selection of subjects from a large pool of volunteers is required to reduce the likelihood of bias. If none of the tested subjects clearly reports expanded consciousness my hypothesis could be deemed to have been disproved.

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Until such experiments are carried out on a large scale, we have to rely on the evidence of reliable experimenters like Aldous Huxley. Please note that I am only advocating the use of these drugs for scientific research, not for recreational purposes.

Aldous Huxley and Mescalin In 1954 the writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley published The Doors of Perception61, in which he reported his experiences with drug mescalin, derived from the peyote, a cactus found in Mexico and the American Southwest. At that time the effects of this drug, although well known to the native Indians, were poorly understood by modern scientists. A psychiatrist in California was looking for volunteers, and Aldous Huxley agreed to take four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water. He expected to see “visions of many-colored geometries” such as those experienced by the Gnostic poet William Blake, but this did not happen. Huxley says he had always been a poor visualizer. An hour and a half after taking the drug, Huxley was sitting in his study, looking intently at a small glass vase containing three flowers. This is how he described the change in his perception: I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. "Is it agreeable?" somebody asked. (During this Part of the experiment, all conversations were recorded on a dictating machine, and it has been possible for me to refresh my memory of what was said.) "Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "It just is." Istigkeit—wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The investigator directed Huxley’s attention to the furniture in the room. I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this purely aesthetic, Cubist's-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers-back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance. The legs, for example, of that chair—how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes—or was it several centuries?—not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them—-or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for "I" was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were "they") being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair. 61 Huxley, Aldous (1945). “The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell,” Publisher: Chatto & Windus Ltd. Published: 1954

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The investigator directed Huxley’s attention to the furniture in the room. What Huxley was experiencing was that the barrier and filter of his brain was temporarily suspended and he was now identified with Smart Mind. His description of this state is “being his Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair”. He goes on: Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, that “ we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.

MDMA (Ecstasy) MDMA is 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine, commonly known as the drug ecstasy. The patent for MDMA was originally filed in 1912 by the German company Merck, but it only began to be used therapeutically in the 1970’s by the psychotherapist Leo Zeff. Its use was adopted by other psychiatrists, but they were reluctant to publish all the data for fear of drawing attention to the drug leading to its criminalization. The significant properties of MDMA which were observed were its ability to diminish anxiety and depression and promote easy emotional communication, thereby aiding the process of psychotherapy. In the early 1980’s media reports appeared sensationalizing the euphoric qualities of the drug. From 1984 onwards, the United States DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) began campaigning for its prohibition, partly on the grounds of its “neurotoxicity”. In 1985 it was placed on Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, which severely restricted its use even in medical research. In fact, the evidence for any neurotoxic effects of MDMA was very limited, and the more probable reason for its banning was the government’s concern over its expanding recreational use. MDMA is now off-patent and is considered to be an “orphan drug”, meaning that the pharmaceutical industry has little financial incentive to develop it; as a result, it is very difficult to obtain funding for research into it. There are, however, many

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anecdotal accounts of its usefulness on the MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) web site, http://www.maps.org/. There is, for instance, the first-person account of a 33-year-old woman who had suffered from depression for 12 years with two hospitalizations. She had been on several different anti-depressants and been treated by a number of doctors and psychotherapists with only limited benefit. She decided to self-medicate with MDMA with the support of her husband and a good friend. She felt herself becoming uninhibited and felt able to talk about things, especially from her emotionally-deprived childhood, which she had never been able to do before even in psychotherapy. Her psychotherapist was on holiday at the time of her experiment with MDMA, and it was one and a half weeks before she saw him. She did not dare tell him that she had taken an illegal drug. He remarked on the improvement in her and expressed his puzzlement. The improvement continued over several months although she had taken the drug only on one occasion. I do not know whether MDMA is a good drug or a bad one; nobody does, because we not have the results of enough clinical trials yet. I have highlighted the saga of this drug because it shows that even in the Land of the Free there are barriers to the acquisition of scientific knowledge unless it is of the approved variety. I do not advocate the illegal use of a drug, but I wish to add my voice to those sections of the medical profession which are arguing for the availability of MDMA on prescription.

Ibogaine Ibogaine is one of twelve alkaloids derived from the root-bark of the plant Tabernanthe iboga, found in West-Central Africa, mainly Gabon, Cameroon and the Republic of the Congo. Its ritual use is an important part of the Bwiti religion practiced in those countries. It is classified as a Schedule I controlled substance in the United States, and its sale and possession are banned in Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, and Switzerland. It is legal in the U.K. and Holland at the time of writing (February 2008), but is not a licensed drug, which means that the user alone bears the responsibility for any harmful effects caused by it. There are a number of anecdotal reports and a few uncontrolled trials testifying to the usefulness of ibogaine in the treatment of heroin, cocaine, and alcohol addiction. Reports have suggested that a single treatment of ibogaine reduced drug craving for a period of weeks or even up to six months. Ibogaine was used by the Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo in the 1960’s as an adjunct to psychotherapy.62 He reported that it did not cause dilation of the pupils or a rise in blood pressure unlike LSD or MDMA. It resembles alcohol in often causing vomiting or a disturbance in body balance. He recommended that it was advisable to administer the drug when the patient has an empty stomach, and not to use more than 4 62 C. Naranjo. “The Healing Journey”. Chapter V, Ibogaine: Fantasy and Reality, 197-231, Pantheon Books, Div. Random House, New York (1973)

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mg. per kilogram of body weight on a first session. The optimal dosage may range from 3 to 5 mg. per kilogram, depending on the individual's sensitivity to the drug. An anti-emetic (Dramamine) may be used with it to prevent vomiting. The psychic effects of ibogaine can include visions of animals and explosions of rage. The anger is not usually directed to people near the patient at the time of administration of the drug but rather to persons or situations in the patient's past, toward whom and by which it was originally aroused. This is in accord with the general tendency for the person under ibogaine to become concerned with childhood reminiscences and fantasies. Naranjo found ibogaine useful in psychotherapy but preferred to use MDMA subsequently as a safer and more pleasant alternative. The use of ibogaine in the treatment of drug addiction was pioneered by Howard Lotsof, a person with no scientific qualifications. He graduated from NYU film school and thought he was going to be an artist, but since 1982 he has been involved in addiction research. He serendipitously observed ibogaine's effect on his own heroin dependence at age 19 in 1962.63 He then administered ibogaine to a total of 20 individuals who were part of a lay network of drug users that ingested hallucinogens and somewhat systematically noted and compared their effects. When the drug became illegal in the United States he began to arrange for the treatment of his “patients” in hotel rooms in Holland. A total of approximately 40 to 45 heroin users were treated between 1989 and 1993 in Holland. The death of a patient in the Netherlands in June 1993 brought an end to treatments there, although the official Dutch inquiry was not conclusive regarding a causal role of ibogaine in the death. Dr. Deborah Mash, professor of neurology and molecular pharmacology at the University of Miami School of Medicine, began an ibogaine treatment program for heroin and cocaine addiction in 1996 on the Caribbean Island of St. Kitts.64 One of the hypotheses for the persistence of drug abuse in an individual is the self-medication hypothesis: The abuser may self-medicate with opioids or psychostimulants in an effort to improve his dysphoric (depressed) mood. Chronic drug abuse leads to changes in neural systems that mediate drive and motivation, and discontinuation of drug use results in an intense desire to administer the drug to the exclusion of other reinforcement. The study conducted by Dr. Mash and her colleagues found that single-dose administrations of ibogaine to drug-dependent individuals resulted in fewer self-reports of craving for cocaine and opiates, and significantly improved depressive

63 THE ALKALOIDS: IBOGAINE: PROCEEDINGS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, Volume 56, Edited by G.A. Cordell, K.R. Alper and S.D. Glick, Copyright © 2001, Elsevier Science (USA), 64“ Medication Development of Ibogaine as a Pharmacotherapy for Drug Dependence” DEBORAH C. MASH, CRAIG A. KOVERA, BILLY E. BUCK, MICHAEL D. NORENBERG, PAUL SHAPSHAK, W. LEE HEARN AND JUAN SANCHEZ-RAMOS . Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 844:274-292 (1998)

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symptoms.65 There were 27 participants in the trial meeting DSM-IV criteria for opioid or cocaine dependence. They were in-patients for 14 days and received one of three fixed dose (500, 600, or 800 mg.) ibogaine treatments under open-label conditions. Results were as follows:

The obvious limitation of this study is that subjects were only followed up for one month. Further studies with longer follow-up are necessary. Experience with ibogaine in the treatment of alcohol addiction in humans comes only from anecdotal reports, for instance in the work done by a British ethnobotanist named Hattie Wells.66 There has, however, been a recent scientific study at the University of California San Francisco Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center on the use of the drug in alcohol-dependent rats.67

65 “Ibogaine: Complex Pharmacokinetics, Concerns for Safety, and Preliminary Efficacy Measures” DEBORAH C. MASH, CRAIG A. KOVERA, JOHN PABLO, RACHEL F. TYNDALE, FRANK D. ERVIN, IZBEN C. WILLIAMS, EDWARD G. SINGLETON, MANNY MAYOR (2000). Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 914 (1), 394–401. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2000.tb05213.x 66 http://www.ibogaine.org/wells.html 67 Dao-Yao He, Nancy N.H. McGough, Ajay Ravindranathan, Jerome Jeanblanc, Marian L. Logrip, Khanhky Phamluong, Patricia H. Janak, and Dorit Ron, "Glial Cell Line-Derived Neurotrophic Factor Mediates the Desirable Actions of the Anti-Addiction Drug Ibogaine against Alcohol Consumption," The Journal of Neuroscience, Jan. 19, 2005, Vol. 25, No. 3, p. 619.

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The theoretical basis for this research was the knowledge that long-term administration of cocaine or opioids results in decreased activity of the brain chemical “glial cell-line derived neurotrophic factor” (GDNF) pathway in rats, and that injection of GDNF into the part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area (VTA) can block the behavioral effects of these drugs. Ibogaine is hypothesized to increase GDNF activity, resulting in the activation of the GDNF receptor “Ret”, leading to a positive feedback cycle. This means that once a single dose of ibogaine triggers increased GDNF activity, a self-perpetuating cycle is initiated which could continue for as long as six months. It is thought that this has an effect on other brain chemicals, especially dopamine, which reduces craving for the drug. All drugs of abuse, including alcohol, activate the “reward” neurocircuitry in the brain. One of the main brain regions in this pathway is the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in the midbrain. The VTA may also be the site for reversal of the neuroadaptations that lead to the development of addiction. The present study suggested that GDNF in the ventral tegmental area mediates the ibogaine-induced reduction in alcohol consumption in rats. Rats were allowed continuous access to two bottles, one containing 10% alcohol in water, and the other containing plain tap water. After some time the rats began to consume alcohol in daily drinking sessions. Their drinking declined precipitously when they received ibogaine, either by injection into the peritoneal cavity or directly into the ventral tegmental area of the brain where GDNF levels were shown to increase. They then withheld alcohol for two weeks, which normally leads to greatly increased drinking when alcohol is again available. Rats that had been given ibogaine showed much less craving for alcohol after a period of abstinence, providing hope that this drug could help prevent binge-drinking in humans.

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Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) DMT was first extracted from the roots of Mimosa tenuiflora in 1946 by the Brazilian chemist Gonçalves de Lima, although it had previously been synthesized by Canadian chemist Richard Manske in 1931. Mimosa tenuiflora is a perennial evergreen shrub native to Brazil. DMT was first investigated scientifically by the Hungarian chemist and psychologist Dr. Stephen Szára in the 1950’s; he injected himself with the drug and reported his experience as follows: “The mask-like faces of the persons, the dream-like mysteriousness of the objects and the room gave me the feeling that I had arrived in another world, entirely different and queer and full of secrecy and mystery. This wonderful and strange world attracted me at one moment but the next moment I did not want to accept it. I became perplexed; I did not know what to do.”68 Rick Strassman of the department of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque studied the clinical effects of DMT in the early nineties.69 Strassman’s study is one of the best and most scientifically rigorous research projects in the field of psychedelic drugs up to now, and was carried out with the approval of the US Drug Enforcement Administration. DMT belongs to the tryptamine class of psychedelic drug, derived from tryptophan which is an amino acid found in food. 5-hydroxy-tryptamine, also called serotonin, is a tryptamine derivative found normally in the brain, but it is not a psychedelic. LSD and psilocybin are also tryptamine-derived psychedelics. While the effects of DMT last for only about 30 minutes, LSD and mescaline act for up to 12 hours. All the tryptamine-type drugs probably act on the brain’s serotonin system because of their chemical similarity to serotonin. Psychedelics probably mimic the action of serotonin in some cases and block them in others. Mimicking the action of serotonin means that psychedelics such as DMT activate some of the same receptors in the brain that serotonin does. DMT exists naturally in the human body as well as in many other animals as well as plants, but it is most abundant in certain plants found in Latin America. Unlike drugs like heroin, cocaine, and alcohol, psychedelic drugs do not cause craving or withdrawal. If someone has taken a psychedelic drug over several days and then stops it abruptly, there are no withdrawal symptoms. The danger of a psychedelic

68 “Psychotropic drugs” S.Garattini, V.Ghetti (editors) Publisher: Elsevier, Amsterdam. Published:1957 69 Strassman, Rick: DMT: “The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences” Publisher: Park Street Press. Published: 2001

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drug is that, if it is not taken under supervision, psychotic-like symptoms could lead to disruptive or self-injurious behaviour. The psychedelic subculture in the USA tried DMT in the early sixties, when it acquired the reputation of being a “terror drug”. The psychiatric research community preferred to experiment on LSD at that time. However, in 1965 DMT was discovered to be a normal constituent of human blood. In 1972 Julius Axelrod demonstrated its presence in human brain tissue. DMT thus became the first endogenous human psychedelic. It was even found that the brain actively transports DMT across the blood-brain barrier into its tissues. The drug is rapidly broken down in the body by enzymes known as monoamine oxidases (MAO). Strassman refers to DMT as the “spirit molecule” which enables the brain to naturally produce non-ordinary states of consciousness at the time of birth, near-death, and death, and also mystical experiences at other times. Melatonin produced by the pineal gland is also a tryptamine derivative, but has no psychedelic properties. Strassman hypothesizes that the pineal gland produces DMT in psychedelic amounts at extraordinary times in our lives, but this has not been confirmed. The most striking psychedelic effects of DMT are visual hallucinations – Subjects described extremely vivid colors, abstract patterns, and also specific visual images. These included “a fantastic bird”, “a tree of life and knowledge” etc. Even more impressive was the apprehension of human and “alien” figures that seemed to be aware of and interacting with the volunteers. Strassman grouped DMT experiences into personal, invisible, and transpersonal types. Personal experiences are sensations affecting the subject’s own body, and thoughts and emotions localized to his own mind. Strassman’s hypothesis was that, if DMT could enable a subject to get in touch with personal memories and /or emotions buried in the unconscious, it could be used a psychotherapeutic tool. This was in fact borne out by some of the sessions with subjects who had current emotional problems, although of course they had not come to the research study specifically for therapy. Strassman defined the invisible category as “an encounter with seemingly solid and freestanding realities coexisting with this one”. As the reports from the volunteers began to accumulate, Strassman was led to the idea that they were describing “real places”. He had to let go of the assumption that these were merely hallucinations or illusions, products of an abnormal imagination. The implications of the study of DMT for our conception of Mind will be considered in a later section.

