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CONTENTS
features
Tryptamine,

20
Hallucinogens, and
Consciousness
There is a very circumscribed place in
organic nature that has i mportant
implications for students of human nature.
by terrence mckenna

The Fusion Illusion

48
The pursuit of fusion energy, essentially,
harnessing the force that powers the sun,
provides a cautionary tale for those who
would remake today’s energy economy.
by max schulz

This is Your Brain

38
on God
The sensation described as “having a
religious experience” is merely a side effect
of our bicameral brain’s feverish activities.
by jack hitt

1
 departments
Alternative Thinking
A word from the CEO regarding the nature
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6
Discover More
The lastest articles from dedicated authors,
scientists, and researchers regarding topics
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58
Novel Literature
New literary works that shatter common
knowledge about seemingly ordinary
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72
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Thought provoking works of art dealing
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76
In the Studio
Highly creative people implementing
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2
From the CEO Alternative Thinking
Science fiction and other fantasy media Editor In Chief
has helped create momentum around Evgeny Olin
the discovery of paranormal phenomena.
Although fiction-based media has
helped create wide-spread interest in Executive Director
the unknown, it also cast a shadow Laura Stolyarova
on subjects not explained by popular
science, labeling it as supernatural, and
casting it off as matters of magic, wizards, Executive Editor
make-belief, or outright falsehood. Rigid Afsaneh Safari
categories of reality and fiction have
contributed to social ignorance regarding
abnormal occurrences, controversial Graphic Director
research, and contemplation of Evgeny Olin
fundamental understanding of Laura Stolyarova
knowledge, thought, truth, and reality. Afsaneh Safari
With majority of the universe unknown,
it is convenient to disregard unexplained
phenomenon as makings of the Contributing Author
imagination, supernatural, or nonsensical Rupert Sheldrake
ramblings of fanatics. Alternative Bruce Lipton
Thinking looks to reduce this stigma and Lloyd Pye
admit unconventional thought into realm Terrence McKenna
of possibility; we provide a source for any A.G. Nazarov
such knowledge. Eugene Pitout
Jack Hitt
We are a resource center for Charles Tart
unconventional knowledge, thoughts, Will Hart
views, and experiences. Our goal is Max Schulz
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instead we encourage our customers composed by the Design Team.
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Evgeny Olin 3
Editor In Chief
See the world
through crystal eyes
Experience the fascinating world of
Swarovski crystal...
Morphic
Fields
can now be measured scientifically!
by Rupert Sheldrake
I
n the laboratory of Princeton
Engineering Anomalies Research
(PEAR) at Princeton University/
USA, research on the topic “mind-
machine-interaction” has been ongoing
since the late 1970s. As far back as the
late 1980s, extensive studies proved
that diodes with white noise might be
used as an interface between man and
machine. Since 1998, worldwide about 50
such diodes with white noise have been
measuring not only the consciousness
of individuals but also the global
consciousness of mankind within a study
called “Global Consciousness Project”. The
results have been published and indicate
synchronized reaction of all diodes to
incidents of worldwide interest such as
the war in Iraq, Lady Diana’s funeral or the
terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001
on the World Trade Centre in New York.
Automatic mind reading
Hardly noticed by the public, research
at the US-American Princeton University
has shown that machines and computers
that have a diode with white noise
interface react with the thoughts and
consciousness of the people who are
connected to them. The connection
between mind and machine or
computer is wireless and is based on
the person mentally concentrating on the
communication with the machine. The
best-known experiment of this kind was
carried out at Princeton University with 200
6
students (not known to have special PSI-
abilities) who were asked to think “+” or “-”
during a test. The evaluation of all test data
demonstrated that the computer could
register through the diode with the white
noise what the operands had been thinking
during the test runs. The computer could
also visualize it properly.
The GCP
Roger Nelson, who was working at
PEAR Laboratory until 2002 had the
following idea: Rather than scanning
separate states of consciousness, he
wanted to check whether there is a
global consciousness and whether it is
measurable. Since 1998, about 50 diodes
with white noise have been distributed
worldwide. One can envisage them as
a radio, which is tuned between two
stations to an irregular noise. The raw
data of this noise is transmitted daily
from each computer, which is connected
to one of these 50 diodes, to a host
system at Princeton University via the
Internet. The data is evaluated and tested
for statistically significant abnormalities
especially in the case of emotionally
moving incidents, which are broadcasted
worldwide via media and press.
Morphic fields
Are we really experiencing a morphic
phenomenon? Is the fact that the global
consciousness reacts synchronically
worldwide to an incident broadcasted
live in all media not only proof that all of
us react to such an incidence in the same
way? The morphic fields postulated by
Sheldrake assume that each and every
person is connected with the morphic
field of mankind. This field should then
also react synchronically worldwide
without an incident being consciously
noticed concurrently. The fact that the
global consciousness had been alert at
4 am, that is five hours before the first
airplane crashed (8:45) and six and a
half hours before the second airplane
crashed (10:30), proves that the global
consciousness also works without
worldwide media and TV broad castings.
Since neither the authorities nor the
media knew about this terrorist attack
until 8:45 am, the global consciousness
reacted from the moment the airplane
highjacker had started to realize their plan!
This is initial evidence for the existence of
morphic fields, which obviously connect
mankind even if the perception of an
incident is via extrasensory perception.
A lot of incidents around the globe were
tested within the GCP on statistically
significant abnormalities of the 50 diodes.
Also positive incidents influence
the global consciousness
Contrary to what one might think when
reading newspaper cover stories, the
global consciousness reacts equally
strong to positive and negative incidents.
During the four years evaluated within

the Global Consciousness Project,
worldwide holidays cause very high
deflections of the diode. Terrorist attacks and
wars come second.
The Individual Consciousness
Project
Based on research at the “Campus
study centre for applied naturopathic
treatment” in Munich, the individual
field of consciousness and later also
the morphic field were analysed at the
same time as the global consciousness
was researched in the USA. Just like at
Princeton, the diode with white noise
was installed. The difference between
the two consciousness projects is
that the American project has set
50 diodes worldwide which “keep
hissing”. The Global Consciousness
Project analyses the noise in itself and
its statistically significant changes are
then compared chronologically with
incidents of worldwide significance.
However, the Individual Consciousness
Project (ICP) scans an individual field
of consciousness through a diode with
white noise and connects the noise
of the diode with databases, which
ideally contain all supposable states of
being of the analyzed consciousness
or morphic field. That way, the current
state of the field of consciousness can be
described through the right entry in the
database and indexed properly by the
computer. The experimental set-up at
Princeton University (PEAR-Laboratory),
as described at the beginning of the
article, included the diode with the white
noise that was similarly connected to the
evaluation database and also scanned
individual consciousness. The “Campus
study centre for applied naturopathic
treatment” in Munich then took up this
approach. However, databases with
not only two entries (“+” and “-”) were
linked but those with plenty of entries.
Whilst the American students in the
PEAR-Laboratory at Princeton were
asked to think “+” or “-”, the Individual
Consciousness Project scans without
active instruction.
Practical applications
The Individual Consciousness Project
used the exact same mechanism. Instead
of fledglings, plants, lakes, fields, houses
and other objects were used; instead of
the robot and a database with only three
entries (straight, right, left), a computer
software with databaswes containing
all possible solutions to malfunctions
that the analyzed objects might have.
Research at “Campus study centre for
applied naturopathic treatment” in
Munich demonstrates that diodes with
white noise may be used in this way and
that they display reliably on which level
of information and frequency the field
of consciousness oscillates. The fact that
this research proves that consciousness
and morphic fields surround not only
Rupert Sheldrake
One of the world’s most innovative biologists and
writers is best known for his theory of morphic
fields and morphic resonance, which leads to a
vision of a living, developing universe with its
own inherent memory.
humans and animals but also plants and
obviously dead matter, will not surprise
the interested reader.
Science
Research at the PEAR-Laboratory at
Princeton in the USA and Freiburg
University in Germany as well as the
earlier described “Global Consciousness
Project” are serious, scientifically
organised studies. Princeton may be
considered one of the leading universities
in the area of physics. Einstein taught
here after leaving Germany. Wheeler
one of the most influential physicians
of our time, taught here, too. Results
from Princeton must be taken seriously.
The “Campus study centre for applied
naturopathic treatment” in Munich is
a private institution. Time will (and to
a certain extent already has told) tell
whether a lack of university status of the
study centre will cause a disqualification
of the precious research results of the
“Individual Consciousness Project”.
“When a certain critical
number achieves an
awareness, this new
awareness may be picked
up by almost everyone. ”
7
 by Dr Bruce Lipton, PhD

W
isdom of Your Cells is a new biology that
will profoundly change civilization and the
world we live in. This new biology takes us
from the belief that we are victims of our
genes, that we are biochemical machines,
that life is out of our control, into another
reality, a reality where our thoughts, beliefs and mind control our
genes, our behavior and the life we experience. This biology is
based on current, modern science with some new perceptions
added. The new science takes us from victim to creator; we are
very powerful in creating and unfolding the lives that we lead.
This is actually knowledge of self and if we understand the old
axiom, “Knowledge is power,” then what we are really beginning to
understand is the knowledge of self-power. This is what I think we
will get from understanding the new biology.

Wisdom of Your Cells

Flying Into Inner Space means progenitor. When I put my cells

“Itthat
is a faulty assumption
we are controlled
by our genes. There are
no cancer genes. It is
not possible for a gene
to activate or change
on its own; for example,
producing cancer. It is the
environmental signal and
our perception (belief)
that contributes to a
change in our system.
” you. Using electron microscopy, not
8
My first introduction to biology was
in second grade. The teacher brought
in a microscope to show us cells and I
remember how exciting it was. At the
university I graduated from conventional
microscopes into electron microscopy
and had a further opportunity to look
into the lives of cells. The lessons I
learned profoundly changed my life
and gave me insights about the world
we live in that I would like to share with
only did I see the cells from the outside
but I was able to go through the cell’s
anatomy and understand the nature
of its organization, its structures and
its functions. As much as people talk
about flying into outer space, I was flying
into inner space and seeing new vistas,
starting to have greater appreciation
of the nature of life, the nature of cells
and our involvement with our own
cells. At this time I also started training
in cell culturing. In about 1968 I started
cloning stem cells, doing my first cloning
experiments under the guidance of Dr.
Irv Konigsberg, a brilliant scientist who
created the first stem cell cultures. The
stem cells I was working with were called
myoblasts. Myo means muscle; blast
in the culture dishes with the conditions
that support muscle growth, the muscle
cells evolved and I would end up with
giant contractile muscles. However, if I
changed the environmental situation, the
fate of the cells would be altered. I would
start off with my same muscle precursors
but in an altered environment they
would actually start to form bone cells. If I
further altered the conditions, those cells
became adipose or fat cells. The results
of these experiments were very exciting
because while every one of the cells was
genetically identical, the fate of the cells
was controlled by the environment in
which I placed them. While I was doing
these experiments I also started teaching
students at the University of Wisconsin
School of Medicine the conventional
understanding that genes controlled
the fate of cells. Yet in my experiments
it was clearly revealed that the fate of
cells was more or less controlled by the
environment. My colleagues, of course,
were upset with my work. Everyone was
then on the bandwagon for the human
genome project and in support of the
“genes-control-life” story.
You Are a Community
of 50 Trillion Living Cells
Now I have a completely new
understanding of life and that has led
to a new way to teach people about
cells. When you look at yourself you
see an individual person. But if you
understand the nature of who you
are, you realize that you are actually a
community of about 50 trillion living
cells. Each cell is a living individual, a
sentient being that has its own life and
functions but interacts with other cells
in the nature of a community. If I could
reduce you to the size of a cell and drop
you inside your own body, you would
see a very busy metropolis of trillions of
individuals living within one skin. This
becomes relevant when we understand
that health is when there is harmony in
the community and dis-ease is when
there is a disharmony that tends to
fracture the community relationships. So,
number one, we are a community.
New Understanding
of Science
When I was outside the university I had
a chance to read into physics. Again I
found information that did not conform
to the science I had been teaching. In the
world of new physics, quantum physics,
the mechanisms that are described
completely collide with the mechanisms
we were teaching, which were based
on the old Newtonian physics. The new
physics currently is still not introduced
in medical schools. Before conventional
science, science was the province of the
church. It was called natural theology
and was infused with the spiritual
domain, teaching that God’s hand was
directly involved in the unfoldment and
maintenance of the world, that God’s
image was expressed through the nature
we live in. Natural theology had a mission
statement: to understand the nature
of the environment so we could learn
to live in harmony with it. Basically this
meant learning how to live in harmony
with God, considering that nature and
God were so well connected. However,
through the abuses of the church, their
insistence on absolute knowledge
and their efforts of suppressing new
knowledge, there was what is called
the Reformation. The Reformation,
precipitated by Martin Luther, was a
challenge to the church’s authority.
After the Reformation, when there was
an opportunity to question beliefs about
the universe, science became what was
called modern science. Isaac Newton, the
physicist whose primary studies were on
the nature of gravity and the movement
of the planets, provided the foundation
for modern science. He invented a new
mathematics called differential calculus
in order to create an equation to predict
the movements of the solar system.
Science identified truths as things that
were predictable. Newtonian physics
perceives the universe as a machine
made out of matter; it says that if you
can understand the nature of the matter
that comprises the machine, then you
will understand nature itself. Therefore
the mission of science was to control and
dominate nature, which was completely
different than the former mission of
science under natural theology, which
was to live in harmony with nature. The
issue of control in regard to biology
becomes a very important point. What is
it that controls the traits that we express?
According to Newtonian physics life
forms represent machines made out of
matter and if you want to understand
those machines you take them apart,
a process called reductionism. You
study the individual pieces and see
how they work and when you put all
the pieces together again, you have an
understanding of the whole. Charles
Darwin said that the traits an individual
expresses are connected to
the parents. The sperm and egg
that come together and result in the
formation of a new individual must be
carrying something that controls the
traits in the offspring. Studies of dividing
cells began in the early 1900s and they
saw string-like structures that were
present in cells that were beginning
to divide. These string-like structures
were called chromosomes. Interestingly
enough, while chromosomes were
identified around 1900, it was only in
1944 that we actually identified which
of their components carried the genetic
traits. The world got very excited. They
said, oh, my goodness, after all these
years we finally have gotten down to
identifying the genetically controlling
material; it appears to be the DNA. In 1953
the work of James Watson and Francis
Crick revealed that each strand of DNA
contained a sequence of genes. The genes
are the blueprints for each of the over
100,000 different kinds of proteins that are
the building blocks for making a human
body. A headline announcing Watson and
Crick’s discovery appeared in a New York
paper: “Secret of Life Discovered” and from
that point on biology has been wrapped
up in the genes. Scientists saw that by
understanding the genetic code we could
change the characters of organisms and
therefore there was a big, headlong rush
into the human genome project to try to
understand the nature of the genes. At first
they thought these genes only controlled the
physical form, but the more they started to
manipulate genes, they saw that there were
also influences on behavior and emotion.
Suddenly, the genes took on more profound
meaning because all the characters and traits
of a human were apparently controlled by
these genes.
9
Diesel
fuel for life
With the bold passion of
Blackcurrant and Jasmine
V YSOTSKY
VL A DI M I R

december 31, 2012 MASSEY HALL www.masseyhall.com

why humans use only about 10% of our massively
supercharged brains? why savants can somehow
access parts of the remaining 90%? why humans have
a gene pool with over 4000 genetic defects? why
our closest genetic relatives, chimps and gorillas,
have very few? why humans have genes that are only
150,000 to 200,000 years old? why anthropologists
insist we descend from creatures 4.0 million years
old? why humans in no way resemble those ancient so-
called “pre”— humans? why humans have 23 pairs of
chromosomes for a grand total of 46? why our closest
genetic relatives (sharing over 90% of our dna) total
48? how humans could lose 2 whole chromosomes in
only 200,000 years? why our skin is so poorly adapted
to the amount of sunlight striking earth? why we are
so physically weak compared to our closest genetic
relatives? why earth’s moon is so extraordinarily
outsized relative to other moons? why megalithic
structures like the pyramids cannot be duplicated today?
why stones in those structures would buckle today’s
largest moveable cranes? how the ancient sumerians
could know uranus, neptune, and pluto existed?
why we discovered uranus only in 1781, neptune in
1846, and pluto in 1930? how and why the sumerians
kept cosmic time in units of almost 26,000 years?