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The Smart Mind Hypothesis Having looked at some of the evidence for the strange properties of Mind, we are in a position to consider a model of Mind which does not restrict us to the unproven sterile assumption that it is merely a “product” of the brain.

I have to emphasize that the nature of Mind is still a mystery, and a tremendous amount of research needs to be done before we can make confident statements about it. The model I have shown in the diagram is one which attempts to make sense of the facts we know at present:

(1) Those who have had near-death experiences tell us that they had vivid, meaningful experiences at a time when the functioning of their brains was severely compromised. These people, as well as those who have had mystical experiences under other circumstances, sometimes speak of an ineffable experience transcending the ordinary confines of the brain. It is this experience of an apparently universal mind that I have represented by “Smart Mind” in the diagram. Some have commented on the timeless nature of this experience; one cannot therefore say that Mind came into being after

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the Big Bang. Something which is timeless, however, is outside our normal experience and we can only conceptualize it in a very approximate way.

(2) Informational feedback is something which occurs in Nature, especially in the body of a living organism. The thyroid gland secretes thyroxine which inhibits the secretion of TSH by the pituitary gland; TSH in turn stimulates the secretion of thyroxine by the thyroid, setting up a feedback loop which maintains the amount of thyroxine in the blood at an optimal. It is not unreasonable to suppose that such feedback also occurs between individual minds and universal mind.

(3) Although the biological model of consciousness regards the life of a human being as “a tale told by an idiot”, consigning human memories to the grave after the decomposition of the brain, the reporting of past life memories contradicts this view and provides evidence that at least some memories are stored outside the human body for at least 4000 years. These memories constitute the “informational feedback” from conscious intelligent beings.

Smart Mind appears to be in a process of continuous evolution, giving rise to living organisms and, in turn, learning from them by gathering information. This implies that Smart Mind is by no means omniscient. When we look at the world around us we do not see evidence of an omniscient intelligence; what we see is a “painful” process of evolution. This pain becomes evident in the suffering of sentient creatures, but this pain is only the visible manifestation of the evolutionary struggle. One of the features of the Near Death Experience described by Raymond Moody is the “panoramic life review”. The survivor describes it in terms of memory, but unlike the kind of recollection one is familiar with, a “vision” of past events succeeding one another in chronological order and with extreme rapidity is sometimes experienced. Some describe the entire review taking place instantaneously. Despite its rapidity the experience is described as extraordinarily vivid and real with images in vibrant colour. This experience is usually described as a very emotional one, and is often accompanied by profound regret for any errors the individual feels he has committed during his life. How does the life review fit into Smart Mind theory? If one sees each human life as an “experiment” carried out by Smart Mind, the life review is the final summing up, the de-briefing, in which Smart Mind learns from the experience of that life. The learning may be primarily one of a moral nature as Smart Mind is to be seen as in a process of moral evolution. An example of moral learning is provided by a case of Past Life Regression quoted by Raymond Moody in his book Life Before Life.70 This is the first person account of a family therapist named Dree Miller Dunlap, who had sought regression 70 Moody, Raymond: “Life Before Life: Regression into Past Lives” Publisher: Macmillan. Published: 1990

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therapy for help in coping with her chronic and painful arthritis. She found herself in a past life as a male Italian physician in the sixteenth century. “I was treating a young girl (about eight years old) who had broken her arm at the elbow….I violently twisted the child’s arm. The child screamed, and I knew that I had deliberately inflicted pain.” “….As the regression continued, I learned that I was unhappily married to a woman who did not want children. Anger and bitterness filled our marriage. I inflicted these feelings on to my patients.” She moved on to another lifetime in which she was a monk in a monastery. “I openly castigated the other monks for not having more respect for God. The theme of criticizing seemed to predominate throughout this life. I reached old age bitter and isolated….My last few years of life were spent alone in my cell. My body was racked in pain.” Past Life Regression showed Dree Dunlap that the pain she was undergoing in her present life made sense as a process of learning. In her previous life as an Italian doctor she had committed the morally indefensible act of deliberately and unnecessarily inflicting pain on a patient. She is now given the opportunity of becoming a better person. After the regression therapy her experience is that, “The arthritis seems to flare up when I allow anger or impatience or bitterness or unforgiveness into my life. When the pain comes, it serves me as a reminder. If I stop and listen to the message it brings, the pain is soon gone.” Some have argued that Near Death Experiences, Death Bed Visions, and Past Life Experiences are evidence of “survival” after death, but the parsimonious explanation for these phenomena is that some memories do appear to survive death and become incorporated into Smart Mind. We have no real evidence that all the billions of people who have lived and died on Earth continue to live as individuals after death. The real mystery that we are confronted with is how memories are stored outside the physical body. Although we are a long way from a definitive solution to this problem, Simon Berkovich’s speculative hypothesis is worth looking at. Simon Y. Berkovich, computer scientist at George Washington University has investigated the information-carrying capability of the human genome.71 While very intensive information processing is of the essence of the phenomenon of life, the information that can be contained in the 30,000 genes of a human being is less than that contained in a blurry picture taken with a cheap digital camera! He hypothesizes that the DNA contained in an organism is not a repository of control information but an identification key for an organism, like a “bar-code”. “With the DNA as a key, biological objects have access to richer information processing facilities of the underlying infrastructure of the physical world.” Berkovich states that these information processing facilities may be regarded as “the internet of the physical universe”. He puts

71 S. Berkovich: “On the remote interaction of biological objects with close genetic structures”, Annals of the European Academy of Sciences, pp. 111-130, 2003.

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forward an experimentally testable hypothesis, which is that cultivating clones can shorten the lifespan of clone donors. His reasoning is as follows: “A zygote starting a new organism opens ‘an account’ on the ‘Internet of the physical Universe’ with the DNA as a key…. Different biological objects get distinct "slices" of the information processing resources of the Universe corresponding to their DNA determined accounts. Biological objects share the storage and bandwidth of the informational infrastructure of the physical world in the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) mode, similarly to cellular phone communications. “The Internet-like organization with the underlying infrastructure of the physical world raises a particular concern how zillions of biological objects avoid informational cross-interference. The feasibility of this construction, which employs the CDMA communications, hinges upon biological individuality of multi-cellular organisms – the distinctiveness of the DNA keys….. In the case of clones, biological objects having exactly matching DNA are generated artificially….. A newly produced clone, in contrast to a sexually created organism, simply takes the existing DNA key and enters the already established account of the donor. Not surprisingly, a clone inherits the “informational” age of the donor and undergoes premature aging and early death. Clones often fail to develop into normal organisms. “Each account has a finite life cycle due to limited capacity to efficiently overcome the increase of accumulated information. A clone and its donor, which have a joint account each, handle more information, so the operational capacity of this account for each user will be exhausted in a shorter period of time…. Recent experiments indicate that cloned animals in fact have a shorter lifespan….. The longevity of clone donors, presumably, has not been examined.” Berkovich calculates that “for a many-clones system the lifespan of a donor should constitute about 30% of a regular remaining duration of its life.” If one accepts his theoretical argument cloning of human beings would be unethical but, as the vast majority of scientific opinion is against him, it is possible that such cloning may take place in the future, enabling his prediction to be refuted or confirmed. Of course the cloning of animals is being done at present, and the necessary data could be easily obtained. Berkovich writes that this would be an Experimentum Crucis, a crucial experiment, as modern science just cannot envision a situation where the lifespan of a living being can be curtailed from a remote location without a tangible material contact. He warns against the possibility of “biological hackers” who could reduce the life-span of an individual by making clones of him. Berkovich has enlarged on these ideas in a book entitled “On the ‘Barcode’ Functionality of DNA, or the Phenomenon of Life in the Physical Universe” (2001). He conceives of a cellular automaton model, which portrays the physical world as a gigantic information processing machine. Functioning of living systems has little to do with physics and chemistry; it is a problem of information control. One of the

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profoundest enigmas of nature is the contrast of dead and living matter, and the core of the enigma of living matter lies in the origin of information control. Turning his attention to the physical Universe, he observes that the existing picture of information pathways in the Universe is incomplete. The information impact of quantum entanglement behind material processes spreads at least 10 to the power 7 times faster than light. The important feature of the suggested cellular automaton model is a continual generation of synchronizations and desynchronizations that spread through the whole Universe at the frequency of 10 to the power 11 Hz. The internal rhythm at the frequency 10 to the power 11 Hz permeating the whole Universe serves as the clock pulse generator for all biological systems. The slow neural circuitry of the brain cannot supply a substantial computational power; the extremely high information processing ����������������� ��������� ������������� ����� ��� � mechanism. Berkovich postulates the extracorporeal placement of human memory with information processing in the brain dependent on the holographic memory of the Universe operating at the characteristic frequency of 10 to the power 11 Hz. This organization employs an unconventional computational model using fast memory and slow processing elements� Spreading the precious contents of human memory over the whole network rather than storing it in one vulnerable location is an obvious design advantage. The central problem for the suggested organization of biological information processing is how to apportion the information processing facilities of the physical Universe among the zillions of living systems. The resolution of this problem is associated with the “barcode” workings of the DNA. A particular instance of the genome creates a specific pattern of conformational oscillations in the chromosomes. This pattern modulates the holographic waves in the informational infrastructure of the physical world. At the same time, chromosomes are susceptible to these patterns of oscillations, so DNA can extract them from the correspondingly modulated incoming waves. Berkovich’s hypothesis is a speculative one which may or may not correspond to reality, but the fact is that the alternative hypothesis of memory storage within the brain is equally shaky. Recent work by Yasser Roudi and Peter E. Latham from University College London has demonstrated the extremely limited memory storage capacity of the brain according to the currently accepted model.72 The Hopfield model for an autoassociative memory was proposed by John Hopfield of the California Institute of Technology during the early 1980s. It conceives of brain cells being organized into neural networks where the likelihood of an individual neuron firing depends on the number of impulses which have been input into that neuron. All neurons are both input and output neurons and all connections are weighted. The units in computer-simulated Hopfield nets are binary threshold units, i.e. the units only take on two different values for their states and the value is determined by whether or not the units' input exceeds their threshold. The interconnected neurons update their activation 72 PLoS Computational Biology Vol. 3, No. 9, e141 doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030141 (September 2007)

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values asynchronously and independently of other neurons. Hopfield networks are a particular model of an attractor network, which is a network of nodes, often recurrently connected, whose time dynamics settle to a stable pattern.

The Hopfield model appeared to solve the problem of memory storage in the brain because the number of memories that could be stored was assumed to be proportional to the number of neurons in the network, and there are 100 billion neurons in the human brain. Roudi and Latham recently investigated this model with reference to the storage capacity of realistic networks in the brain; how many different memories can be stored in a single network? They realized that answering this is critical for understanding the highly flexible and seemingly unlimited memory capacity in animals. Previous studies had used computer simulations which were “unrealistic” in the sense that they were not a close approximation of the structure and function of the brain. One such study had indicated that the number of memories which could be stored was 0.14 of the number of neurons, which obviously gives an enormous storage capacity for an animal brain. Even the more realistic studies lacked biological plausibility in that connectivity between neurons was all-all rather than sparse, and the neurons were binary (either on or off, with nothing in between). The present study used a more realistic computer simulation. Roudi and Latham found that neurons often produce random, meaningless signals that create noise in neuron-to-neuron speech. It is possible to have as many neurons as you like in a network but, as memories are added and the connections get stronger, the noise gets so amplified. This means that realistically the number of neurons in an effective network is limited to the number of connections per neuron (about 10,000) so that a network can only store about 500 memories. This is obviously inadequate to account for the number of memories in a human brain, which is able to accommodate a vocabulary of at least 50,000 words in addition to much other information. Neuroscientists hypothesize that there are tens of thousands of Hopfield networks in the brain which are interconnected, allowing a combinatorial increase in storage capacity. Understanding how to achieve such an increase has, however, proved difficult. Simulations with simple models have so far only produced a modest increase in storage capacity. What this means is that we no longer know how the brain holds so many memories. Peter Latham has stated to a science writer, “"Our finding is just one tiny piece of an exceedingly large puzzle I don't think will be solved until a thousand

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years from now."! Could it be that Berkovich is right, and the hardware for memory storage is outside the brain? Further advances in this field will require the collaboration of physicists with psychologists/parapsychologists. It is unfortunate that, since Wolfgang Pauli is no longer with us, there seem to be few physicists interested in such collaboration.