13
 Deformed Human,
Alien, or Hybrid?
the Starchild skull
by Lloyd Pye

Sixty to seventy years ago the parents

of a young American girl of Mexican
(receiving much help along the way from
other villagers, who consider Starchildren
“Scientists know these
limitations of evolutionary
heritage took her to visit relatives in a great blessing). At that point the Star theory are true and will be
a small rural village in the mountains Beings return to take the hybrids to enduring, but shamefully
southwest of Chihuahua, Mexico. wherever they are ultimately destined few have the nerve to
While there, the girl disobeyed a local
taboo and went exploring in caves and
to live. With that in mind, it is easy to
imagine a scenario in which the mother
address them openly. ”
mineshafts dotting the area. In one of a young hybrid finds out her child will
mineshaft she made a startling discovery: soon be taken from her. Rather than give
lying on the ground at the rear of the it up, she takes it into a mineshaft and
tunnel was a complete human skeleton. kills it, then buries it in a shallow grave
Coming up out of the dirt beside it was with one hand sticking out for her to
a misshapen hand, entwined in one hold onto. Then she takes a fatal dose of
of the human skeleton’s arm bones. poison and lies down beside her child to
Gathering her courage, the young girl permanently escape their mutual fate.
began to dig away the dirt the hand was Now, to many that might seem an overly
rising up out of. She uncovered a shallow drastic solution to what was surely an
grave containing a being smaller than excruciating torment, but it is always
the human, with a body and skull as difficult to second guess a mother’s
misshapen as the hand. motives in circumstances like that. Maybe
she had acquired knowledge that led
This discovery occurred in an area her to believe what awaited her child
(northern Mexico) rife with variations of in space was a fate worse than death.
a legend that pervades all of South and Needless to say, the young American
Central America, as well as parts of the girl knew nothing of those Amerindian
American southwest. These are known as legends, so she removed both skulls from
“The Star Being Legends,” which state that the mineshaft and brought them back
for many centuries Star Beings have come into the U.S., where she kept them until
to Earth from the heavens to impregnate her death in old age. They were then
women in isolated rural villages. Because passed to an American man who held
Star Beings do not nurture their young them for five years, not knowing what
as humans do, and because the hybrids to do with them. He passed the skulls to
produced have so much human in them, a younger couple with UFO affiliations,
the chosen women are allowed to raise and they contacted me because of my
them until they are five to eight years old research into human origins (Everything
14
You Know Is
Wrong--Book
One: Human
Origins, Adamu
Press, 1998,
available now).
My expertise is in
comparing human
bones with prehuman
bones and showing
they have very little in
common, so I am not a
UFO expert. However, I
am aware of the basics of
ufology, so at my first glimpse of
the “deformed” skull my only thought was
that it had to be from an alien because it
looked so much like a “Gray.”
The eyes are what did it for me, as they
do for most people. Hauntingly different
from the human norm, they are two stark
windows into forbidden knowledge,
strongly hinting that we are not at all
what we think we are, and that in life the
owner of those eyes knew secrets of the
universe that we Earthlings can barely
begin to imagine. Gazing into those
eyes (eye sockets, actually), I felt the way
people in the early 1600’s must have felt
when first gazing into a telescope, seeing
spread out before them the infinite depth
of their ignorance about physical reality.
Like them, I felt myself staring at a similar
depth of personal ignorance
regarding biological reality. Soon after
that first glimpse into my possible
past and future, I was offered the job
of caretaker for what has come to be
called the Starchild skull. Soon after that
I began consulting experts in various
aspects of cranial anatomy, all of whom
assured me that the astonishing degree
of “deformity” evident in the skull was
the result of cranial binding (practiced
throughout South America) combined
with a highly unlikely but not impossible
combination of physical pathologies. This
did considerable damage to my initial
conviction that the skull might prove
to be the greatest relic in the annals of
human history. Then I went to my local
library and spent many hours researching
human deformities, which taught me
I had been
misinformed
by the
experts I
consulted. I
do not choose
to believe my
misinforming was
deliberate. I choose
to believe it was
what often results
when personal ego and
professional reputation
are mixed with the hubris that
can come from being considered
an “expert.” Having achieved that lofty
status, there can be an overpowering
temptation to pound all square pegs
into the round hole of conventional
thinking, whatever that happens to be
at any moment in time. So I choose to
believe the experts I consulted were
acting in good faith, victimized by
their own extensive educations which,
past a certain point, tends to become
indoctrination, which leads to collective
peer-reviewed agreements that
ultimately ossify into dogma.
In the library, using their own texts, I
discovered the truth, which was that the
Starchild possessed “deformities” like
no others ever seen before. Individually,
each was absolutely unique, which
negated all the assurances I had heard
15
that “this isn’t so very different from
any number of others I have seen in my
career as a (fill in the blank).” Those were
all lies, whether to themselves or to me.
None of them had ever seen anything
like it before because I was looking
through their own texts and nothing like
the Starchild was there. Nothing even
close. Not even a whisper of it. So my lost
conviction rapidly returned.
What came out of my research is this:
When it comes to deformity of the
human cranium, a little is generally too
much. Because newborns are so fragile,
and because the head is the center of so
many of life’s essential processes (eating
and breathing, to name two), anything
seriously wrong in that area is frequently
a death sentence. Certainly in any remote
village like the one where the skull was
supposedly found, there was no social
stigma attached to doing away with
malformed newborns that would be a
long-term drain on a mother’s meager
physical resources. So there is no way the
Starchild should have made it past Day
One, yet it survived in apparent good
health until the age of about five.
We know this because a detached piece
of maxilla (upper jaw and palate) was
found with the skull, and in that piece
of maxilla were two baby teeth that
show clear signs of wear from chewing.
16
Also, its cranial bones, though highly
aberrant, are well knit in all their sutures,
indicating an age of more than three.
Since the baby teeth would probably
be missing in the sixth year, the age of
five has been chosen as the likeliest time
of death. [Note: this is no longer a solid
assumption. The teeth still indicate an
early death, but the skull suturing and
durability of the bone indicate either an
adult, or something other than a normal
human child.]
During life [however brief or long] this
skull exhibited an astonishing array of
traits that cannot be considered human
either in isolation or collectively. The eyes
are not human; the temples are not; the
forehead is not; the parietal bones (upper
rear of the head) are not; the occipital
bone (rear of the head) is not; the
foramen magnum (hole where the spine
enters the cranium) is not; its weight is
not; its cranial volume (brain capacity) is
not; its sinuses (which it completely lacks)
are not; and its neck is not. In short, it is
not human. Experts insist it is human only
because their knowledge base simply
does not allow the possibility that it is not
human. But, experts or not, these facts
cannot be denied.
Let’s examine a few closely. First, as
highlighted earlier, the eyes. Human
eye sockets are cone shaped to hold an
eyeball and the muscles surrounding it
that allow it to move in all quadrants: up,
down, left, right. That cone extends about
5 centimeters into the skull, and at its
back are openings for the optic nerve and
various blood vessels. The Starchild’s skull
has no cone, but rather a shallow scoop
in the bone of the face, 3 centimeters at
its greatest depth. The optic nerve canals
and the fissures are skewed down and
away, at the bottom of the scoop and
on the inside, thereby housing an eye so
different in shape and probable function
that to attempt any comparison is an
exercise in straw grabbing.
The temples. In humans, thick bands
of muscle pass beneath the zygomatic
arch (cheekbone) to spread out in a fan
shape and connect with the entire side
of the skull. Hold your fingers to the
side of your head and grimace to see
how they attach from forehead to upper
hairline to behind the ear. In the Starchild
the zygomatic arch has been greatly
reduced and dropped from horizontal to
a 45-degree angle. Instead of two fingers
worth of muscle passing through, two
spaghetti strands pass through. And,
in a true miracle of deformity, those
greatly reduced muscles have been
neatly detached from the anchor points
of humans, spread out in a reconfigured
fan shape, and reattached across an area
about 1/3 that of a human.
The parietals. In humans the parietal
bones form the upper rear of the
cranium. While there can be quite a
range of difference in this part of the
head, the parietals of the Starchild are far
beyond any such variation. In fact, they
are so large relative to human parietals,
it is conceivable they might contain
individual parts of a trilateral brain (all
humans and primates have bilateral
brains). If this should prove to be true
(a planned endocranial cast should be
definitive), there would be little doubt
the child was a pure alien or an alien-
human hybrid. [Note: an endocranial
cast has yet to be created. At first, the
thinness of the bone intimidated us
away from casting it for fear of damaging
one or more of the cranial sutures. Now
we know the bone is durable, so a cranial
cast seems possible, but it remains
something for us to do. Also, we no
longer consider the trillateral brain as a
possibility. All indications are that the
brain was bilateral.]
The occipital and neck. The occipital is
a large curved bone covering the lower
rear of a human head. Near its center
is a noticeable bump (feel your own)
called the “inion,” the starting point
for the neck. Above the inion is skull,
below it is neck. Neck attachments
fan out in an arc that carries from the
inion to behind and below the mastoid
bones that protect the ear canals. It
is an extensive area, in its own way as
extensive as the attachment area of
the temple muscles. And in all cases of
head binding, none can go below the
inion without damaging muscle. Yet in
the Starchild’s skull the entire occipital
is flat, as if designed that way, with a
gently convoluted surface that belies any
chance of binding--ever. Furthermore,
the inion has become subtly concave
relative to the bone around it. And,
as with the temple muscles, the neck
muscles have somehow been detached
from where they would normally be on
a human skull, greatly reduced in size,
then reattached in a semicircle roughly
1/3 the area of a human neck.
The foramen magnum. In humans the
foramen is positioned rear of center to
balance a heavy rear cranium against an
essentially empty face area. The front of a
human face has numerous sinus cavities,
two deep eye sockets, a mostly empty
nasal passage, and a rather large mouth.
This means the weight of the brain is
dominantly rearward, under which is the
human foramen. The Starchild’s foramen
is centered under the head, balancing it
like a misshapen golf ball on a vertical
tee. This shift in its center of gravity is
necessary because the child’s cranium
is essentially wall-to-wall brain. It has no
sinus cavities and greatly reduced eye
sockets above an apparently small nasal
passage and mouth.
Weight and brain volume. An adult
human skull weighs about 2.2 pounds.
A typical five-year-old might weigh
a pound less, about 20 ounces. The
Starchild’s skull weighs 13 ounces
without its teeth or jaws, so with them
it might have weighed 15 to 16 ounces.
Its bone is definitely lighter than human
bone and roughly half as thick. Perhaps
its most startling difference is in brain
volume. A normal adult’s brain capacity
is around 1400 cubic centimeters (c.c.).
Whatever the Starchild’s age, its brain
capacity is an astonishing 1600 c.c.!
In anthropological circles a jump of
200 c.c. in brain volume heralds a new
species. Homo Erectus is 200 c.c. more
than Homo Habilis. Homo Archaic
is 200 c.c. more than Homo Erectus.
Homo Neanderthalensis is 200 c.c.
more than Homo Erectus. But with
the Starchild skull, thus far it is
officially considered a mere freak
of nature, and so it will remain until
DNA testing and other testing now
underway definitively proves its lineage
to be either a butt-ugly human, a pure
alien, or an alien-human hybrid.
17
Canadian Tourism Commission
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D i s c o v e r
E x p e r i e n c e
Tryptamine, Hallucinogens