Unus Mundus The modern concept of the Unus Mundus (“one world”) emerged from a remarkable collaboration between the Swiss-German psychoanalyst Carl Jung and the Austrian-Jewish Nobel-prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli. In 1932, Pauli had reached a life crisis; his mother had committed suicide, his marriage had broken up, he was drinking heavily, and was disturbed by vivid dreams. He sought help from Jung and was offered weekly appointments. Jung interpreted nearly 400 of Pauli’s dreams. Their correspondence over a period of 26 years has recently been published. Jung formulated his concept of archetypes several years before he postulated the unus mundus, and his understanding of the nature of archetypes matured during this time. He wrote that in certain highly impressive dreams “the imagery makes use of motifs analogous to or even identical with those of mythology. I call these structures archetypes because they function in a way similar to instinctual patterns of behavior….They occur in the folklore of primitive races, in Greek, Egyptian, and ancient Mexican myths, as well as in the dreams, visions, and delusions of modern individuals entirely ignorant of all such traditions.”73 He later came to the conclusion that archetypes had a dual nature; they exist both in the psyche and in the world at large. The archetype was not merely a psychic entity but, more fundamentally, a bridge to matter in general. In his final formulation he used the term unus mundus to describe the psychophysically neutral, unitary ground which underlies both mind and matter. Pauli’s interpretation was that the laws of nature were the physical manifestations of the archetypes. Each law of nature should have a psychic correspondence, and vice versa, although this may not be apparent to us in our present state of knowledge. He was optimistic (in a letter to Jung written in 1953) that “since matter has now turned into an abstract, invisible reality for the modern physicist, the prospects for a psychophysical monism have become much more auspicious.” Jung wrote: “If mandala symbolism is the psychological equivalent of the unus mundus, then synchronicity is its parapsychological equivalent”.74 Jung came to an understanding of the mandala through analysis of his own dreams. The background to

73 C.G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol.3, par. 549 74 Storr, Anthony: “The Essential Jung: Selected Writings Introduced by Anthony Storr”, p.292 Publisher: Fontana, London. Published: 1983

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this was a “breakdown” Jung suffered from 1912 onwards, coinciding with his parting from Sigmund Freud whom he had previously regarded as a father figure. “The darkness”, as Jung described his breakdown, continued for nearly six years. In 1918, he began to sketch a small circular drawing, a mandala, every morning. The name mandala is the Sanskrit word for “circle”, and these images are important in Tibetan Buddhism. Mandalas may be simple or complex, but they always have a circular shape with a center, and sometimes have the theme of “squaring the circle”. Jung saw this geometrical pattern as “one of the many archetypal motifs which form the basic patterns of our dreams and fantasies”. With the help of such drawings Jung was able to observe his psychic transformations from day to day. Jung regarded the mandala as the archetype of wholeness, and he felt that the need to draw it at certain times was an attempt of the psyche to heal itself. He thought they symbolized the unconscious mind, “which is undoubtedly older and more original than consciousness”. He continued, “The mandala symbolizes, by its central point, the ultimate unity of all archetypes as well as of the multiplicity of the phenomenal world, and is therefore the empirical equivalent of the metaphysical concept of unus mundus” What did Jung mean when he wrote that synchronicity is the parapsychological equivalent of the unus mundus? The development of Jung’s ideas on the profound and subtle concept of synchronicity has been traced by Roderick Main, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.75 One of Jung’s definitions of synchronicity is “the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state”. Jung stated that the relationship between the psychic state and the external events may be “acausal”. As an example I shall take the events which occurred on the 11th of September 2001, with reference to the ongoing parapsychological experiment being conducted by Roger Nelson and his team at the University of Princeton.76 This team has been collecting data from a global network of random event generators (REG devices) since August, 1998. The network runs custom software that reads the output of physical random number generators and records a 200-bit trial sum once every second, continuously over months and years. The data are transmitted over the internet to a server in Princeton, NJ, USA, where they are archived for later analysis. The purpose of Nelson’s study is purpose is to examine subtle correlations that reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. It appears that when millions of people share intentions and emotions the numbers generated by the REG devices are correlated with each other more than could be expected by chance. There have been many analyses of the data on that day, but I shall focus on incident, the crash of United Airlines Flight 93. Of the four planes taken by terrorists, this was the one

75 Roderick Main. “Religion, Science, and Synchronicity”. Harvest: Journal for Jungian Studies. 46, no. 2 (2000): 89-107 76 http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

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which was apparently brought down to crash in western Pennsylvania by passengers who attacked and overcame the terrorists, in a deliberate sacrifice of their own lives.

The black box recording of Flight 93 stopped at 10:03:10 a.m., and eye-witnesses reported that it crashed at 10.06 a.m. With reference to the graph, the spike at the end is driven by a one-second trial during which the REG devices were so highly correlated as to produce a Z-score of 4.8, which has odds of less than 1 in a million. Such an extreme score might happen by chance once in 15 days; the odds of such a spike occurring during the 1.5 hour span of the terror attacks are about 1 in 200. Here we have a conjunction of (a) an unusual psychic state affecting the passengers on the plane, and (b) an unusual correlation of random event generators located many miles away. A possible explanation is that the minds of the passengers somehow affected the machine causally, but this seems unlikely. Jung referred to synchronicity as an “acausal connecting principle”, but Roderick Main has pointed out that it is not clear exactly what Jung meant by this. In the present example, are we to suppose that the numbers generated were not completely random? This would fit with Jung’s view that archetypes have a physical component as well as a mental one. An essential feature of a synchronicity is that it is meaningful to one or more observers, in this instance to the researchers at Princeton and to the thousands who visit their web site. The archetype represents in itself “a form of transcendental meaning which might manifest itself simultaneously in the human psyche and in the arrangement

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of an external and independent event”. We can only speculate as to the psychic state of the passengers at the time of the spike on the chart: They may have been extremely distressed, or they may have been having near-death experiences which are altered states of consciousness. Jung wrote this about out-of-body and near-death experiences in 1952, long before Raymond Moody’s pioneering study in 1975: “In swoon states, where by all human standards there is every guarantee that conscious activity and sense perception are suspended, consciousness, reproducible ideas, acts of judgment, and perceptions can still continue to exist”.

Smart Mind May Be Independent of Time Mind is a prisoner of the human brain, in the sense that when the brain is functioning “normally” it filters Mind and subjects it to the constraints of time. When we speak of the normal functioning of the brain we mean the way it functions in the majority of healthy people in civilized societies. It appears that even in civilized societies there are a minority who are able to transcend the limitations of the brain. The parapsychologist William Cox conducted an investigation of twenty-eight documented train accidents between 1950 and 1955.77 The number of passengers on the trains involved in accidents was found to be significantly less than the number of passengers on the same trains one week before or a few days after the accident. The odds against this kind of a difference occurring by chance were over a hundred to one. Some people seemed to have unconsciously avoided the accident-prone trains. The physicist Stephen Hawking has shown that time began in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago. The beginning of real time would have been a “singularity”, at which the laws of physics would have broken down. The human brain, which is the result of a process of evolution which began at the Big Bang, is therefore dependent on time and limited by it. In discussing the concept of time we need to distinguish between internal time, as an immediate mode of our existence, and external time, as measured by mechanical or electronic devices called clocks. John Ellis McTaggart classified internal time as A-time: There is a quality of “nowness” which distinguishes the present from the past and the future. B-time is the time of physics; all points of B-time are equivalent points on a linear scale.78 In view of this dual aspect of time, it follows that the question of the nature of time needs to be considered in conjunction with the question of the relationship of the mind to matter.

77 Cox, W. E. (1956). “Precognition: An analysis II”, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 30, 99–109. 78 McTaggart J.E. (1908) “The Unreality of Time”. Mind, 17, 456-473.

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While the directedness of time in physics is problematical, the “psychological arrow of time” with reference to A-time is a matter of everyday experience. In view of the difficulty of deriving A-time from B-time we might suppose that A-time is primary and try to derive B-time from it. This approach has been adopted by Hartmann Romer of the Department of Physics at the University of Freiburg.79 He starts from a monistic conception of mind and matter and locates the origin of time in personal consciousness. By contrast, time does not seem to be relevant in the unconscious; the clarity of time fades away in our dreams and the collective unconscious and unus mundus of Carl Jung are explicitly assumed to be timeless. Romer conceives of the unus mundus as timeless and neutral with regard to the distinction of mind and matter. This distinction only arises after an epistemic split of the unus mundus, separating a “conscious observer” from the rest of the world. Primarily, time emerges as A-time, related to the conscious observer. The concept of the “now” – the brief interval that divides the past from the future – is absent in all fundamental mathematical formulations, both in classical physics and in quantum physics. Einstein wrote, “For us physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”. In other words, Einstein was saying that “tensed time”, which is a fundamental dimension of psychological reality, is absent in physics. K.G. Denbigh wrote in 1970 that, “the criterion of before and after which is offered by consciousness has a primacy over any criterion offered by science.” Those who deny the reality of consciousness are also denying the reality of time! Freud and Jung appreciated that “tensed time”, although a manifest reality for the conscious mind, is not so for the unconscious mind. Jung wrote, “There is no trouble about time in the unconscious. Part of our psyche is not in time and not in space.” The Swiss scientist Hans Primas has advanced the idea of a non-material “tensed domain” which includes, in addition to tensed time, all kinds of conscious experience, mental processes and personal memory.80 Primas does not restrict the tensed world to the inner world of private thoughts and experiences; instead he relates the tensed domain to a mental world considered as fundamental to the nature of existence. He goes on to state that, according to this view, “mind operates as a principle beyond individual consciousness and is not restricted to the ‘human mind’”. Unless there was such a principle, my “now” could be different from your “now”; there must be a synchronizing principle to link all human minds on this planet. We could imagine that if there was intelligent life on other solar systems, their subjective time may not be synchronized

79 Romer, Hartmann (2004) “Weak Quantum Theory and the Emergence of Time” Mind and Matter, Vol. 2(2), 105-125 80 Primas, Hans (2003) “Time-Entanglement Between Mind and Matter” Mind and Matter, Vol. 1, 81-119

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with ours, presenting a barrier to communicating with them. My understanding of Einstein’s theory of relativity is rather shaky, but I would imagine that if life existed on a solar system which was moving away from our solar system at a very high speed, their subjective time certainly would be different from ours. The tense-less domain, by contrast, refers to physical objects and all concepts of matter and energy. We then need to explain how the world of objects is related to the tensed world of mind, for our experience is that the two worlds are nearly perfectly coordinated (Any exceptions would present as psycho-physical anomalies). Primas invokes for this purpose Leibniz’s idea that mind and matter are categorically distinct, and have no direct causal effect on one another, but are perfectly correlated in time.

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I see the visible material world which commenced at the Big Bang as providing a physical interface between the unus mundus and individual conscious minds. Brains are a part of this physical interface and appear to function as “filters” of conscious experience. Slovakian physicist Metod Saniga has attempted to outline a physics of time and space which takes account of altered states of consciousness.81 He noted that the near-death experience sometimes included the telescoping of the past and future into the present, as in this description by Phyllis Atwater: “Before me there loomed two gigantic, impossibly huge masses spinning at great speed, looking for all the world like cyclones…. As I stared, I came to recognize my former Phyllis self in the mid upper left of the top cyclone. Even though only a speck, I could see my Phyllis clearly, and superimposed over her were all her past lives and all her future lives happening at the same time in the same place as her present life. Everything was happening at once! Around Phyllis was everyone else she had known and around them many others…. Past, present, and future were not separated but, instead, interpenetrated like a multiple hologram combined with its own reflection.” Similar “distortions” in perception of time and space are encountered in drug-induced altered states of consciousness, as in this LSD experience described by the psychologist Stanislav Grof: “I was preoccupied with the problems of time and space and the insoluble paradoxes of infinity and eternity that baffle our reason in the usual state of consciousness. I could not understand how I could have let myself be ‘brain-washed’ into accepting the simple-minded concept of one-dimensional time and three-dimensional space as being mandatory and existing in objective reality. It appeared to me rather obvious that there are no limits in the realm of spirit and that time and space are arbitrary constructs of the mind. Any number of spaces with different orders of infinities could be deliberately created and experienced. A single second and eternity seemed to be freely interchangeable.” Subjective time distortion in the mental illness of mania has been described by the existential psychologist Ludwig Binswanger: “….these patients live almost entirely in the present and to some degree still in the past, but no longer into the future. Where everything and everyone is ‘handy’ and ‘present’, where distance is missing, there is no future either, but everything is played off ‘in the present’, in the mere here and now.”82 Leston Havens provides a this take on the experience of time in depression: “In depression the future is lost, and the past becomes fixed, immovable, bad, the place of irredeemable mistakes.” Saniga quotes this experience of a patient with schizophrenia: “I sure do notice the passing of time but couldn't experience it. I know that tomorrow will be another day again but don't feel it approaching. I can estimate the past in terms 81 M. Saniga. “Geometry of Psychological Time”. Albeverio and Ph. Blanchard (eds.). “The Direction of Time. The Role of Reversibility/Irreversibility in the Study of Nature”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 82 Quoted in: S. Nassir Ghaemi “Feeling and Time: The Phenomenology of Mood Disorders, Depressive Realism, and Existential Psychotherapy”. Schizophrenia Bull 2007 33: 122-130