Art by Rick Palmore

20
& Consciousness
by Terrence McKenna
I refer to the tryptophan-derived
hallucinogens dimethyltryptamine
(DMT), psilocybin, and a hybrid drug that
is in aboriginal use in the rain forests of
South America, ayahuasca. This latter is
a combination of dimethyltryptamine
and a monoamine oxidase inhibitor that
is taken orally. It seems appropriate to
talk about these drugs when we discuss
the nature of consciousness; it is also
appropriate when we discuss quantum
physics. It is my interpretation that the
major quantum mechanical phenomena
that we all experience, aside from waking
consciousness itself, are dreams and
hallucinations. These states, at least in
the restricted sense that I am concerned
with, occur when the large amounts of
various sorts of radiation conveyed into
the body by the senses are restricted.
Then we see interior images and interior
processes that are psychophysical. These
processes definitely arise at the quantum
mechanical level. It’s been shown by John
Smythies, Alexander Shulgin, and others
that there are quantum mechanical
correlates to hallucinogenesis. In other
words, if one atom on the molecular ring
of an inactive compound is moved, the
compound becomes highly active. To
me this is a perfect proof of the dynamic
linkage at the formative level between
quantum mechanically described matter
and mind. Hallucinatory states can be
induced by a variety of hallucinogens
"We have wandered into a state of
prolonged neurosis because of the
absence of a direct pipeline to the
unconscious and we have then
fallen victim to priestcraft of every
"
conceivable sort.
and diassociative anesthetics, and
by experiences like fasting and other
ordeals. But what makes the tryptamine
family of compounds especially
interesting is the intensity of the
hallucinations and the concentration
of activity in the visual cortex. There is
an immense vividness to these interior
landscapes, as if information were being
presented three-dimensionally and
deployed fourth-dimensionally, coded as
light and as evolving surfaces. When one
confronts these dimensions one becomes
part of a dynamic relationship relating
to the experience while trying to decode
what it is saying. This phenomenon is
not new - people have been talking
to gods and demons for far more of
human history than they have not. It
is only the conceit of the scientific and
postindustrial societies that allows us to
even propound some of the questions
that we take to be so important. For
instance, the question of contact with
extraterrestrials is a kind of red herring
premised upon a number of assumptions
that a moment’s reflection will show are
completely false. To search expectantly
for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial
source is probably as culture bound a
presumption as to search the galaxy
for a good Italian restaurant. And yet,
this has been chosen as the avenue
by which it is assumed contact is likely
to occur. Meanwhile, there are people
all over the world - psychics, shamans,
mystics, schizophrenics - whose heads
are filled with information, but it has
been ruled a priori irrelevant, incoherent,
or mad. Only that which is validated
through consensus via certain sanctioned
instrumentalities will be accepted as
a signal. The problem is that we are so
inundated by these signals - these other
dimensions - that there is a great deal of
noise in the circuit.
It is no great accomplishment to hear a
voice in the head. The accomplishment
is to make sure it is telling the truth,
because the demons are of many kinds:
“Some are made of ions, some of mind;
the ones of ketamine, you’ll find, stutter
often and are blind.” The reaction to these
voices is not to kneel in genuflection
before a god, because then one will be
21
like Dorothy in her first encounter with
Oz. There is no dignity in the universe
unless we meet these things on our
feet, and that means having an I/Thou
relationship. One say to the Other: “You
say you are omniscient, omnipresent, or
you say you are from Zeta Reticuli. You’re
long on talk, but what can you show me?”
Magicians, people who invoke these
things, have always understood that one
must go into such encounters with one’s
wits about oneself.
What does extraterrestrial
communication have to do with this
family of hallucinogenic compounds
I wish to discuss? Simply this: that the
unique presentational phenomenology
of this family of compounds has been
overlooked. Psilocybin, though rare,
is the best known of these neglected
substances. Psilocybin, in the minds of
the uninformed public and in the eyes
of the law, is lumped together with LSD
and mescaline, when in fact each of these
compounds is a phenomenologically
defined universe unto itself. Psilocybin
and DMT invoke the Logos, although
DMT is more intense and more brief in
its action. This means that they work
directly on the language centers, so that
an important aspect of the experience
is the interior dialogue. As soon as one
discovers this about psilocybin and
about tryptamines in general, one must
decide whether or not to enter into this
dialogue and to try and make sense of
the incoming signal. This is what I have
attempted. I call myself an explorer rather
than a scientist, because the area that
I’m looking at contains insufficient data
to support even the dream of being a
science. We are in a position comparable
to that of explorers who map one river
and only indicate other rivers flowing
into it; we must leave many rivers
unascended and thus can say nothing
about them. This Baconian collecting of
data, with no assumptions about what it
might eventually yield, has pushed me
to a number of conclusions that I did not
anticipate. Perhaps through reminiscence
I can explain what I mean, for in this case
describing past experiences raises all of
22
the issues. I first experimented with DMT
in 1965; it was even then a compound
rarely met with. It is surprising how few
people are familiar with it, for we live
in a society that is absolutely obsessed
with every kind of sensation imaginable
and that adores every therapy, every
intoxication, every sexual configuration,
and all forms of media overload. Yet,
however much we may be hedonists or
pursuers of the bizarre, we find DMT to
be too much. It is, as they say in Spanish,
bastante, it’s enough - so much enough
that it’s too much. Once smoked, the
onset of the experience begins in about
fifteen seconds. One falls immediately
into a trance. One’s eyes are closed
and one hears a sound like ripping
cellophane, like someone crumpling
up plastic film and throwing it away. A
friend of mine suggests this is our radio
entelechy ripping out of the organic
matrix. An ascending tone is heard. Also
present is the normal hallucinogenic
modality, a shifting geometric surface
of migrating and changing colored
forms. At the synaptic site of activity, all
available bond sites are being occupied,
and one experiences the mode shift
occurring over a period of about thirty
seconds. At that point one arrives in a
place that defies description, a space
that has a feeling of being underground,
or somehow insulated and domed. In
Finnegans Wake such a place is called the
“merry go raum,” from the German word
raum, for “space.” The room is actually
going around, and in that space one feels
like a child, though one has come out
somewhere in eternity.
The experience always reminds me of
the twenty-fourth fragment of Heraclitus:
“The Aeon is a child at play with colored
balls.” One not only becomes the Aeon at
play with colored balls but meets entities
as well. In the book by my brother and
myself, The Invisible Landscape, I describe
them as self-transforming machine elves,
for that is how they appear. These entities
are dynamically contorting topological
modules that are somehow distinct
from the surrounding background,
which is itself undergoing a continuous
transformation. These entities remind
me of the scene in the film version of The
Wizard of Oz after the Munchkins come
with a death certificate for the Witch
of the East. They all have very squeaky
voices and they sing a little song about
being “absolutely and completely dead.”
The tryptamine Munchkins come, these
hyperdimensional machine-elf entities,
and they bathe one in love. It’s not
erotic but it is open-hearted. It certainly
feels good. These beings are like fractal
reflections of some previously hidden
and suddenly autonomous part of one’s
own psyche.
And they are speaking, saying, “Don’t
be alarmed. Remember, and do what
we are doing.” One of the interesting
characteristics of DMT is that it
sometimes inspires fear - this marks the
experience as existentially authentic.
One of the interesting approaches to
evaluating such a compound is to see
how eager people are to do it a second
time. A touch of terror gives the stamp
of validity to the experience because
it means, “This is real.” We are in the
balance. We read the literature, we know
the maximum doses, the LD-50, and so
on. But nevertheless, so great is one’s
faith in the mind that when one is out
in it one comes to feel that the rules of
pharmacology do not really apply and
that control of existence on that plane
is really a matter of focus of will and
good luck. I’m not saying that there’s
something intrinsically good about terror.
I’m saying that, granted the situation,
if one is not terrified then one must be
somewhat out of contact with the full
dynamics of what is happening. To not
be terrified means either that one is a
fool or that one has taken a compound
that paralyzes the ability to be terrified.
I have nothing against hedonism, and I
certainly bring something out of it. But
the experience must move one’s heart,
and it will not move the heart unless it
deals with the issues of life and death. If it
deals with life and death it will move one
to fear, it will move one to tears, it will
move one to laughter. These places are
profoundly strange and alien.
The fractal elves seem to be reassuring,
saying, “Don’t worry, don’t worry; do
this, look at this.” Meanwhile, one is
completely “over there.” One’s ego is
intact. One’s fear reflexes are intact. One
is not “fuzzed out” at all. Consequently,
the natural reaction is amazement;
profound astonishment that persists and
persists. One breathes and it persists.
The elves are saying, “Don’t get a loop of
wonder going that quenches your ability
to understand. Try not to be so amazed.
Try to focus and look at what we’re doing.”
What they’re doing is emitting sounds
like music, like language. These sounds
pass without any quantized moment of
distinction - as Philo Judaeus said that
the Logos would when it became perfect
- from things heard to things beheld.
One hears and beholds a language of
alien meaning that is conveying alien
information that cannot be Englished.
Being monkeys, when we encounter a
translinguistic object, a kind of cognitive
dissonance is set up in our hindbrain.
We try to pour language over it and
it sheds it like water off a duck’s back.
We try again and fail again, and this
cognitive dissonance, this “wow” or
“flutter” that is building off this object
causes wonder, astonishment and awe at
the brink of terror. One must control that.
And the way to control it is to do what
the entities are telling, to do what they
are doing. I mention these “effects” to
invite the attention of experimentalists,
whether they be shamans or scientists.
There is something going on with
these compounds that is not part of
the normal presentational spectrum of
hallucinogenic drug experience. When
one begins to experiment with one’s
I do it? Did I speak in tongues?” This
hallucinogen induced phenomenon isn’t
like that; it’s simply a brain state that
allows the expression of the assembly
language that lies behind language,
or a primal language of the sort that
Robert Graves discussed in The White
Goddess, or a Kabbalistic language of
the sort that is described in the Zohar,
a primal “ur sprach” that comes out of
oneself. One discovers one can make
the extradimensional objects - the
feeling-toned, meaning-toned, three-
dimensional rotating complexes of
transforming light and color. To know this
is to feel like a child. One is playing with
colored balls; one has become the Aeon.
This happened to me twenty seconds
after I smoked DMT on a particular day
in 1966. I was appalled. Until then I
had thought that I had my ontological
categories intact. I had taken LSD
before, yet this thing came upon me
like a bolt from the blue. I came down
and said (and I said it many time), “I
cannot believe this; this is impossible,
this is completely impossible.” There
was a declension of gnosis that proved
to me in a moment that right here and
now, one quanta away, there is raging
a universe of active intelligence that
is transhuman, hyperdimensional,
and extremely alien. I call it the Logos,
and I make no judgements about it. I
constantly engage it in dialogue, saying,
“Well, what are you? Are you some kind
of diffuse consciousness that is in the
ecosystem of the Earth? Are you a god
or an extraterrestrial? Show me what
you know.” The psilocybin mushrooms
also convey one into the world of the
tryptamine hypercontinuum. Indeed, Photography by Rick Palmore

voice, unanticipated phenomena psilocybin is a psychoactive tryptamine.

become possible. One experiences
glossolalia, although unlike classical
glossolalia, which has been studied.
Students of classical glossolalia have
measured pools of saliva eighteen
inches across on the floors of South
American churches where people have
been kneeling. After classical glossolalia
has occurred, the glossolaliasts often
turn to ask the people nearby, “Did
The mushroom is full of answers to the
questions raised by its own presence.
The true history of the galaxy over the
last four and a half billion years is trivial to
it. One can access images of cosmological
history. Such experiences naturally raise
the question of independent validation
- at least for a time this was my question.
But as I became more familiar with
the epistemological assumptions of
Terence McKenna
Advocated the exploration of altered states of
mind via the ingestion of naturally occurring
psychedelic substances. He was open to the idea
of psychedelics as being “trans–dimensional
travel”; literally, enabling an individual to
encounter what could be aliens, ancestors, or
spirits of earth.
23

modern science, I slowly realized that
the structure of the Western intellectual
enterprise is so flimsy at the center that
apparently no one knows anything with
certitude. It was then that I became
less reluctant to talk about these
experiences. They are experiences, and
as such they are primary data for being.
This dimension is not remote, and yet
it is so unspeakably bizarre that it casts
into doubt all of humanity’s historical
assumptions. The psilocybin mushrooms
do the same things that DMT does,
although the experience builds up over
an hour and is sustained for a couple of
hours. There is the same confrontation
with an alien intelligence and extremely
bizarre translinguistic information
complexes. These experiences strongly
suggest that there is some latent ability
of the human brain/body that has yet to
be discovered; yet, once discovered, it
will be so obvious that it will fall right into
the mainstream of cultural evolution. It
seems to me that either language is the
shadow of this ability or that this ability
will be a further extension of language.
Perhaps a human language is possible in
which the intent of meaning is actually
beheld in three-dimensional space. If this
can happen on DMT, it means it is at least,
under some circumstances, accessible to
human beings. Given ten thousand years
and high cultural involvement in such a
talent, does anyone doubt that it could
become a cultural convenience in the
24
same way that mathematics or language
has become a cultural convenience?
Naturally, as a result of the confrontation
of alien intelligence with organized
intellect on the other side, many
theories have been elaborated. The
theory that I put forth in Psilocybin: The
Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide, held
the Stropharia cubensis mushroom
was a species that did not evolve on
earth. Within the mushroom trance, I
was informed that once a culture has
complete understanding of its genetic
information, it reengineers itself for
survival. The Stropharia cubensis
mushroom’s version of reengineering
is a mycelial network strategy when in
contact with planetary surfaces and a
spore-dispersion strategy as a means of
radiating throughout the galaxy. And,
though I am troubled by how freely Bell’s
nonlocality theorem is tossed around,
nevertheless the alien intellecton the
other side does seem to be in possession
in a huge body of information drawn
from the history of the galaxy. It/they say
that there is nothing unusual about this,
that humanity’s conceptions of organized
intelligence and the dispersion of life in
the galaxy are hopelessly culture-bound,
that the galaxy has been an organized
society for billions of years. Life evolves
under so many different regimens of
chemistry, temperature, and pressure,
that searching for an extraterrestrial who
will sit down and have a conversation
with you is doomed to failure. The
main problem with searching for
extraterrestrials is to recognize them.
Time is so vast and evolutionary
strategies and evironments so varied that
the trick is to know that contact is being
made at all. The Stropharia cubensis
mushroom, if one can believe what it says
in one of its moods, is a symbiote, and it
desires ever deeper symbiosis with the
human species. It achieved symbiosis
with human society early by associating
itself with domesticated cattle and
through them human nomads. Like the
plants men and women grew and the
animals they husbanded, the mushroom
was able to inculcate itself into the
human family, so that where human
genes went these other genes would be
carried. But the classic mushroom cults
of Mexico were destroyed by the coming
of the Spanish conquest. The Franciscans
assumed they had an absolute monopoly
on theophagy, the eating of God; yet in
the New World they came upon people
calling a mushroom teonanacatl, the
flesh of the gods. They set to work, and
the Inquisition was able to push the old
religion into the mountains of Oaxaca
so that it only survived in a few villages
when Valentina and Gordon Wasson
found it there in the 1950s.
There is another metaphor. One must
balance these explainations. Now I shall
sound as if I didn’t think the mushroom
is an extraterrestrial. It may instead be
what I’ve recently come to suspect - that
the human soul is so alienated from us in
our present culture that we treat it as an
extraterrestrial. To us the most alien thing
in the cosmos is the human soul. Aliens
Hollywood-style could arrive on earth
tomorrow and the DMT trance would
remain more weird and continue to hold
more promise for useful information
for the human future. It is that intense.
Ignorance forced the mushroom cult
into hiding. Ignorance burned the
libraries of the Hellenistic world at an
earlier period and dispersed the ancient
knowledge, shattering the stellar and
astronomical machinery that had been
the work of centuries. By ignorance I
mean the Hellenistic-Christian-Judaic
tradition. The inheritors of this tradition
built a triumph of mechanism. It was
they who later realized the alchemical
dreams of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries - and the twentieth century
- with the transformation of elements
and the discovery of gene transplants.
But then, having conquered the New
World and driven its people into
cultural fragmentation and diaspora,
they came unexpectedly upon the
body of Osiris - the condensed body
of Eros - in the mountains of Mexico
where Eros has retreated at the coming
of the Christos. And by finding the
mushroom, they unleashed it. Phillip
K. Dick, in one of his last novels, Valis,
discusses the long hibernation of the
Logos. A creature of pure information,
it was buried in the ground at Nag
Hammadi, along with the burying of the
Chenoboskion Library circa 370 A.D. As
static information, it existed there until
1947, when the texts were translated
and read. As soon as people had the
information in their minds, the symbiote
came alive, for, like the mushroom
consciousness, Dick imagined it to be a
thing of pure information. The mushroom
consciousness is the consciousness of
the Other in hyperspace, which means
in dream and in the psilocybin trance,
at the quantum foundation of being, in
the human future, and after death. All of
these places that were thought the be
discrete and separate are seen to be part
of a single continuum. History is the dash
over ten to fifteen thousand years from
nomadism to flying saucer, hopefully
without ripping the envelope of the
planet so badly that the birth is aborted
and fails, and we remain brutish
prisoners of matter.
History is the shockwave of eschatology.
Something is at the end of time and
is casting an enormous shadow over
human history, drawing all human
becoming toward it. All the wars, the
philosophies, the rapes, the pillaging,
the migrations, the cities, the civilizations,
all of this is occupying a microsecond of
geological, planetary, and galactic time
as the monkeys react to the symbiote,
which is in the environment and which is
feeding information to humanity about
the larger picture. I do not belong to the
school that wants to attribute all of our
accomplishments to knowledge given
to us as a gift from friendly aliens - I’m
describing something I hope is more
profound than that. As nervous systems
evolve to higher and higher levels, they
come more and more to understand
the true situation in which they are
embedded, and the true situation in
which we are embedded is an organism,
an organization of intelligence on a
galactic scale. Science and mathematics
may be culture-bound. We cannot know
for sure, because we have never dealt
with an alien mathematics or an alien
culture except in the occult realm, and
that evidence is inadmissible by the
guardians of scientific truth. This means
that the contents of shamanic experience
and of plant-induced ecstasies are
inadmissible even though they are the
source of novelty and the cutting edge
of the ingression of the novel into the
plenum of being.
Think about this for a moment: If the
human mind does not loom large in the
coming history of the human race, then
what is to become of us? The future is
bound to be psychedelic, because the
future belongs to the mind. We are just
beginning to push the buttons on the
mind. Once we take a serious engineering
approach to this, we are going to
discover the plasticity, the mutability, the
eternal nature of the mind and, I believe,
release it from the monkey. My vision
of the final human future is an effort to
exteriorize the soul and internalize the
body, so that the exterior soul will exist as
a superconducting lens of translinguistic
matter generated out of the body of
each of us at a critical juncture at our
psychedelic bar mitzvah. From that point
on, we will be eternal somewhere in the
solid-state matrix of the translinguistic
lens we have become. One’s body image
will exist as a holographic wave transform
while one is at play in the fields of the
Lord and living in Elysium.
Other intelligent monkeys have walked
this planet. We exterminated them and
so now we are unique, but what is loose
on this planet is language, self-replicating
information systems that reflect functions
of DNA: learning, coding, templating,
recording, testing, retesting, recodong
against DNA functions. The again,
language may be a quality of an entirely
different order. Whatever language is, it is
in us monkeys now and moving through
us and moving out of our hands and
into the noosphere with which we have
surrounded ourselves.
The tryptamine state seems to be in one
sense transtemporal; it is an anticipation
of the future, It is as though Plato’s
metaphor were true - that time IS the
moving image of eternity. The tryptamine
ecstasy is a stepping out of the moving
image and into eternity, the eternity
of the standing now, the nunc stans
of Thomas Aquinas. In that state, all of
human history is seen to lead toward
this culminating moment. Acceleration
is visible in all the processes around
us: the fact that fire was discovered
several million years ago; language came
perhaps thirty-five thousand years ago;
measurement, five thousand; Galileo,
four hundred; then Watson-Crick and
DNA. What is obviously happening is that
everything is being drawn together.
On the other hand, the description
our physicists are giving us of the
universe - that it has lasted billions of
years and will last billions of years into
the future - is a dualistic conception,
an inductive projection that is very
unsophisticated when applied to the
nature of consciousness and language.
Consciousness is somehow able to
collapse the state vector and thereby
cause the stuff of being to undergo
what Alfred North Whitehead called “the
formality of actually occurring.” Here is
the beginning of an understanding of
the centrality of human beings. Western
societies have been on a decentralizing
bender for five hundred years, concluding
that the Earth is not the center of the
universe and man is not the beloved
25
DMT
of God. We have moved ourselves out
toward the edge of the galaxy, when
the fact is that the most richly organized
material in the universe is the human
cerebral cortex, and the densest and
richest experience in the universe is the
experience you are having right now.
Everything should be castellated outward
from the perceiving self. That is the
primary datum. The perceiving self under
the influence of these hallucinogenic
plants gives information that is totally at
variance with the models that we inherit
from our past, yet these dimensions
exist. One one level, this information is
a matter of no great consequence, for
many cultures have understood this
for millennia. But we moderns are so
grotesquely alienated and taken out of
what life is about that to us it comes as
a revelation. Without psychedelics the
closest we can get to the Mystery is to try
to feel in some abstract mode the power
of myth or ritual. This grasping is a very
over intellectualized and unsatisfying
sort of process. As I said, I am an explorer,
not a scientist. If I were unique, then
none of my conclusions would have any
meaning outside the context of myself.
My experiences, like yours, have to be
more or less part of the human condition.
Some may have more facility for such
exploration than others, and these states
may be difficult to achieve, but they are
part of the human condition. There are
few clues that these extra dimensional
26
places exist. If art carries images out of
the Other from the Logos to the world
- drawing ideas down into matter - why
is human art history so devoid of what
psychedelic voyagers have experienced
so totally? Perhaps the flying saucer or
UFO is the central motif to be understood
in order to get a handle on reality here
and now. We are alienated, so alienated
that the self must disguise itself as an
extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us
with the truly bizarre dimensions that
it encompasses. When we can love the
alien, then we will have begun to heal