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of years but I don't have any connection to it anymore. The time standstill is infinite; I live in a constant eternity. I see the clocks turn but for me time does not flow.” This feeling of time standing still may be responsible for the phenomenon of age distortion in some patients with schizophrenia: A 70-year-old patient may give his age as 22, the age at which the illness commenced. Saniga quotes a patient with depression who had the sensation of time flowing backward: “As I worked and worked again, and worried and did not manage anything, I simply had this feeling that everything around us (including us) goes back…..I always thought that the clock hands run the wrong way round, that they are without any meaning. I just stood-up in the sick-camp and looked at the clock – and it came to me then at once: Well, what is this, time runs the wrong way round?!… I saw, of course, that the hands moved forward, but, as I could not believe it, I kept thinking that in reality the clock runs backward.” William Braud, Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California, has written about his experience of timelessness83: “I am sitting in an armchair at home, reading an article about anomalous temporal phenomena…. I get up and walk to the kitchen, thinking about what a timeless experience would be like…. By now, I am standing near the kitchen sink. The present moment continues to grow, expand. Now it expands into the "future" as well. Events are gradually piling up in this increasingly larger moment. What began as a thin, moving slice of time is becoming thicker and thicker, increasingly filled with events from the present, past, and future." It appears that Braud was here describing a mystical experience. It is clear from the above examples, especially those described by mentally ill people, that our normal perception of the flow of time depends critically on the normal functioning of the brain, although Braud regards his experience as “extraordinary” rather than abnormal, and Grof is suggesting that normal people “have been brain-washed into accepting the simple minded concept of one-dimensional time and three-dimensional space as being mandatory and existing in objective reality”! From the physicist’s point of view also it may be argued that, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, our “normal” perception of time may not give us a complete picture of reality. The reader is referred to Saniga’a original paper for the mathematical model which, he claims, “underlies and unifies the seemingly bizarre properties” of the various experiences of time described above. He concludes that “any attempt to disregard these psychopathological temporal constructs as pure hallucinatory phenomena would simultaneously cast a doubtful eye on the very role of mathematics in our understanding of Nature. To the contrary, it is just mathematics that plainly tells us that it is far more natural to expect all these unusual perceptions of time to be simply as real as our ordinary (‘normal’) one.” 83 Braud, W.G. (1995). “An experience of timelessness”. Exceptional Human Experience, 13, 64-66

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Where Mind Meets Matter – Astrology and the Holomovement We have seen how some of the phenomena of Near Death Experiences can be explained on Smart Mind theory. The phenomena of the conception and birth of intelligent beings are perhaps even more mysterious than their deaths. Christian theology does appreciate this mystery, but theological ideas are difficult to reconcile with the scientific facts which have now come to our attention. I agree with theology in stating that human conception and birth cannot be attributed to “chance” and cannot be regarded as mindless occurrences comparable to the conception and birth of an insect. I would also state that, although the conscious wish of the parents is a vital and often determining factor in whether or not a particular conception occurs, there are a number of other unconscious and mysterious influences also in operation. For instance, it sometimes happens that the parents desperately want a child but are not able to conceive even though there is no apparent medical reason for infertility. Furthermore, the parents are not able to determine which spermatozoon unites successfully with which ovum. According to astrology, the configuration of the planets at the time of birth has a bearing on the personality of the individual and the events of his or her life, but the mechanism of such an interaction is difficult to envisage in terms of classical physics. What we have instead is a picture of the Sun, the planets, and all the intelligent beings on Earth being part of a single integrated system. This is how I understand David Bohm’s conception of the “holomovement”. Paavo Pylkkänen in his book Mind, Matter, and the Implicate Order discusses the causal powers of the mind.84 He asks, if minds are not described by the laws of physics, should the laws of physics be modified to allow for the causal influence of minds upon bodily behaviour? This is known as the problem of mental causation. Pylkkänen attempts to solve this problem in terms of David Bohm’s theory of the Implicate Order, which is based on a particular interpretation of quantum physics. This is Pylkkänen’s interpretation of Bohm’s holomovement: “…..the essence of the universe is not the movement of objects through space, nor a step-by-step evolution of the state of the universe in a process of time, although these notions of course can play some role. More fundamentally, the metaphor draws attention to the universe as a whole movement (indeed the “holomovement”) in which a certain total ordering prevails. This total ordering is enfolded in each moment. The key point is that the total ordering of the movement that is the universe is not essentially related to a process of time. In this sense the holomovement is beyond time. It is the ground from which arise the sorts of processes in which a time order prevails.”

84 Pylkkänen, Parvo: Mind, Matter, and the Implicate Order Publisher: Springer. Published: 2006

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Although the physicist David Bohm did not make any reference to astrology, I interpret astrological phenomena in terms of the above theory. The movements of the planets as well as the conception, birth, and other life events of intelligent beings which occur in time all arise out of the timeless holomovement. The movements of the planets do not “cause” human events, but may act as a marker for significant occurrences. There is limited scientific evidence for astrology; one such scientific study was an elegant piece of research presented by Sara Klein Ridgley for her Ph.D. thesis in 1992. The report is to found on the web at http://www.safire.net/sara/index.html . She investigated the possible relationship of astrological predictors to the occurrence of accidents. In astrology, the Sun’s position on a person’s chart (given by the position of the Sun on a person’s date of birth, known commonly as the Sun sign) is used as a point describing the physical body and health of a person. The “hard aspects” are derived from the division of the circle of the zodiac by two, four, and eight, whereas the “soft aspects” represent the division of the circle by three, five, six or twelve. The conjunction (0°) is a result of the first harmonic (no division of the circle). The opposition (180°) is the result of the division of the circle by two. Two is the number symbolizing a confrontation between two principles and inherently is connected with the idea of conflict. The square (90°) results from the division of the circle by four, which is a multiple of two; therefore it shares much of the nature of the opposition, representing dynamic change and instability. Under the null hypothesis, there is no expected relationship between a person’s date of birth and the date of an accident he/she may be involved in. Ridgley’s study hypothesized that such a relationship does in fact exist and is predicted and explained by astrology. It was expected that significantly more people are injured when the transiting Sun forms a hard aspect (conjunction, square or opposition) to the natal Sun than would be expected by chance. In other words, it was expected that people would tend to be injured significantly more frequently on or around their birthday, three months before or after, or six months following their birthday. The cases studied were people who had been injured at work and had filed compensation claims in the State of California, and the data were obtained retrospectively from public records. Sample A consisted of 414 English-speaking workers who were injured between the years 1983 and 1991; no distinction into male/female categories was made in this sample. Sample B consisted of 609 Hispanic injured workers who were evaluated and treated at another Los Angeles clinic that deals only with Hispanic people. This sample consisted of 126 females and 483 males. Data on 206 cases of completed suicide reported through the city of Philadelphia in 1982 were obtained from a previous study and were used as a control group. The official statistics for all work-related injuries in California in 1989 were examined to check whether the age distribution of the selected samples was representative of the population, and this was in fact found to be the case. Of 402,256 workers injured in California, 19.0% were in the 25-29 year age group, while in Sample A 20.7% were in that age group.

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The position of the Sun at birth and on the day of the injury by sign according to the Tropical Zodiac was recorded for each subject in Samples A and B. The difference in sun signs was calculated and coded in the following manner: Sun sign at birth (SSB) and sun sign at injury (SSI) in the same sign are coded as injury category 1, SSI one sign ahead of SSB as injury category 2, and so on. For example, if a person was born on March 19 the Sun sign in the Tropical Zodiac is Pisces. If the person was injured on March 10, the injury also occurred in the Sign of Pisces, thus the coding for this injury will be No. 1. If the injury occurred on March 27, the injury Sun Sign is Aries, and the coding for this example will be No. 2. If, on the other hand, the date of birth is March 27 (Aries), and the date of injury is March 19, (Pisces), the coding will be No. 12, as Aries is one sign ahead of Pisces in the Zodiac. In the combined group of 1005 cases, the null hypothesis states that there would be 83.75 in each injury category (1005 divided by 12). As the graph shows, there are very significant deviations from this figure, 139 falling into category 1, 113 into category 4, 117 into category 7, and 114 into category 10. The statistical probability of such deviations occurring by chance is less than .0000000001. Translated into everyday language this means that you are 65% more likely to have an accident on or around your birthday than at other times, and about 34% more likely to do so three months or six months before or after your birthday.

Distribution of Sample A & B of accident subjects (N=1005) by injury category

(Reproduced by kind permission of Sara Klein Ridgley)

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By comparison, the suicide cases do not show a significant deviation from expected values:

Suicide Subjects (N=161) by injury category

One might argue that birthdays are risky times because of drinking and parties, but this objection would not hold for the other times for which an increased risk is observed. Astrology probably has some limited practical value in that it can give an indication that one should take extra care to avoid accidents at certain times of the year, but its principal value in Smart Mind theory is that it gives us a framework for understanding the celestial dimensions of human life. It indicates that individual human lives are linked to a system of mental activity in the broadest sense which extends to the solar system and beyond. (This is my personal interpretation, not Dr.Ridgley’s). Every conception and birth of a conscious intelligent being is seen not as a random event but as part of the unfolding of a purposeful “implicate order”. The phenomenon of past life memories implies that each infant is equipped with a particular set of such memories which have an effect on his personality and enable him to participate in the universal process of mental evolution. It would seem that such past life memories constitute our collective unconscious, and it is only occasionally that they break through into conscious awareness. One of the objectives of meditation in Buddhism is to clarify what is going on in the unconscious mind.

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Does the Human Mind Need to be Purified? According to the Abhidhamma, a compilation of Theravada Buddhist texts dating from 500 to 250 B.C., consciousness performs a task of “selfless” data processing – There is action without an actor. The Abhidhamma remains agnostic on the nature of Mind or even whether it exists. The Dutch logician Henk Barendregt has written that following the path of purification, which means uncovering those unconscious impulses which result in behaviour contrary to our conscious wishes, may result in one consciousness being replaced by a different consciousness, perhaps a super consciousness. Buddhist monks are usually not given an explanation as to how or why the mind has become impure in this way; they are told that such questions will distract them from the work of meditation which needs to be done in the here and now. Barendregt has interpreted Buddhist teachings in a modern psychological format with what he calls “the cover-up model of the human mind”.85 This model concentrates on one particular aspect of consciousness – Suffering and desire, which Buddhism often refers to. He uses an information technology metaphor, stating that while evolution uses suffering and desire as a part of the “programme” which makes human beings accede to its wishes, Buddhism offers an alternative “operating system” which could offer the path to liberation. As with a computer, installing a new operating system could be a difficult and risky procedure. Barendregt states that there is a continuously fluctuating chaos within each one of us, referred to by him as “the process”, over which we have absolutely no control, and will be felt as nauseating and unbearable if we allow it to reach full consciousness. The cover-up involves continuously seeking physical or mental sensation in order to prevent “the process” reaching full consciousness. Where possible we seek pleasant sensation, but failing that even an unpleasant sensation like depression is better than what lies beneath. Barendregt suggests that it is “the process” which is described in Sartre’s novel La Nausée. Roquentin, the anti-hero of Sartre’s book has flashes of nausea which emanate from mundane objects. He is unable to identify the cause of this nausea until, finding his eyes drawn to the gnarled roots of an old chestnut tree in a park, he receives a piercingly clear vision of what the nausea actually is. Existence itself, the property of existence to be something rather than nothing, was what was slowly driving him mad. Barendregt describes how, if we are not able to increase the intensity of feeling to a sufficient pitch, we experience the process as suffering. This pushes us to external actions such as eating, fighting or sex to remedy that deficiency, or we may dwell on sad or angry thoughts to achieve the same effect internally.