the psychic discontinuity that has
plagued us since at least the sixteenth
century, possibly earlier. My testimony
is that magic is alive in hyperspace. It is
not necessary to believe me, only to
form a relationship with these
hallucinogenic plants.
The fact is that the gnosis comes from
plants. There is some certainty that one is
dealing with a creature of integrity if one
deals with a plant, but the creatures born
in the demonic artifice of laboratories
have to be dealt with very, very carefully.
DMT is an endogenous hallucinogen.
It is present in small amounts in the
human brain. Also it is important
that psilocybin is 4-phosphoraloxy-N,
imethyltryptamine and that serotonin,
the major neurotransmitter in the
human brain, found in all life and
most concentrated in humans, is
5-hydroxytryptamine. The very fact that
the onset of DMT is so rapid, coming
on in forty-five seconds and lasting
five minutes, means that the brain is
absolutely at home with this compound.
On the other hand, a hallucinogen like
LSD is retained in the body for some
time. I will add a cautionary note. I always
feel odd telling people to verify my
observations since the sine qua non is
the hallucinogenic plant. Experimenters
should be very careful. One must build
up to the experience. These are bizarre
dimensions of extraordinary power and
beauty. There is no set rule to avoid
being overwhelmed, but move carefully,
reflect a great deal, and always try to map
experiences back onto the history of the
race and the philosophical and religious
accomplishments of the species. All the
compounds are potentially dangerous,
and all compounds, at sufficient doses
or repeated over time, involve risks.
The library is the first place to go when
looking into taking a new compound.
We need all the information available to
navigate dimensions that are profoundly
strange and alien.
I have been to Konarak and visited
Bubaneshwar. I’m familiar with Hindu
iconography and have collected thanks.
I saw similarities between my LSD
experiences and the iconography of
Mahayana Buddhism. In fact, it was LSD
 Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a naturally-occurring
tryptamine and potent psychedelic drug, found not only
in many plants, but also in trace amounts in the human
body where its natural function is undetermined.
experiences that drove
me to collect Mahayana art.
But what amazed me was the
total absence of the motifs of
DMT. It is not there; it is not
there in any tradition
familiar to me. There is a very
interesting story by Jorge Luis Borges
called “The Sect of the Phoenix.” Allow
me to recapitulate. Borges starts
out by writing: “There is no human
group in which members of the sect do
not appear. It is also true that there is
no persecution or rigor they have not
suffered and perpetrated.” The rite is
the only religious practice observed by
the sectarians. The rite constitutes the
Secret. This Secret...is transmitted from
generation to generation. The act in
itself is trivial, momentary, and requires
no description. The Secret is sacred,
but is always somewhat ridiculous; its
performance is furtive and the adept do
not speak of it.
There are no decent
words to name it, but it is understood
that all words name it or rather inevitably
allude to it. Borges never explicitly says
what the Secret is, but if one knows his
other story, “The Aleph,” one can put
“there
So I did it and
was a
something, like
a flower, like a
chrysanthemum in
orange and yellow that was
sort of spinning, spinning,
and then it was like I was
pushed from behind and I fell
through the chrysanthemum
into another place that
didn't seem like a state of
mind, it seemed like another
place. And what was going on
in this place aside from the
tastefully socketed indirect
lighting, and the crawling
geometric hallucinations
along the domed walls,
what was happening was
that there were a lot of
beings in there, what I call
self-transforming machine
elves. Sort of like jewelled
basketballs all dribbling
their way toward me. And if
they'd had faces they would
have been grinning, but they
didn't have faces. And they
assured me that they loved
me and they told me not to
be amazed; not to give way
to astonishment.
”
27
these two together and realize that the
Aleph is the experience of the Secret of
wthe Cult of the Phoenix.
In the Amazon, when the mushroom was
revealing its information and deputizing
us to do various things, we asked, “Why
us? Why should we be the ambassadors
of an alien species into human culture?”
And it answered, “Because you did not
believe in anything. Because you have
never given over your belief to anyone.”
The sect of the phoenix, the cult of this
experience, is perhaps millennia old,
but it has not yet been brought to light
where the historical threads may run.
The prehistoric use of ecstatic plants on
this planet is not well understood. Until
recently, psilocybin mushroom taking
was confined to the central isthmus
of Mexico. The psilocybin-containing
species Stropharia cubensis is not known
to be in archaic use in a shamanic rite
anywhere in the world. DMT is used in
the Amazon and has been for millennia,
but by cultures quite primitive - usually
nomadic hunter-gatherers.
I am baffled by what I call “the black hole
effect” that seems to surround DMT. A
black hole causes a curvature of space
such that no light can leave it, and, since
no signal can leave it, no information
can leave it. Let us leave aside the issue
of whether this is true in practice of
spinning black holes. Think of it as a
metaphor. Metaphorically, DMT is like
an intellectual black hole in that once
one knows about it, it is very hard for
others to understand what one is talking
about. One cannot be heard. The more
one is able to articulate what it is, the less
others are able to understand. This is why
I think people who attain enlightenment,
if we may for a moment comap these two
things, are silent. They are silent because
we cannot understand them. Why the
phenomenon of tryptamine ecstasy has
not been looked at by scientists, thrill
seekers, or anyone else, I am not sure,
but I recommend it to your attention.
The tragedy of our cultural situation
is that we have no shamanic tradition.
Shamanism is primarily techniques, not
28
ritual. It is a set of techniques that have
been worked out over millennia that
make it possible, though perhaps not
for everyone, to explore these areas.
People of predilection are noticed and
encouraged. In archaic societies where
shamanism is a thriving institution, the
signs are fairly easy to recognize: oddness
or uniqueness in an individual. Epilepsy is
often a signature in preliterate societies,
or survival of an unusual ordeal in an
unexpected way. For instance, people
who are struck by lightning and live are
thought to make excellent shamans.
People who nearly die of a disease and
fight their way back to health after
weeks and weeks of an indeterminate
zone are thought to have strength of
soul. Among aspiring shamans there
must be some sign of inner strength or
a hypersensitivity to trance states. In
traveling around the world and dealing
with shamans, I find the distinguishing
characteristic is an extraordinary
centeredness. Usually the shaman is an
intellectual and is alienated from society.
A good shaman sees exactly who you are
and says, “Ah, here’s somebody to have a
conversation with.” The anthropological
literature always presents shamans as
embedded in a tradition, but once one
gets to know them they are always very
sophisticated about what they are doing.
They are the true phenomenologists of
this world; they know plant chemistry,
yet they call these energy fields “spirits.”
We hear the word “spirits” through
a series of narrowing declensions of
meaning that are worse almost than not
understanding. Shamans speak of “spirit”
the way a quantum physicist might speak
of “charm”; it is a technical gloss for a very
complicated concept.
It is possible that there are shamanic
family lines, at least in the case of
hallucinogen-using shamans, because
shamanic ability is to some degree
determined by how many active receptor
sites occur in the brain, thus facilitating
these experiences. Some claim to have
these experiences naturally, but I am
under whelmed by the evidence that
this is so. What it comes down to for me
is “What can you show me?” I always ask
that question; finally in the Amazon,
informants said, “Let’s take our machetes
and hike out here half a mile and get
some vine and boil it up and we will
show you what we can show you.” Let
us be clear. People die in these societies
that I’m talking about all the time and
for all kinds of reasons. Death is really
much more among them than it is in our
society. Those who have epilepsy who
don’t die are brought to the attention of
the shaman and trained in breathing and
plant usage and other things - the fact is
that we don’t really know all of what goes
on. These secret information systems
have not been well studied. Shamanism
is not, in these traditional societies, a
terribly pleasant office. Shamans are not
normally allowed to have any political
power, because they are sacred. The
shaman is to be found sitting at the
headman’s side in the council meetings,
but after the council meeting he returns
to his hut at the edge of the village.
Shamans are peripheral to society’s
goings on in ordinary social life in every
sense of the word. They are called on
in crisis, and the crisis can be someone
dying or ill, a psychological difficulty, a
marital quarrel, a theft, or weather that
must be predicted.
We do not live in that kind of society, so
when I explore these plants’ effects and
try to call your attention to them, it is as
a phenomenon. I don’t know what we
can do with this phenomenon, but I have
a feeling that the potential is great. The
mind-set that I always bring to it is simply
exploratory and Baconian - the mapping
and gathering of facts. Herbert Guenther
talks about human uniqueness and
says one must come to terms with one’s
uniqueness. We are naive about the role
of language and being as the primary
facts of experience. What good is a theory
of how the universe works if it’s a series
of tensor equations that, even when
understood, come nowhere tangential
to experience? The only intellectual or
noetic or spiritual path worth following is
one that builds on personal experience.
What the mushroom says about itself is
 Art by Rick Palmore
this: that it is an extraterrestrial organism, opinions. I entertain it the way I would
that spores can survive the conditions of any eccentric friend. I say, “Well, so that’s
interstellar space. They are deep, deep what you think.” When the mushroom
purple - the color that they would have began saying it was an extraterrestrial, I
to be to absorb the deep ultraviolet end felt that I was placed in the dilemma of a
of the spectrum. The casing of a spore is child who wishes to destroy a radio to see
one of the hardest organic substances if there are little people inside. I couldn’t
known. The electron density approaches figure out whether the mushroom is the
that of a metal. Is it possible that these alien or the mushroom is some kind of
mushrooms never evolved on earth? technological artifact allowing me to
That is what the Stropharia cubensis hear the alien when the alien is actually
itself suggests. Global currents may light-years aways, using some kind of Bell
form on the outside of the spore. The nonlocality principle to communicate.
spores are very light and by Brownian
motion are capable of percolation to
the edge if the planet’s atmosphere.
Then, through interaction with energetic
particles, some small number could
actually escape into space. Understand
that this is an evolutionary strategy
where only one in many billions of
spores actually makes the transition
between the stars - a biological strategy
for radiating throughout the galaxy
without a technology. Of course this
happens over very long periods of time.
But if you think that the galaxy is roughly
100,000 light-years from edge to edge, if
something were moving only one one-
hundredth the speed of light - now that’s
not a tremendous speed that presents
problems to any advanced technology - it
could cross the galaxy in one hundred
million years. There’s life on this planet
1.8 billion years old; that’s eighteen times
longer than one hundred million years.
So, looking at the galaxy on those time
scales, one sees that the percolation of
spores between the stars is a perfectly
viable strategy for biology. It might
take millions of years, but it’s the same
principle by which plants migrate into a
desert or across an ocean. There are no
fungi in the fossil record older than forty
million years. The orthodox explanation
is that fungi are soft-bodied and do not
fossilize well, but on the other hand we
have fossilized soft-bodied worms and
other benthic marine invertebrates from
South African gunflint chert that is dated
to over a billion years. I don’t necessarily
believe what the mushroom tells me;
rather we have a dialogue. It is a very
strange person and has many bizarre
29
 Noo–
spheric
REALITY
“asThethenoosphere can be seen
"sphere of human
thought" being derived from
the Greek νους ("nous")
meaning "mind" in the
style of "atmosphere" and
"biosphere". In the original
theory of Vernadsky, the
noosphere is the third in
a succession of phases
of development of the
Earth, after the geosphere
(inanimate matter) and
V.I.Vernadsky the biosphere (biological
Proposed the phenomena of noosphere; life). Just as the emergence
an emerging ecology that is all around us, of life fundamentally
becoming more evident in ways such as the transformed the geosphere,
Internet which is everywhere all at once, or at the emergence of human
least soon to be. cognition fundamentally
transforms the biosphere. In
contrast to the conceptions
of the Gaia theorists,
or the promoters of
cyberspace, Vernadsky's
noosphere emerges at the
point where humankind,
through the mastery of
nuclear processes, begins
to create resources through
the transmutation of
elements. ”

30
1

by A.G. Nazarov
V.I.Vernadsky had no time to develop
himself an integral doctrine about
noosphere. In the 20s of the last century
he still considered human activity as a
force alien to biosphere, but 15 to 20
years later he put forward an idea of
biosphere’s “transmutation”, “transition”
into noosphere. V.I.Vernadsky had
in view that human beings would
undertake control and government
of all global processes of substance
and energy exchange, but he did not
point out how specifically all this would
happen. Vernadsky believed that one of
important prerequisites for noosphere
formation was “complete populating of
biosphere by human beings”, and the
main indications of imminent transition
was extinction of multiple species of
wild animals and plants, as well as
amelioration of vast areas. Nowadays,
these changes that made the scientist so
glad have grown up to reach the scope
of global ecological crisis. Noospheric
reality – this is the destruction of our
natural habitat. Nevertheless, hundreds
of scientists, followers of Vernadsky,
hope that his theory will permit to
overcome the current ecological crisis.
Relationship between noospheric
doctrine and ecology are not simple in
general. Vernadsky did not virtually refer
to ecologists in his works, and ecologists
do not practically discuss now the idea
of biosphere turning into noosphere. In
A.G. Nazarov’s opinion, “transmutation”
of biosphere is not possible even
theoretically. To manage all biospheric
processes, mankind should control their
information flows. But a single bacterium
lets pass through itself as much
information as a contemporary PC does.
The total amount of such cells on the
Earth makes 10 in the 28th power. That
is 20 times higher that the number of
people on the planet and 22 times more
than the number of computers available.
It is beyond mankind’s power to cope
with the information gap of such extent.
So, entire biosphere is beyond human
control, but human beings will probably
be able to govern some part of it. Now,
human beings control only several
dozens of domestic animal species
and about 300 species of cultivated
plants. However, artificial communities
(agrocoenoses) created by human
beings are very simplified and therefore
are unable to perform autoregulation.
Agrocoenoses ruin natural ecosustems
surrounding them, significantly yielding
in productivity (sometimes by several
times). Reclaimed meadows demonstrate
the highest productivity – 22.4 tons
per hectare, and taiga’s productivity
is 400. Agrocoenoses cannot exist
without fertilizers and pesticides that
contaminate both environment and
the harvest itself. Mankind is unable to
cope with vermin, weeds, pathogens,
ecosystem degradation. It is unable
to do away with wastes: even partial
elimination of wastes requires enormous
expenses and energy consumption.
Complete wastelessness is impossible for
the same reasons. The social evolution
rate together with all its destroying
impacts on biosphere is 3 to 5 times
Art by Rick Palmore
higher than the biological evolution
rate, this excluding possibility for any
adaptation of biosphere to man-caused
changes. Therefore, adaptatin in the
“nature-society” system is possible only in
case if mankind accommodates itself to
the laws of biosphere and strictly adheres
to them. However, for the time being man
and nature are in state of war, and we
are now witnessing biosphere’s attempts
to “discard” man through new diseases,
genetic and mental disorders as the most
hazardous organism. In A.G. Nazarov’s
opinion, it is necessary to control not
biosphere but “noospheroegenesis”, i.e.
to implement only comprehensively
justified actions, which lessen acuteness
of contradictions between nature and
society. Such co-adaptation strategy
as regards to biosphere may and
should include reduction of the Earth’s
population, limitation of consumption,
formation of new biospheric education,
which fully contradicts to Vernadsky’s
main ideas. However, these measures can
(according to estimates of the Roman
Club members) decrease antropogenic
burden on biosphere by 1,000 times
and more. Carrying out of such strategy
would not at all infringe upon human
rights and personal liberty, as it is
aimed at ensuring the highest human
right to live and at improving quality of
life. Provided this strategy is adopted,
the “age of noosphere” may only be
welcomed at least as unrealizable, but
alluring goal, inspiring hope for longer
mankind’s survival.
31
Can
we be
swayed
by
Symbols?
by Eugene Pitout
Absolutely. I don't care what you
believe, you will think twice before
drinking from the bottle with the skull
and bones symbol on it that appeared
in your medicine cabinet. When you
see a building with a cross on it you
will definitely know its some Christian
building of some kind and depending
on your belief it could sway you to be
quietly respectful or to get the hell
away from there.
Symbols are very powerful tools to
be used in spiritual practices. We use
Reiki symbols to heal and then we have
pentagrams and flower of life and all
kinds of symbols and sacred geometry
that we use to enhance the energies of
our intent. Why do they work and how?
For the sake of this article I will explain it
as simple as I understand them.
A symbol is a representation of
something. When a Christian sees a
Jesus cross for example there is a whole
anagrammatic memory that they have
that combines all the times in their lives
32
where they did something where there
was a cross present. Sunday's, weddings
funerals and mass all combine to create a
unique emotional energy signature that
they have around the symbol.
In the same way when you want to
manifest another personal reality for
yourself you can use a symbol. You might
want to manifest a European tour but
it takes a long time to visualize it in one
breath, so you might package the whole
visualization of a European holiday into a
symbol like a Euro dollar for example and
then when the time comes to place your
intent or manifestation to the universe in
one breath you just offer the Euro Dollar
symbol. That is another use.
Then we have ancient symbols from
ancient times that we use to do things
with. We have lived thousands upon
thousands of lives and in those lives we
were many things. From kings to wizards
to paupers, we were them all. Now we
might not remember the life we lived
but subconsciously we still remember
“and
Through renaming actions we take
relabeling decisions we make,
we turn what may be unacceptable
into socially approved behaviors.
”
the power symbols we used to create
our magic in those lives. When you show
those symbols to your subconscious it
opens energy portals for you that enables
you to empower whatever you are busy
with. Therefore Reiki symbols work and
the old antakarana is one of the most
powerful healing symbols from Tibet that
we use to this day. A blue pentagram on
your screen of consciousness when you
meditate for example will still act as a key
to open the portal between your God self
and your human self and enable you to
manifest many divine aspects for yourself.
Ancient symbols carry with them the
power of the collective. Many people
in all time used them for the same
purpose so even if you haven't dealt
with them ever, they will still have power.
Intuitive people and psychics sometimes
immediately feel the power of a symbol
even when you just think it up.
www.twistedmusic.com
 This is Your
Brain
by Jack Hitt
Over a scratchy speaker, a researcher
announces, "Jack, one of your electrodes
is loose, we're coming in." The 500–
pound steel door of the experimental
chamber opens with a heavy whoosh;
two technicians wearing white lab
coats march in. They remove the Ping–
Pong–ball halves taped over my eyes
and carefully lift a yellow motorcycle
helmet that's been retrofitted with
electromagnetic field-emitting
solenoids on the sides, aimed directly
at my temples. Above the left
hemisphere of my 42–year–old male
brain, they locate the dangling electrode,
needed to measure and track my brain
waves. The researchers slather more
conducting cream into the graying
wisps of my red hair and press the
securing tape hard into my scalp. After
restoring everything to its proper
working position, the techies exit, and
I'm left sitting inside the utterly silent,
utterly black vault. A few commands
are typed into a computer outside the
chamber, and selected electromagnetic
fields begin gently thrumming my
brain's temporal lobes. The fields are
no more intense than what you'd get
as by–product from an ordinary blow–
dryer, but what's coming is anything
but ordinary. My lobes are about to be
bathed with precise wavelength patterns
that are supposed to affect my mind in a
stunning way, artificially inducing the
sensation that I am seeing God.
34
I'm taking part in a vanguard experiment
on the physical sources of spiritual
consciousness, the current work–
in–progress of Michael Persinger, a
neuropsychologist at Canada's Laurentian
University in Sudbury, Ontario. His theory
is that the sensation described as "having
a religious experience" is merely a side
effect of our bicameral brain's feverish
activities. Simplified considerably,
the idea goes like so: When the right
hemisphere of the brain, the seat of
emotion, is stimulated in the cerebral
region presumed to control notions of
self, and then the left hemisphere, the
seat of language, is called upon to make
sense of this nonexistent entity, the mind
generates a "sensed presence."
Persinger has tickled the temporal lobes
of more than 900 people before me and
has concluded, among other things,
that different subjects label this ghostly
perception with the names that their
cultures have trained them to use; Elijah,
Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, the
Sky Spirit. Some subjects have emerged
with Freudian interpretations, describing
the presence as one's grandfather, for
instance – while others, agnostics with
more than a passing faith in UFOs, tell
something that sounds more like a
standard alien-abduction story. It may
seem sacrilegious and presumptuous to
reduce God to a few ornery synapses,
but modern neuroscience isn't shy
about defining our most sacred notions;
love, joy, altruism, pity, as nothing
more than static from our impressively
large cerebrums. Persinger goes one
step further. His work practically
constitutes a Grand Unified Theory of
the Otherworldly: He believes cerebral
fritzing is responsible for almost anything
one might describe as paranormal, aliens,
heavenly apparitions, past-life sensations,
near-death experiences, awareness of the
soul, you name it.
To those of us who prefer a little mystery
in our lives, it all sounds like a letdown.
And as I settle in for my mind trip, I'm
starting to get apprehensive. I'm a lapsed
Episcopalian clinging to only a hazy
sense of the divine, but I don't especially
like the idea that whatever vestigial faith
I have in the Almighty's existence might
get clinically lobotomized by Persinger's
demo. Do I really want God to be
rendered as explicable and predictable as
an endorphin rush after a 3–mile run?
The journey from my home in
Connecticut to the mining district
north of Lake Huron is, by modern
standards, arduous. Given what's in
store, it's also strangely fitting. When you
think of people seeking divine visions,
you imagine them trekking to some
mountainous cloister. The pilgrimage to
Persinger's lab is the clinical counterpart.