85Henk Barendregt’s homepage: http://www.cs.ru.nl/~henk/

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The “cover-up model of the human mind” does make some intuitive sense, but the usefulness of the path of purification is more debatable. Barendregt describes an intensive ten-day course of meditation which he acknowledges is very strenuous and entailing some risk to the mental health of the participant unless carried out under the guidance of an expert teacher. Most reflective people would agree that the human mind is a peculiar, idiosyncratic, temperamental and imperfect instrument, as evidenced by the reported high prevalence in the population of mild-to-moderate mental and psychosomatic illness, and the propensity of human beings to abuse alcohol and other psychoactive drugs. The imperfection of the human brain is not surprising when one considers how it might have evolved. It did not evolve as an exactly-tuned stable instrument to keep its owner in a constant state of bliss unperturbed by periodic waves of desire and suffering. When human beings were hunter-gatherers, those with brains which impelled them to ruthlessly kill vulnerable animals would have had a better chance of surviving and passing on their genes to succeeding generations than others who preferred to quietly contemplate the beauties of Nature. Barendregt goes on to make what he calls “conjectures” regarding the nature of consciousness, some of which he suggests could be scientifically testable hypotheses. “The human mind has more than one center of control (for our thoughts and emotions), but only one of these is visible in our momentary consciousness…..These centers are not synchronized. The fundamental process is the friction, a neural storm, caused by this asynchronism. The act of mindfulness makes a partial synchronization between the centers of control…..The cessation of the process means a complete synchronization of some centers of control.” There have been scientific studies of “mindfulness-based stress reduction”, a much less rigorous technique than that described by Barendregt, which has been shown to be useful in the treatment of conditions such as anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and even coronary heart disease. Barendregt’s claim that very intensive meditation can lead to “cessation of the process” and even “nirvana” is difficult to verify scientifically. It should also be pointed out that there are other psychological techniques such as cognitive behavioural therapy which may be more effective than mindfulness meditation for the above conditions. Research psychiatrist Jeffrey M. Schwartz has presented evidence to show that repeated mental activity can change the structure of the brain, even well into adulthood; it is thus possible that meditation techniques practiced over a number of years could lead to brain changes with beneficial effects on mental health. Sara Lazar and her colleagues at Harvard University found that those who practiced Buddhist insight meditation for an average 40 minutes a day had an increased thickness of grey matter (by 4 to 8 thousandths of an inch) than those who did not.86

86 http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/daily/2006/01/23-meditation.html

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“The Dreaming” and Shamanism Modern civilization is characterized by a rigid division between the material and the spiritual which is characterized as being “normal”; any observed phenomenon which calls this division into question is dismissed as “anomalous” or “delusional”. The aborigines in Australia who evolved separately from the rest of the human race for 40,000 years developed a world view in which matter, mind, and spirit were harmoniously integrated. Anthropologists have revealed that the "The Dreaming" or Dreamtime myths are at the core of aboriginal society. The basis of aboriginal religious beliefs is an essential unity and harmony between humans, the land and the Dreaming. They were only able to survive in the harsh environment of the outback because of their close bond with, and understanding of, the land. The term Dreaming was first used in 1896 by Spencer and Gillen as a rough translation of the aboriginal term "alcheringa". The Aborigine concept of the Dreaming is poorly understood by anthropologists for two reasons: (a) Being a philosophy which was lived rather than theorized about, any verbal formulation of it is likely to be only an approximation. (b) By the time serious study of the Dreaming began in the twentieth century, the destruction of aboriginal culture was already well under way. Perhaps the only evidence we now have of Aboriginal culture is in their art, although even that is being corrupted by commercial demands. To the Aboriginal people the act of producing the art is as important as, or more important than, the finished product. Body paintings and ground sculptures are only meant to last a few hours. The indigenous Australian people refer to the Dreaming in translation as the "All-at-once" Time in which past, present, and future coalesce one into the other. They considered the Dreaming to be objective, whilst linear time was considered a subjective construction of waking consciousness. This is the converse of the European concept which views dreams as subjective and linear time as objective. The Dreaming, however, should not be equated with dreams as we understand them; it is an embodiment of the spiritual forces of the Universe. The Dreaming has been described by Max Charlesworth in his book Religion in Aboriginal Australia (1999) as follows: “First, it is a narrative mythical account of the foundation and shaping of the entire world by the ancestor heroes who are uncreated and eternal. Second, "the Dreaming" refers to the embodiment of the spiritual power of the ancestor heroes in the land in certain sites, and in species of fauna and flora, so that this power is available to people today. Indeed, one might say that for the Aboriginal his land is a kind of religious icon, since it both represents the power of the Dreaming beings and also effects and transmits that power... (The Dreaming is) the most real and concrete and fundamental aspect of Aboriginal life and has nothing to do with the Western concept of dreaming as an imaginary, fantastic and illusory state of consciousness". The indigenous people believe that every person in an essential way exists eternally in the Dreaming. This eternal part existed before the life of the individual begins, and continues to exist when the life of the individual ends.

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Another way of interpreting the Dreaming is that it is outside of linear time, just as Smart Mind appears to be. Paul Wildman has pointed out that the concept of Dreaming is quite different to the Hindu idea of “circular time” in which the world is created, destroyed and recreated every 4,320,000 years, and is also not mystic in the sense of direct apperception of God. 87 “It is unique in that it contextualizes the present manifesting moment within the unmanifesting cosmos of the ancestors’ dreaming and the present dreaming as the ancestors’ present moment.” In the context of this ontology there is no need for original sin, ego elimination or universal consciousness. Rosemary Jane Beaumont has attempted to resuscitate for our benefit something of the aborigine’s vision of sacredness. She quotes the Jungian psychologist David Tacey: “The power in the landscape of Australia is able to crack open the psyche beyond the ego to the mythic realms and psychic field of nature”. Aldous Huxley wrote in The Perennial Philosophy: “….men are not content to be merely kind and clever within the limits of a concrete situation. They aspire to relate their actions, and the thoughts and feelings accompanying those actions, to general principles and a philosophy on the cosmic scale.”88 The Dreamtime myths are certainly a philosophy on the cosmic scale, which modern science fails to provide. Huxley’s book explores the common elements in the great religions of the Northern hemisphere -Christianity, Islam, Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism – but has little to say about the rest of the world. There are of course no written documents on religion and philosophy emerging from the Australian aborigines, and few from Africa and America south of the equator, but there are many sacred buildings and other archaeological features such as the Nazca lines and figures etched into Peru's Atacama Desert in South America which have been investigated by Graham Hancock. Huxley did not consider shamanism, a form of spirituality which probably originated 30,000 years ago and found in both Northern and Southern hemispheres, as a part of the perennial philosophy. The word Shaman originated from Siberia and other parts of Northern Asia extending to Northern China, being the Turkic-Tungus word for a traditional healer and literally meaning "he or she who knows”. The biography of Chuonnasuan, said to be the last Shaman of North-East China, has been written by Richard Noll. Having obtained permission form the Chinese Foreign Affairs Office, Noll travelled to the village of Shibazhan in Northern Heilongjiang province in 1994 to meet this man. He belonged to the Oroqen tribe, who were previously nomadic hunters and gatherers, but since the early 1950s have been forced to settle in log cabins and to learn to grow their own food. With the aid of an interpreter, Chuonnasuan told Noll and his colleagues the story of his life. 87 Wildman, P. (1996). Dreamtime Myth: History as Future (interpreting an Australian Aboriginal view of history as future). New Renaissance, ISSN 0939-1657, 7(1), 16-19. 88 Huxley, Aldous (1945). The Perennial Philosophy Publisher: Chatto & Windus Ltd. Published: 1945

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His grandfather and his paternal uncle were both powerful shamans, but Chuonnasuan was told that he had to be selected by the spirits to become a shaman himself. It would take three classic “initiatory illnesses” and three healings by master shamans before Chuonnasuan would join their ranks. His first illness occurred at the age of 16. He lost a younger brother and sister in 1943, and that traumatic experience made him wander around in the forest sometimes in a trance state. Shamanic illness is a psycho-spiritual crisis or a rite of passage, observed among those becoming shamans. The episode often marks the beginning of a time-limited episode of confusion or disturbing behavior where the shamanic initiate might have an experience of being "disturbed by spirits". A healing ritual was organized, during which the spirits came to know Chuonnasuan and taught him to dance; this was the first step to becoming a shaman. After two more such illnesses over a period of years he became a fully-fledged healer himself. Some anthropologists and religious scholars define a shaman as an intermediary between the natural and spiritual world, who travels between worlds in a state of trance. Once in the spirit world, the shaman would commune with the spirits for assistance in healing, hunting or weather management. Shamanism is based on the premise that the visible world is pervaded by invisible forces or spirits that affect the lives of the living. The difference between a priest and a shaman is that while a priest is appointed by a religious organization or at least has his activities sanctioned by such an organization, the shaman is one who, as a consequence of a personal psychological crisis, has gained a certain power of his own. Ian Prattis, Professor of Anthropology and Religion at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, has observed that many of the events associated with shamanism have to do with the shaman’s ability to move into altered states of consciousness (A.S.C.).89 He is of the view that the scientific observer will not be able to appreciate the feature, structure and process of the experience the shaman is trying to describe unless the observer himself to travel through the shamanic experience or something similar. Prattis has been able to enter altered states of consciousness by using a breath control technique. Writer Graham Hancock has done so with the aid of the psychedelic drugs ayahuasca (containing DMT) and ibogaine.90 Hancock takes issue with the conventional definition of the term “hallucination”, which states that what is perceived in this way is not real; its contents are derived from memory and life experiences, and are culture-specific. He asks, if shamans in primitive societies located in South America, Africa, and Australia hallucinate certain visions very similar to those perceived by modern citizens of the United States, can one regard these as “culture-specific”? He is here referring to “alien abduction” experiences documented by John Mack and others in the United States. British-born John Edward Mack, M.D. (1929 – 2004) was Professor of Psychiatry at

89 “Healing Journeys: Shamanism as Therapy” http://www.ianprattis.com/ 90 Hancock, Graham: “Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind” Publisher: The Disinformation Company Ltd. Published: 2007

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Harvard Medical School. Mack followed up 200 people who claimed such experiences over a 10-year period. He found that some of them had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, but none were psychotic and there was no evidence that they were abnormal personalities. When Mack published his findings he had to suffer ridicule of his psychiatrist colleagues who attempted unsuccessfully to get him ousted from his job. Hancock believes that these abduction experiences resulted from altered states of consciousness rather than from “nut-and-bolts” encounters with aliens, and are thus similar to shamanic experiences under the influences of drugs such as ayahuasca and ibogaine. There were remarkable similarities in the content of the hallucinations: Both groups referred to experiences such as being induced to ascend by a large owl, floating up on threads of light to encounter beings in the sky, being given a highly informative book which later disappears, and experiencing piercings by long needles or the implantation of foreign objects in their bodies. How can these hallucinations be regarded as culture-specific? One can argue that this kind of evidence will now be contaminated by the publication of Hancock’s book (in 2007), but many of the abduction experiences were reported in the sixties when the ayahuasca experiences had not been given wide publicity. Michael Winkelman is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University. He believes that shamanism played a fundamental role in the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition of the human race 40,000 years ago and the emergence of modern human cognition.91 A universal and central feature of shamanism is the experience of traveling to the supernatural world in an altered state of consciousness and encountering apparently intelligent entities there. This corresponds to the out-of-body experience which sometimes occurs in NDE, and also to the phenomenon of “astral projection”. These experiences enable the shaman to see himself from others’ point of view in a visual symbolic experience. In Winkelman’s view the evolution of the human brain and its modular structures produced a fragmentation of consciousness. Shamanic traditions using ritual altered states of consciousness enabled primitive humans to overcome the fragmentation of consciousness by synchronizing the divergent aspects of human cognition. These integrative brain states are typified by theta brain-wave patterns producing integrative discharges along the neuraxis of the brain. The hypothesis emerging from these anthropological studies is that shamanism served the human race well for perhaps 30,000 years, giving rise to stable communities such as existed in Australia before colonization. It is only in the past five to six thousand years that the human race has been evolving in a different direction leading to the establishment of cities, nation-states, and wars.

91 Michael Winkelman (2002): “Shamanism and Cognitive Evolution”. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 12(1): 71-101.

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Crossing a Boundary Astronomers tell us that there are likely to be thousands of planets on solar systems scattered across the Universe with the conditions suitable for the evolution of life. Why is it that most human beings on planet Earth are not able to communicate with these beings? Is it possible that Earth has been physically “quarantined” to protect other worlds from the contagion of violence which is endemic here? The Smart Mind hypothesis includes the possibility that, although physical communication with other intelligent beings in the Universe seems impossible, the minds of such beings may form a communicating network spread across vast distances. From the historical point of view the angelic visions of Emanuel Swedenborg and the communication with Spiritual Beings described by Rudolf Steiner may be instances of this phenomenon. A close study of the paintings on the walls of caves at 300 sites in South-Western Europe suggests the possibility that our prehistoric ancestors have been communicating with these strange beings for 30,000 years.92 A belief in the existence of “spiritual” beings has persisted in mainstream religion with references to “devas”, “angels”, and “demons”. “Demons” are referred to in both Eastern and Western religions. A deva (Sanskrit and Pali) in Buddhism is one of several different types of non-human beings who share the characteristics of being more powerful, longer-lived, and, in general, living more contentedly than the average human being, and perhaps corresponds to an angel as described in the Christian Bible.. The presence of a deva can be detected by those humans who have developed a particular extrasensory power by which one can see beings from other planes, but this does not seem to be a common occurrence in modern Buddhism. There are instances of the appearance of angels in the Old and New Testaments, and the existence of angels is a part of orthodox Christian teaching, but there seems to be a general view among Christians that seeing or communicating with angels is not really possible in this day and age. The Catholic Encyclopedia mentions many references to angels in the New Testament, but none in the past 19 centuries. Is it possible that the human brain has changed in such a way that its vision has become more restrictive? Near-death experiences may be seen as excursions across the boundary that separates life from death and, as such, may be regarded as “normal” phenomena because the passage from life to death is the lot of every conscious being who walks on

92 Hancock, Graham: “Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind” Publisher: The Disinformation Company Ltd. Published: 2007

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this planet. Do people who take psychedelic drugs such as DMT also cross a boundary and, if so, is it the same boundary that is crossed in a near-death experience? When Rick Strassman studied the effects of DMT he too had to cross a boundary, of a different kind. For the first year of his study he went along with the orthodox scientific view that the experiences of his subjects were hallucination, in other words tricks played on them by their drugged minds. Having been trained as a psychiatrist he was, of course, non-judgmental, meaning that he listened sympathetically and did not try to impose his views on the volunteers who were trying out DMT. On the other hand, when they told him that “they had visited another world and met alien beings”, he was careful not to encourage them in their delusional thinking. As dozens of volunteers, who had all been screened by Strassman himself for any evidence of mental instability or psychosis and been found to healthy, began to come out with similar stories, his confidence in the scientific model was shaken. It was then that he decided to cross the boundary: He writes, “So, as a thought experiment, I decided to act as if the worlds that the volunteers visited and the inhabitants with whom they interacted were real…”93 Mental health professionals like Timothy Leary, who experimented with LSD in the sixties, deservedly or undeservedly got themselves a reputation as “druggies”; Time magazine, reviewing his legacy recently, accused him of “terrible recklessness”.94 This same article, however, suggests that the near-total international ban on psychedelic drugs may be a case of throwing out the baby with the bath-water. It quotes a study by Carlos A. Zarate and his colleagues at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health on the use of the psychedelic drug ketamine in treatment-resistant major depression.95 They studied 18 patients who had failed to respond to at least two other antidepressant drugs. These patients were given an intravenous infusion of either ketamine hydrochloride or placebo in a “cross-over” study. They found that ketamine was very effective in relieving depression, with a very large effect-size of 1.46 on the day of receiving the ketamine infusion, and a moderate effect size of 0.68 a week later. It should be noted that Rick Strassman is no Timothy Leary: He was able to get permission from the US Drug Enforcement Administration to carry out his study on DMT because of his impeccable credentials. After he decided to change his approach to his volunteers he found that they became much more forthcoming in telling him of their experiences. One of those who gave vivid descriptions of contact with “aliens” was Rex, a forty-year-old ex-serviceman, employed as a carpenter at the time of the study. This is how he described one of his sessions: 93 Strassman, Rick: DMT: “The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences” Publisher: Park Street Press. Published: 2001 94 “Time” Apr. 19, 2007: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1612717,00.html 95 Zarate CA Jr., Singh JB, Carlson PJ, et al. “A randomized trial of an N-methyl-D-aspartate antagonist in treatment-resistant major depression”. Arch Gen Psychiatry 2006;63:856-864

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“I realize the intense pulsating-buzzing sound and vibration are an attempt by the DMT entities to communicate with me. The beings were there and they were doing something to me, experimenting on me….Then the space opened up around me. There were creatures and machinery…. They were sharing this with me, letting me see all this. There was a female. I felt like I was dying, then she appeared and reassured me. She accompanied during the viewing of the machinery and the creatures. When I was with her I had a deep feeling of relaxation and tranquility.” “They were pouring communication into me but it was just so intense….There were rays of psychedelic light coming out of the face of the reassuring entity. She was trying to communicate with me…..There was something outlined in green, right in front of me and above me here…. She was showing me, it seemed like, how to use this thing. It resembled a computer terminal. I believe she wanted me to try to communicate with her through this device. But I couldn’t figure it out.” Strassman observes that although Rex’s experiences with DMT were difficult and almost traumatic at times he was eventually able to come to terms with them, and “he incorporated them into his understanding of the increasingly complex and symbol-rich dreams that began developing”. Rex, like several others in the study, had the impression that the “alien beings” were trying to impart some knowledge to him but they did not quite succeed in getting through. It is possible that someone more intelligent and/or better prepared than Rex may have been able to make more of the experience, but it is also could be that the intense but very short-lived effect of DMT given intravenously was not the ideal method of acquiring such knowledge. Elena’s experience was different from Rex’s in that it had mystical qualities. She was 39 years old and had, some time before the beginning of the study, sold her counseling business and begun an intense process of inner work. She hoped her participation in the DMT study might “lead to a clearer understanding of my spiritual truths.” This was the report she wrote of one of her sessions: “…..there arose in me an energy so forceful that no words could describe it. It drove my heart…. Then everything stopped! The darkness opened to light, and on the other side of space all was utterly still. Then the words ‘just because it is possible’ emerged out of nothingness and filled me….. The great power sought to fill all possibilities. It was “amoral”, but it was love, and it just was. There was no benevolent god, only this primordial power. All of my ideas and beliefs seemed absurdly ridiculous. I never wanted to forget this…. I wondered, ‘Why come back?’ I was reluctant to open my eyes.” Having heard this and a few other accounts of mystical-type experiences, Strassman asked himself, are the experiences necessarily beneficial? This question was particularly relevant in view of the unpleasant or in some other way “adverse” effects experienced by 25 out of 60 of his subjects. He felt that some of these effects could be attributed to the clinical hospital setting in which the trial was conducted, with

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somewhat stressful procedures like subjects having to fill in forms and have their blood tested. One of the key questions Strassman wished to address in this study was whether the benefits of DMT outweighed any possible risks. One of the conclusions that Strassman came to was that, in contrast to MDMA which he calls a “love and light” drug that accentuates the positive and minimizes the negative, DMT has the potential of activating disruptive emotional conflicts normally buried in the unconscious. One subject, Ken, observed that, compared to the “mellowness” of MDMA, DMT was too hard and intense. Other subjects fought against the experience of “leaving the body”. Andrea was one of these, but when she confronted her fear of death she was able to break through into “an ecstatic resolution of her anxiety and confusion”. There were also physical problems in a few subjects, such as a severe fall or rise in blood pressure. Strassman decided in retrospect that a top dose of 0.3 mg. /kg. would have been a better choice that the 0.4 mg. /kg. dose that they had used in the study. He wrote, “DMT can open our eyes to terrifying realities, too, and mark us with those experiences for as long as do any beatific ones. DMT is a potentially dangerous drug”. It is evident from reading Strassman’s book that he found it emotionally very difficult to cope with the possibility that “alien” beings really existed, and this was one of the reasons for his deciding to terminate the study prematurely: “I also was unprepared for the overwhelmingly frequent reports of contact with beings. They challenged my view of the brain and reality. They also stretched and frayed my ability to empathize and support our volunteers…. I could not comfortably accept or incorporate the remarkably high frequency of being in contact”. He tried to relate this phenomenon to his extensive knowledge of Buddhism: “Tibetan and Japanese versions of Buddhism possess a full roster of demons, gods, and angels. I understood these encounters to symbolically represent certain qualities of ourselves, not autonomous, non-corporeal life forms”. As the study went on Strassman began to feel that such a psychological explanation was inadequate to explain the observed facts. It appears to me that compared to the apparent long-term beneficial psychological effects of psilocybin, which were demonstrated by Pahnke’s “Good Friday” experiment, Strassman’s study did not generally show this kind of effect. The only use for DMT that we can see at present is that it may be a useful but risky experimental tool for exploring the frontiers of Mind under strictly controlled conditions. Critics of Strassman have written that he was inviting problems by using DMT in an “unnatural” setting, in contrast to the shamans who have been using it in the Amazonian jungles for thousands of years in the form of ayahuasca. The use of this substance has been adopted by a religious sect originating in Brazil, named the União do Vegetal, who describe themselves as “a religion based on the superior Christian values of love and fraternity among men, in full communion with Nature through the tea Hoasca, a vehicle synchronizing it with the Divinity...ecology and spirituality are indivisible”. The United States branch of this sect faced legal problems in the use of

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ayahuasca until, on February 21st, 2006, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision affirming their rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.96 Marc Blainey has studied the ritual use of entheogens in ancient Mesoamerica (Central America and the southeastern states of Mexico), and how this could have resulted in a worldview very different from that which has prevailed in the Old World since the 5th century B.C. The dualism of the theistic religions which originated in the Middle East is characterized by the demonizing of those who do not belong to that particular religion. The Old World was able to compartmentalize spiritual values so that the exploitation of the material world and the domination of less powerful cultures could be undertaken without guilt even when this necessitated mass killings. The worldview of Mesoamerica by contrast, as Blainey observes, sees “a duality of complementary, interdependent, interrelating forces, each playing its respective role in the cosmic drama”.97 Benny Shanon, Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has tried out ayahuasca on numerous occasions, and has written: “Personally, if I were to pick one single effect of ayahuasca that had the most important impact on my life….I would say that before my encounter with the brew I was an atheist… and when I returned home after my long journey in South America, I no longer was one…. There are many individuals who, in direct consequence of their experience with ayahuasca, underwent a radical religious or spiritual conversion.”98 Kenneth W. Tupper, PhD candidate at the Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia, has written on the possible educational value of ayahuasca, referring to it as “a revered plant teacher” for many Amazonian tribes who use it as a tool to attain understanding and wisdom. He discusses “existential intelligence”, one of the multiple intelligences identified by the educationalist Howard Gardner. Individuals from indigenous cultures who take up shamanic practice may have an unusually high degree of existential intelligence, manifested as “the ability beyond others to dream, to imagine, to enter states of trance, and to have a significant interest in cosmological concerns at a young age”. The ritual initiation of these individuals as shamans, often with the use of entheogens such as ayahuasca, enables them to develop these abilities so that they will later be able to offer valuable guidance to the community when the latter is faced with difficult or threatening situations. Much further research with DMT and similar drugs is needed before we can be certain of the existence of other worlds and other beings. Why is this research necessary? It is because, if such beings exist, they may have information vital to the continued existence of the human race. It is apparent from the reports we have that the 96 http://www.udvusa.com/supremect.php 97Marc Blainey, B.A. thesis: http://www.wayeb.com/indexresources.htm?/resourceswayebtheses.htm 98 “The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience” by Benny Shanon. Oxford University Press, 2002

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interpretation of this information is not easy. As it was acknowledged in the past that certain individuals called shamans needed to access the “spirit world” and intervene for the benefit of the community on their behalf, there may be a need for specially qualified “modern shamans” to take on this task. If on the other hand such research is stymied by blind adherence to an unproven materialist world-view, Planet Earth is in danger of becoming a “ship of fools”. (The medieval conception of the ship of fools, as depicted in the painting by Hieronymus Bosch, is a parodic antithesis of Smart Mind.)

Many Worlds If people who take ayahuasca or DMT do in fact visit “other worlds”, where are these worlds? A possible explanation might be found in the “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics put forward by Hugh Everett in 1957. Everett presented this interpretation in his Ph. D thesis, and then gave up physics discouraged at the lack of response to his theories from other physicists. According to the Everett interpretation, depending on the quantum state of a particle, reality diverges into alternative worlds.

A thought experiment of “quantum suicide” has been devised based on this interpretation. An experimenter sits in front of a gun which is triggered or not triggered depending on the decay of some radioactive atom. With each run of the experiment there is a 50-50 chance that the gun will be triggered and the physicist will die. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the gun will eventually be triggered and the physicist will die. If the many-worlds interpretation is correct then at each run of the experiment the physicist will be split into one world in which he lives and another world in which he dies. After many runs of the experiment, there will be many worlds – The number of worlds could theoretically be infinite. In the worlds where the physicist dies, he will cease to exist. There will however be a set of worlds in which the physicist appear to be immortal, because each time the

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experiment is run there is a 50% chance of survival! This is referred to as the phenomenon of “branching selves” apparently unaffected by probability, and is a serious objection to the Everett interpretation. I think this apparently absurd consequence of the Everett interpretation is a result of the physicists and philosophers who speculate on such matters failing to take into account the real nature of Mind. They have not considered the possibility that human minds may be able, in certain circumstances, to choose the world they inhabit from now onwards. This is what is meant by “free will”, and I believe this is the only way free will can operate. There are strict limits on the exercise of this choice, one of which is that we depend on significant others for our personal identity. For instance, we may choose to live in a world where we had plenty of money, but we would not be happy if we had to leave all our friends and family in the previous world. It is questionable whether free will is ever exercised individually. The individual exercise of free will may be a fallacy derived from the other fallacy that the human mind is a totally independent entity. We do of course have the illusion of acting independently, but this is because we are unconscious of much of the inner workings of our mind. A criminal is encouraged in his course of action by the criminal fraternity, while someone working in the health professions is supported and guided by his or her colleagues. The reluctance to accept the Everett interpretation could be compared to the skepticism which greeted Galileo’s idea that the Earth revolved around the sun. If the Earth moved in this way wouldn’t there be an immense wind, and wouldn’t falling bodies fall behind the points from which they were released? Just as Galileo explained that the motion would be invisible if everything was in motion together, Everett explained that branching would be invisible so long as everything was branching together. Everything? Is there not a possibility for groups of people, either consciously or unconsciously, to choose to take a divergent path? It is likely that such a decision will never be fully conscious. The difficulty is that none of the worlds will be an Utopia; each will have its advantages and disadvantages. It will be unusual for even two people to be in 100% agreement on such a momentous step, let alone a larger group. An example would be a pair of lovers jumping off a cliff together hoping for a better life. To return to our original question, where are the “other worlds” seen under the influence of DMT? Physicists state categorically that it is physically impossible to cross over into a parallel universe, but it could be that the mind is Smart enough to do so and then return. A lot more research is needed to refute or confirm this hypothesis.

The Smart Mind and Evolutionary Ethics

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I start with the assumptions that (a) the evolution of Smart Mind is directed towards a global increase of knowledge, wisdom, and happiness and (b) every intelligent being in the universe is expected to contribute to this process. It follows from this that every action which results in an increase of knowledge, wisdom, or happiness is “good”, while every action which has the opposite effect is “evil”. On what basis do I make the assumption that Mind is directed towards an increase of knowledge, wisdom, and happiness? This is what is called a teleological assumption, which states that there is some purpose or directive principle in nature. (Teleology derived from the Greek telos, meaning purpose or end) If on the other hand we assume that everything which happens in the Universe is determined by the laws of physics there is then no room for teleology. Teleological assumptions are a part of everyday life and decision-making, for instance in the social sciences. The organization of a society is based on the assumption that the vast majority of people want to live in peace and with some respect for their neighbor’s property. Attempts have been made to apply Darwinism to human behaviour with the concept of fitness teleology, the assumption that choices, practices, culture, and institutions have evolved which maximize reproductive fitness. For instance, the institution of marriage is said to have evolved because it gives the best chance of successfully rearing offspring and thereby enabling the genes of the parents to be passed on to future generations. Daniel Vining, however, has pointed out that “across a range of wealthy nations those able to afford more children choose to have fewer children – a disconfirmation of the prediction that humans teleologically seek to maximize reproduction or fitness.99 Human life is permeated with deviations from rationally maximized child production.” John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have written that the new discipline of evolutionary psychology rejects fitness maximization as an explanation for human and animal behavior. “Although organisms sometimes appear to be pursuing fitness on behalf of their genes, in reality they are executing the evolved circuit logic built into their neural programs, whether this corresponds to current fitness maximization or not.” Evolutionary psychology hypothesizes that the programs that comprise the human brain were sculpted over hundreds of thousand of years by the ancestral environments and selection pressures experienced by the hunter-gatherers from whom we are descended. Although the behavior our evolved programs generate would, on average, have been adaptive (reproduction promoting) in ancestral environments, there is no guarantee it will be so now. Natural selection will ensure that the programs in the brain of an individual were adapted to deal with environments encountered by his ancestors – There is no reason to suppose that the present human brain is a “general-purpose instrument” able to deal efficiently with a rapidly-changing environment.

99 Quoted by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in “Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind”, edited by David Buss. Publisher: Allyn & Bacon. Published: 1998

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The argument put forward by evolutionary psychology sounds very plausible, and may well be right. It may also, unfortunately, spell doom for the human race. The reason is that, if the four million deaths in the First World War and the fifty million deaths in the Second World War were caused by faulty wiring in the human brain, what prospect is there of putting right the programs in the brain to prevent even more terrible carnage in the next hundred years? Evolutionary biologist Peter Corning attempted to address the problem of the survival of the human race in a lecture delivered in 2003.100 He identifies as threats to survival which could occur in the near future megadroughts as a result of climate change, and the depletion of the world’s stock of fresh water which is already being seen mainly as a result of the consumption of water by artificial irrigation for agriculture. He pointed out that the “selfish gene” model of human evolution, which rejects the possibility of group selection and has been predominant in evolutionary theory in the past thirty years, does not offer any solutions to such problems. Corning argues that selfish behavior could not account for the evolutionary success of the human race; a “sense of fairness” seems to have evolved by natural selection. It is likely that groups of primitive humans with a more highly developed sense of fairness could have had a survival advantage over other groups because it could have played a central role in reconciling conflicting interests within the group. Fairness could be important when there is a shortage of food; if the distribution of food is seen to be fair it could prevent violent disagreements. In Corning’s view human societies are superorganisms whose collective interests may sometimes supersede the interests of their individual members. He makes a proposal for a more equitable distribution of the world’s resources that may reduce the likelihood of war but, in my view, his strategy for bringing this about is not clear. The theories of Corning, and that of Tooby and Cosmides, are deficient in that they focus respectively on sociology and on neurophysiology while ignoring the mind itself. Can the psychoanalyst and social psychologist Erich Fromm take us further? Fromm distinguishes between benign and malignant aggression.101 Benign, or biologically adaptive, aggression is a response to threats to vital interests, is common to animals and men, and is not spontaneous or self-increasing but reactive and defensive. Malignant aggression on the other hand is characteristic only of man, its main manifestations – killing and cruelty – are pleasureful without needing any other purpose, and is harmful not only to the person who is attacked but also to the attacker. Fromm traces the emergence of malignant aggression to a dramatic change in human society which occurred in the fourth and third millennia, B.C., which has been termed the “urban revolution”. The use of the term “revolution” in this context has been

100 Peter Corning: 'The Basic Problem is Still Survival, and an Evolutionary Ethics is Indispensable', a lecture delivered in London at the Complexity, Ethics and Creativity Conference, 17 September 2003. 101 Fromm, Erich: “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness” Publisher: Holt, Rineheart and Winston. Published: 1973

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criticized as it implies a mass movement. Far from being a mass movement, urbanization occurred as a result of the will of the powerful being imposed on the less powerful. Prior to that time and until much more recently in Australia and parts of Africa, people had lived as hunter-gatherers in what Marshall Sahlins referred to as “the original affluent society”.102 He produced evidence to show that hunter-gatherers “enjoyed an unparalleled material plenty - with a low standard of living.” It has been found that for Bushmen living in the Kalahari Desert, “Food resources were ‘both varied and abundant’, particularly the energy rich mangetti nut- ‘so abundant that millions of the nuts rotted on the ground each year for want of picking’.” Each adult worker only had to work 15 hours a week on average. The city of Babylon in present-day Iraq was probably built in 2400 B.C., and the Indus Valley Civilization flourished from about 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE, including urban centers such as Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. These were authoritarian societies under the control of a dominant minority, and slave labor was often used for the back-breaking work of construction. Large armies were organized to subjugate the surrounding countryside, with the conquest of neighboring lands providing the material and human resources for the enlargement of the cities. War was now a necessity for the maintenance of the new kind of civilization, and a process of “artificial selection” was added to Darwinian natural selection with the most aggressive males being given material rewards for their prowess as warriors. These social and political changes were accompanied by a profound change in the role of women in society and of the mother figure in religion. The American psychologist Julian Jaynes has hypothesized that a dramatic change in human consciousness occurred during the second millennium BC.103 He refers to this change as “the breakdown of the bicameral mind”, arguing that before that time normal cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking," and a second part which listens and obeys. According to him, “hearing a voice” was regarded as a normal occurrence, and some people like the Old Testament prophets interpreted this voice as the voice of God. He asserted that until roughly the times written about in Homer's Iliad, humans did not generally have the self-awareness characteristic of consciousness as most people experience it today. Jaynes theorized that a shift from bicameralism marked the beginning of introspection and consciousness as we know it today. The mass migrations of the second millennium BC created unexpected situations and stresses that required ancient minds to become more flexible and creative. Self-awareness, or consciousness, was the

102 Sahlins, M. (1968). "Notes on the Original Affluent Society", Man the Hunter. R.B. Lee and I. DeVore (New York: Aldine Publishing Company) pp.85-89. 103 Jaynes, Julian. (1976) The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

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culturally evolved solution to this problem which emerged as a neurological adaptation to social complexity. Jaynes’s theory has found little favor among neuroscientists. In my view, one of its serious weaknesses is that Jaynes did not adequately explain how the emergence of introspection would constitute a beneficial adaptation to social complexity. While I agree with Jaynes that a change in human consciousness is likely to have occurred around that time, I wish to put forward an alternative hypothesis about the nature of this change. We have to consider the possibility that primitive humans experienced telepathic communication as a normal phenomenon. This would have been conferred a very significant survival advantage on them when they were living as groups of hunter-gatherers. I use the term telepathic communication in this context to mean the sharing of sensations and emotions more than the sharing of thoughts. Perhaps a more appropriate term for the sharing of sensations and emotions would be “projective identification” as used in psychotherapy. With reference to primitive hunter-gatherers this would have meant that if one member of a group was injured, other members would have felt the pain almost as intensely as if they themselves were injured. Such a sharing of feelings would have helped to make the group more cohesive and also discouraged violent attacks on each other. They would be more likely to share food with each other in times of scarcity. Members of such a group would have had much less “I-consciousness” than we experience at the present time. Malignant aggression would have been unheard of. How would people with these psychological characteristics have been able to cope with the social changes that occurred in the fourth and third millennia, B.C., when able-bodied men were required to serve in armies and kill in cold blood? It would have been almost impossible for them to kill unless there was a way to alter their state of consciousness. Drumming and other martial music could have been used to induce a dissociative or trance state. Hungarian anthropologist Felicitas Goodman (1914-2005) found that a 210 beats-per-minute rhythm of a rattle or drum combined with certain body postures was most effective in producing an ecstatic state.104 In Western societies dissociation is considered an illness and is defined as a “disturbance or alteration in the normally integrated functions of identity, memory or consciousness’’. Dissociation means that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. The disturbance in identity means that the individual may carry out an action in the dissociated state but later deny responsibility for the action. Dissociated individuals in early armies would have been able to carry out their killing duties without compunction, while those who remained in their previously “normal” state of mind would have been paralysed with indecision and vulnerable to being killed themselves. Here we see another method of artificial selection which would have favored those individuals who were able to dissociate easily. Malignant aggression now became possible. Psychiatric examination of murderers at the present time often reveals that the individual is totally cut off from that part of his psyche which carried out the murderous act. 104 http://www.cuyamungue-institut.de/pages/english.php

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My hypothesis then is that the change in human consciousness which occurred during the second millennium BC, particularly in the Middle East and the Mediterranean littoral, was the artificial selection of humans (a) capable of killing while in a dissociated state and (b) lacking in empathy for the feelings of others. Such individuals would be relatively deficient in internally generated moral cues, resulting in the need for external moral codes imposed by a powerful authoritarian hierarchy promising tangible rewards or punishments either in this life or the next. It is to be expected in complex human societies that any such genetic selection will be accompanied by corresponding cultural changes. This is how “malignant aggression” as described by Erich Fromm became an integral though usually unacknowledged element of modern human civilization. When Alexander the Great (356 BC – 323 BC) came on the scene he would have found plenty of suitably murderous recruits for his armies, who spread the infection of malignant aggression as far to the East as the Punjab in India. The Roman conquests which followed enveloped the Western boundaries of Germany and Britain. Genetic selection affected culture and religion and these in turn had a profound influence on philosophy. Freedom of thought such as is found in the individualistic explorations of Mind in shamanism survived only outside the fringes of the great empires. The island of Ireland in the West, then known as Hibernia, was never incorporated into the Roman Empire. Esoteric literature mentions the “Hibernian Mysteries” described thus: “For within the sanctums of these Hibernian mysteries there seemed to the ancients to be contained the possibility for mankind of a great refinement of his cultural, religious and social life, indeed even his very consciousness itself…. Here there was an initiation available into the greatest and most profound secrets of the universe that exist…” Shamanism, as we have seen, survived until recently in Siberia, Northern Scandinavia, and Northern China, and shamans were respected by communities in those regions as healers and revealers of spiritual truths. Whereas evolution in the physical world has come to mean the selection from generation to generation of those genes which confer the maximum survival advantage on the species, evolution of Mind involves, in addition to gene selection, the selection of ideas transmitted orally and in writing, the mysterious thing called culture, and also ideas and thought-patterns in the Collective Unconscious. The Hindu/Buddhist conception of karma can be partially interpreted in evolutionary terms. Karma in Hinduism is a concept which explains causality through a system where beneficial effects are derived from past beneficial actions and harmful effects from past harmful actions, creating a system of actions and reactions throughout a person's reincarnated lives. Neither the concept of karma nor that of the transmigration of souls appears in the Rig Veda, which dates back to 1700–1100 BC. The concept of karma appeared in Hindu thought during the period 800-200 BC.

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Buddhism, which began in the 5th century B.C., adopted the Hindu teaching of karma while rejecting the concept of an immortal soul. The Hindu doctrine of reincarnation was replaced in Buddhism by the more complex idea of rebirth, in which he consciousness of a person, upon the death or dissolution of the aggregates (skandhas) which make up that person, becomes one of the contributing causes for the arising of a new group of skandhas which may again be conventionally considered a person or individual. The consciousness arising in the new person is neither identical to, nor different from, the old consciousness, but forms part of a causal continuum or stream with it. Is it possible to retain the concept of karma while rejecting the idea that each and every intelligent being is reincarnated or reborn? I think it is possible to do this with the ideas of Smart Mind and evolutionary theory. We can take the example of “psychopathic” behaviour, here understood as extremely selfish and/or violent acts committed by an individual which are detrimental to the social group in which he lives. There is evidence that there is some genetic basis to this kind of behaviour; one would expect that such genes would have been weeded out in the course of evolution. It appears that this has in fact happened because psychopathic acts are only committed by a tiny minority of the population. Even these can be explained on the basis that genetically inherited behaviour patterns which were relatively harmless in the past have now become dangerous because of changes in the social environment; evolution is an ongoing process. Applying the idea of karma to this kind of behaviour, one might say that the karmic consequence of psychopathic behaviour is the gradual elimination over many generations of the genes which give rise to such behaviour. It is naïve to think of karma as always involving the “punishment” of an individual. The checks and balances of karma are integral to the psychological and social evolution of the human race which has occurred over the past 100,000 years. Psychopathic behaviour would have been weeded out, but a particular kind of behaviour is only psychopathic in a particular social setting. When human beings were living in groups of less than a hundred, an equitable sharing of food could have made a difference between life and death for the group. “Equitable” does not of course mean “equal”. The ultimate implication of karma in evolutionary terms is that if a species has evolved in a direction which makes it highly destructive to its own environment, that species will eventually become extinct. Karma operates via the process of evolution by selecting those genes that are most likely to lead to an increase of knowledge, wisdom, and happiness. According to the theory of karma, an altruistic act is a “good” act, and should be rewarded. Altruism occurs even in the animal kingdom, as when worker bees defend a hive; if a bee stings the attacker, its entire stinging apparatus is torn from its body resulting in its death. When Charles Darwin put forward his theory of evolution in 1859 he saw that the phenomenon of altruism was a significant paradox which he was not able to explain adequately. If the more altruistic members of a group sacrifice their lives for others,

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they have will have fewer offspring to pass on their genes to future generations; evolution appears to have no “reward” for their behaviour. It was not until more than a hundred years later, in 1964, that the British biologist William Hamilton came up with a solution to this problem. He introduced the concept of inclusive fitness, which included the evolutionary “fitness” of the altruist’s relatives as well as his own. The siblings of the altruist share 50 % of his genes and his nephews and nieces 25%. When he sacrifices his life for his relatives, he helps to ensure the survival of the genes which he shares with them. This is the reward for his karma which he bequeaths to the descendants of his relatives. “Hamilton’s Rule” states that altruism is rewarded when r multiplied by b is more than c, where r is the genetic relatedness between two individuals, b is the fitness benefit to the group, and c is the fitness cost to the altruist. He later demonstrated mathematically that altruism would be favored by any degree of genetic relatedness, not just that between close relatives. In order for this to work, the altruist must be able to detect degrees of genetic similarity in those for whom he sacrifices his life. An empirical example of the inclusive fitness principle is provided by the Belding ground squirrel that inhabits alpine meadows of the western United States. These squirrels give alarm calls to warn their group of the presence of a predator, even though doing so puts the individual giving the call at risk. It has been shown that willingness of the squirrel to put itself at risk is directly proportional to how closely related it is to members of its population. It is my view that Hamilton’s rule has no relevance as an ethical principle for conscious and intelligent beings living in complex societies. Such societies are governed to an extent by the rule of law, but thinking individuals will question from time to time whether particular laws are just or unjust. In the final analysis it is only an understanding, either intuitive or consciously reasoned, of the transcendental unity of all minds that can result in genuine altruism for such beings. It is quite possible that some primitive tribes living as far back in time as 30,000 years ago did achieve such an intuitive understanding, while the mass killings of the twentieth century are evidence of an abysmal ignorance.

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Conclusion To summarize the available scientific data, (1) near-death experiences indicate that vivid, meaningful mental experiences occur during cardiac arrest, when brain functioning is severely impaired due to the cessation of blood flow; (2) cases of the reincarnation type point towards the persistence of human memories after the disintegration of the physical body; (3) parapsychological research offers evidence that the mind of one person can affect the physiological functioning of another person at a distance. These three phenomena are consistent with the idea that mental activity and memory are not restricted to the brain. The exact mechanism of extra-cerebral mental activity is likely to be revealed by advances in physics rather than in biology. There is strong anecdotal evidence that prayer or a prayerful attitude can help to heal certain illnesses either of the praying individual or of other people, in the latter case often by nonlocal action. Mystical experiences either spontaneous or induced by psychedelic drugs speak of the existence of universal consciousness. Volunteers who have taken DMT speak of “other worlds” and seemingly intelligent beings in these worlds. We have to consider the possibility that, if more intensive research is carried out on altered states of consciousness induced by DMT or ayahuasca, we may obtain from these beings information vital to the survival of the human race, for instance by preventing man-made catastrophes like war. I acknowledge that the evidence presented does not constitute indubitable proof that the mind is not simply a product of the brain; it is possible that human behavior is governed by “software” in the brain that was evolved over the past 100,000 years, during 95,000 of which human beings lived as hunter-gatherers in groups of one thousand or less. It may be that the wars of the twentieth century which claimed at least 70 million live occurred because the software in human brains was not sophisticated enough to ensure the peaceful co-existence of large nation states. We can hope that this software has significantly improved in the past fifty to hundred years to prevent carnage on that scale in the future. Alternatively, we can conceive of Mind as capable of transcending the limitations of the brain with the potential of individual minds working together to consciously shape the future. Is Mind, as manifested in the human race, Smart enough to ensure the continued existence and prosperity of this race? It is of course a matter of individual choice how the mind and consciousness are conceived of. Many people are perfectly happy to regard the mind as nothing but the functioning of the brain which comes to an end when the body dies. For those who are dissatisfied with such a philosophy there is now solid evidence for an alternative view of reality with almost infinite possibilities, “a philosophy on the cosmic scale”, which takes into account the scientific knowledge which the human race has accumulated up to the present time. It recognizes that, while the individual human mind is only a temporary manifestation of a universal mind, the activity of the individual mind has cosmic significance. The “life review” which takes place at the time of death is the process whereby the moral learning which the individual has acquired during his or her

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lifetime is integrated into the universal store of memory. Every experience, every thought, every moral decision, and every action of each individual is taken into account in the grand scheme of things and has a part to play in the unfolding of the future. Dawn breaks on the West coast of Sri Lanka, an island racked by war. I listen to the coded messages of birds. They are not singing today, but saying something important in the language of the Universe. This is how I translate their medley of sounds: “The future of life on Earth is in the hands of every intelligent being on this planet, but effective action depends on finding a means of acting in concert. The human race will prosper and advance if it makes a net contribution to universal knowledge, wisdom, and happiness. The free actions of every single individual have the power to make a difference to the net result. It is possible that if enough people work towards enhancing their consciousness and wisdom while practicing charity towards their neighbour, the course of evolution on Earth may change in a positive direction. Even if it does not, we are not despondent; life on this planet would have been a marvelous experiment which nearly succeeded. Smart Mind will continue its life on other planets in other solar systems, perhaps even in other Universes.”

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Recommended Books Chalmers, David: “The Conscious Mind” Publisher: Oxford University Press. Published: 1996 Dossey, Larry: “Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine” Publisher: Harper San Francisco. Published: 1993 Fromm, Erich: “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness” Publisher: Henry Holt & Co. Published: 1973 Hancock, Graham: “Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind” Publisher: The Disinformation Company Ltd. Published: 2007 Huxley, Aldous (1945). “The Perennial Philosophy” Publisher: Chatto & Windus Ltd. Published: 1945 Huxley, Aldous (1945). “The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell,” Publisher: Chatto & Windus Ltd. Published: 1954 James, William: “Varieties of Religious Experience” Publisher: Vintage Books. Published: 1970 (Original work published 1902) Jaynes, Julian: “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company. Published: 1976 Laszlo, Ervin: “Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything” Publisher: Inner Traditions. Published: 2004 Moody, Raymond: “Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon--Survival of Bodily Death” Publisher: HarperOne. Published: 1975 Moody, Raymond: “Life Before Life: Regression into Past Lives” Publisher: Macmillan. Published: 1990 Pearsall, Paul: “The Heart’s Code” Publisher: Broadway Books, New York. Published: 1998 Pylkkänen, Parvo: “Mind, Matter, and the Implicate Order” Publisher: Springer. Published: 2006 Ryle, Gilbert: “The Concept of Mind”

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Publisher: Hutchinson’s University Library. Published: 1949 Searle, John: “The Mystery of Consciousness (New York Review of Books Collections)” Publisher: New York Review Books. Published: 1990 Storr, Anthony: “The Essential Jung: Selected Writings Introduced by Anthony Storr” Publisher: Fontana, London. Published: 1983 Strassman, Rick: DMT: “The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences” Publisher: Park Street Press. Published: 2001 Thibaut, George, (translator) 1848-1914: “The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja” — Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 Wambach, Helen: “Reliving Past Lives: The Evidence under Hypnosis” Publisher: Harper & Row, New York. Published: 1978

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Index Aborigines, 98, 99 accidents, 87, 93, 95 Aggression, 110, 111, 112, 113 AI, 3, 15, 18, 19 Akashic, 26, 44, 118 Alcohol, 10, 36, 50, 72, 74, 75, 76, 97 Altered states of consciousness, 87, 90, 100,

101, 116 Altruism, 115 Anagarika Dharmapala, 47 Anatman, 23, 24 Angels, 102, 105 Anthropology, 7 antidepressants, 64 Antidepressants, 64 Archetypes, 52, 84, 85, 86 Ascetic, 47 Assumption, 53 Astrology, 3, 92, 95 Ayahuasca, 100, 101, 105, 106, 107, 116 Benor, Daniel, 60 Big Bang, 24, 26, 79, 87, 90 birth, 37, 77, 92, 93, 94, 95 Bohm, David, 92, 93 Brain, 3, 34, 55, 69 Buddhism, 6, 9, 23, 47, 85, 95, 96, 99, 102, 105,

114 Burbank, 61 Cancer, 29, 61, 63 Cardiac arrest, 7, 27, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 116 Cerebral, 34, 35, 116 Cerebral cortex, 34 Chalmers, David, 16, 19 Child, 15, 18, 31, 39, 41, 42, 44, 80, 92, 109 Childhood, 35, 72, 73 China, 54, 99, 113 Christian, 6, 9, 12, 16, 24, 37, 62, 92, 102, 105 Collective unconscious, 53, 88, 95 consciousness, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19,

20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 39, 49, 54, 65, 66, 69, 71, 77, 79, 85, 87, 88, 90, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117

Consciousness, 3, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 39, 48, 49, 50, 54, 62, 65, 66, 69, 71, 77, 79, 85, 87, 88, 90, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119

CORT, 39, 40, 41 Cryptoamnesia, 37 DEA, 71 Death, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 16, 21, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30,

31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46, 69, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 87, 90, 92, 103, 105, 114, 116, 118, 119

Deathbed visions, 30 Demons, 102, 105 Dennett, Daniel, 8, 14, 15, 19 Depression, 38, 71, 72, 90, 91, 96, 97, 103 Descartes, 6, 15, 19, 25, 26 Dissociation, 112 DMT, 3, 76, 77, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107,

108, 116, 119 DNA, 23, 61, 80, 81, 82 Dossey, Larry, 63 Dreams, 6, 12, 52, 57, 84, 85, 88, 98, 104 Drug Enforcement, 71, 76, 103 Dualism, 16, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26, 106 Ecstasy, 3, 71 EEG, 34, 35, 43, 56, 66 Effect size, 58, 59, 103 Epistemology, 14, 19 Everett interpretation, 107, 108 Evolution, 11, 23, 24, 26, 79, 87, 92, 95, 96,

101, 102, 109, 110, 113, 114, 117 Freud, Sigmund, 5, 6, 85 Fromm, Erich, 21, 110, 113 Gene, 110, 113 Good Friday, 48, 49, 105 Greyson, Bruce, 32 Hallucinations, 32, 36, 51, 52, 77, 101 Hamilton, William, 115 Hancock, Graham, 99, 100 Healing, 7, 29, 46, 53, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66, 67,

68, 100 Heart, 16, 19, 20, 28, 30, 35, 55, 56, 57, 63, 97,

104 Hieronymus Bosch, 107 Homo sapiens, 24 Hopfield networks, 83 Hunter-gatherers, 97, 109, 111, 112, 116 Huxley, Aldous, 3, 70, 99 Hypnosis, 3, 37, 65, 66, 67, 119

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ibogaine, 72, 73, 74, 75, 100, 101 Implicate order, 95 Indian, 8, 29, 31, 41, 42, 61, 113 James, William, 46, 47 Jaynes, Julian, 111 Jung, Carl, 5, 22, 52, 84, 88 Jungian, 38, 52, 85, 99 Karma, 113, 114, 115 Laszlo, Ervin, 44 Life review, 32, 33, 34, 79, 116 Love, 16, 21, 28, 29, 31, 34, 50, 68, 104, 105 LSD, 53, 72, 76, 77, 90, 103 Mack, John Edward, 101 Magnetic, 14, 57 Mandala, 84 Mary, 53 Materialism, 3, 18 MDMA, 3, 71, 72, 73, 105 Memories, 16, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46,

77, 79, 80, 83, 95, 116 Moody, Raymond, 7, 27, 29, 33, 36, 79, 87 Moorjani, Anita, 29 mystical, 26, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 61, 77, 78,

91, 104 Mystical, 3, 26, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 61, 76,

77, 78, 91, 103, 104, 116, 119 NDE, 3, 7, 10, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 40,

69, 101 Near-death experience, 7, 27, 30, 33, 35, 46, 69,

78, 87, 90, 103, 116 Nelson, Roger, 85 Neurophysiology, 110 Neurotransmitters, 13, 20 Nightmares, 42, 43 Nonlocal, 63, 116 Nonlocality, 34, 35, 63 noosphere.princeton.edu, 85 Ontological, 14 Ontology, 14, 19, 99 Pahnke, 48, 49, 50, 105 Pain, 13, 19, 24, 26, 28, 43, 66, 67, 79, 80, 97,

112 Paleolithic, 101 Parapsychology, 56, 59 Parnia, Sam, 35 Past Life Regression, 3, 36, 37, 38, 39, 79, 80 Pauli, Wolfgang, 84 PET, 14

Physics, 7, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25, 30, 63, 81, 87, 88, 90, 92, 107, 109, 116

Pineal, 6, 77 Placebo, 48, 49, 64, 65, 66, 67, 103 Plato, 43, 62 Prayer, 16, 49, 60, 63, 116 Precognition, 56, 61 Process philosophy, 24 Psilocybin, 48, 49, 50, 51, 76, 105 Psychedelic, 3, 48, 51, 69, 72 Psychiatrist, 6, 47, 48, 60, 63, 70, 72, 97, 101,

103 psychokinesis, 59, 61 Psychokinesis, 59, 61 Psychologist, 46, 51, 53, 76, 90, 99, 110, 111 Psychosis, 3, 51 Psychotherapy, 9, 32, 38, 52, 68, 71, 72, 73, 112 Purnima, 39 Pylkkänen, Paavo, 92 Rebirth, 114 Reductionism, 20 regression, 36, 79, 80 Reincarnation, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 114, 116 Religious, 11, 30, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 57, 98,

100, 105, 106, 113 Ridgley, Sara Klein, 93, 94 Samararatne, Godwin, 39 Schizophrenia, 52, 69, 90 Searle, John, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19 September 2001, 85 Shamanism, 54, 99, 100, 101, 113 Ship of Fools, 107 Siberia, 54, 99, 113 Sinusitis, 38 software, 18, 85, 116 Soul, 3, 15, 24, 26, 43 South America, 99, 100, 106 Sri Lanka, 39, 47, 117 Staring, 54, 55 Strassman, Rick, 76, 103 Suicide, 10, 51, 84, 93, 95, 107 Targ, Elisabeth Fischer, 63 Teleology, 109 Telepathy, 6, 61 Therapy, 100 Time, 3, 87, 88, 90, 98, 103 Transpersonal, 11, 46, 52, 77 Transplants, 57 United Airlines Flight 93, 85 Unus Mundus, 3, 84 Van Dusen, 51, 52, 53

122

Van Lommel, Pim, 33 Visions, 30, 52, 70, 73, 84, 100, 102 Wambach, Helen, 36, 37 War, 110, 116, 117 Whitehead, 24 Wickramasekera, Ian, 67

Witches, 6, 62 Woolger, Roger, 38 Zen, 47 Zodiac, 94 Zombie, 17, 18, 20