on God
The trip involves flying in increasingly
smaller puddle–jumpers with
increasingly fewer propellers until you
land in the ore–rich Ontario town of
Sudbury, a place that's been battered by
commerce, geography, and climate. Jags
of red rock and black iron erupt from the
landscape, often bolting right out of the
pavement. The weather-beaten concrete
exteriors of the city's buildings speak of
long, harsh winters.
A short car ride through stony suburbs
ends at a forlorn cluster of a dozen
buildings: Laurentian University. Near
Parking Lot 4, I am met by Charles
Cook, a grad student of Persinger's.
He leads me into the science building's
basement, then to the windowless
confines of Room C002B, Persinger's lair.
Waiting there is Linda St–Pierre, another
graduate student, who prompts me to
sit down, then launches into a series of
psychological questions. I answer a range
of true–or–false statements from an old
version of the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory, a test designed
to ferret out any nuttiness that might
disqualify me from serving as a study
subject. When read individually, the
questions seem harmless, but as a group
they sound hopelessly antiquated, as if
the folks who devised the exam hadn't
checked the warehouse for anachronisms
in five decades:
• I like to read mechanics magazines.
• Someone is trying to poison me.
• I have successful bowel movements.
• I know who is trying to get me.
• As a child, I enjoyed playing
drop–the–handkerchief.
I'm escorted into the chamber, an old
sound–experiment booth. The tiny
room doesn't appear to have been
redecorated since it was built in the
early '70s. The frayed spaghettis of a
brown-and-white shag carpet, along with
huge, wall–mounted speakers covered
in glittery black nylon, surround a spent
brown recliner upholstered in the prickly
polymers of that time. The chair, frankly,
is repellent. Hundreds of subjects have
settled into its itchy embrace, and its
brown contours are spotted with dollops
of electrode–conducting cream, dried
like toothpaste, giving the seat the look
of a favored seagulls' haunt. Persinger’s
research forays are at the very frontier
of the roiling field of neuroscience, the
biochemical approach to the study of the
brain. Much of what we hear about the
discipline is anatomical stuff, involving
the mapping of the brain’s many folds
and networks, performed by reading
PET scans, observing blood flows, or
deducing connections from stroke
and accident victims who’ve suffered
serious brain damage. But cognitive
neuroscience is also a grab bag of more
theoretical pursuits that can range
Art by Rick Palmore
from general consciousness studies to
finding the neural basis for all kinds of
sensations. As the work piles up, many
things that we hold to be unique aspects
of the “self” are reduced to mere tics of
cranial function. Take laughter. According
to Vilayanur Ramachandran, professor of
neuroscience at UC San Diego, laughter
is just the brain’s way of signaling that
a fearful circumstance is not really so
worrisome. At a conference earlier this
year, he posited that the classic banana–
peel pratfall is funny only when the
victim gets up, and that we laugh to alert
“other members of [our] kin that, ‘Look,
there has been a false alarm here; don’t
waste your resources rushing to help.’” He
calls laughter “nature’s OK signal.”
Of course, this type of deromanticizing
has been going on for a while;
Persinger’s brain manipulations have
crude antecedents in the 1950s, the
roaring decade for behaviorism. Back
then, Yale physiologist Jose Delgado
earned national renown by implanting
electrodes into the brains of live animals
and attaching them to a “stimoceiver”
under the skull. In a technique called
ESB – electronic stimulation of the brain;
Delgado sent radio signals through
the electrodes to control the animal. In
one demonstration in the early 1960s,
he used his electronic gizmo to halt a
charging bull.
35

Michael Persinger
Has a vision that the Almighty isn’t dead, he is an
energy field. And your mind is an electromagnetic
map around your soul.
Delgado’s relatively coarse stunts were William Calvin, a professor of behavioral
a long way from Persinger’s quest for sciences at the University of Washington
the God spot, but Persinger is not the in Seattle, says that Persinger’s line
first to theorize that the Creator exists of inquiry is no more mysterious
only in the complex landscape of the than another pursuit that intrigues
human noggin. In his controversial 1976 neuroscientists: trying to understand
book, The Origin of Consciousness in the the sensations of déjà vu or its opposite,
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian jamais vu – the feeling, during a familiar
Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist, argued routine, that we’re doing it for the first
that the brain activity of ancient people; time. Maybe these feelings, like God,
those living roughly 3,500 years ago, are just more fritzing in the electricity
prior to early evidence of consciousness arcing about our brains. Persinger arrives
such as logic, reason, and ethics, soon after St–Pierre has judged me sane
would have resembled that of modern enough to enter Room C002B. “I see that
schizophrenics. Jaynes maintained Mr. Cook has been as punctual as usual,”
that, like schizophrenics, the ancients he says, extending a hand in greeting.
heard voices, summoned up visions, Persinger, 54, blends a crisp, scientific
and lacked the sense of metaphor and demeanor with a mischievous smile,
individual identity that characterizes a but overall he’s a very serious man. His
more advanced mind. He said that some erect posture is enhanced by a dark,
of these ancestral synaptic leftovers are pin–striped, three–piece suit with a gold
buried deep in the modern brain, which chain swag at the bottom of the vest. His
would explain many of our present–day sentences are clipped and stripped of
sensations of God or spirituality. any vernacular, so painstakingly scientific
that they can be coy. For example, he
Among practicing neuroscientists, there tells me that he is actually an American
is no overarching consensus on whether who “moved to Canada in July of 1969,
such notions are correct. Persinger is because I had a rather major ethical
certainly out on a frontier where theory disagreement with my government.”
meets the boldest sort of speculation, but It takes me a follow-up or two before
there’s nothing inherently bizarre about I realize he had dodged the draft. As
his methods or the questions he’s asking. the researchers fit my helmet, I ask: Has

“ofBydifferent
stringing together a number
electromagnetic
fields, it is possible to prompt a
complicated chemical reaction
on the genetic level; for example,
directing the body’s natural self–
healing instincts.
”

36
anyone ever freaked out in the chair?
Persinger smiles slightly and describes
when a subject suffered an “adverse
experience” and succumbed to an
“interpretation that the room was hexed.”
When I ask if, say, the subject ripped all
this equipment from his flesh and ran
screaming from the dungeon, Persinger
curtly replies: “Yes, his heart rate did
go up and he did want to leave and of
course he could because that is part of
the protocol.” One more time: Has anyone
freaked out in the chair? “His EKG was
showing that he moved very, very quickly
and dramatically,” Persinger offers, “and
that he was struggling to take off the
electrodes.” Technically speaking, what’s
about to happen is simple. Using his fixed
wavelength patterns of electromagnetic
fields, Persinger aims to inspire a feeling
of a sensed presence; he claims he can
also zap you with euphoria, anxiety,
fear, even sexual stirring. Each of these
electromagnetic patterns is represented
by columns of numbers - thousands
of them, ranging from 0 to 255; that
denote the increments of output for the
computer generating the EM bursts.
Some of the bursts; which Persinger
more precisely calls “a series of complex
repetitive patterns whose frequency
is modified variably over time”, have
generated their intended effects with
great regularity, the way aspirin causes
pain relief. Persinger has started naming
them and is creating a sort of EM
pharmacological dictionary. The pattern
that stimulates a sensed presence is
called the Thomas Pulse, named for
Persinger’s colleague Alex Thomas, who
developed it. There’s another one called
Burst X, which reproduces what Persinger
describes as a sensation of “relaxation
and pleasantness.”
A new one, the Linda Genetic Pulse,
is named for my psychometrist, Linda
St–Pierre. Persinger says St-Pierre is
conducting a massive study on rats to
determine the ways in which lengthy
exposures to particular electromagnetic
pulses can “affect gene expression.”
After spending a little time with
Persinger, you get accustomed to the
fact that his most polite phrases demand
pursuit. Affect gene expression? It sounds
so simple, but what he’s really talking
about is stringing together a number
of different electromagnetic fields to
prompt a complicated chemical reaction
on the genetic level; for example,
directing the body’s natural self–healing
instincts. “We want to enhance what
the brain does to help heal the body,”
Persinger explains. “Among more
sensitive individuals, tests show that
their skin will turn red if they believe a
hot nickel has been placed on their hand.
That’s a powerful psychosomatic effect
of the brain on the body. Suppose we
could make it more precise?” Persinger
envisions a series of EM patterns that
work the way drugs do. Just as you take
an antibiotic and it has a predictable
result, you might be exposed to precise
EM patterns that would signal the
brain to carry out comparable effects.
Another possible application: Hollywood.
Persinger has talked to Douglas Trumbull,
the special–effects wizard responsible
for the look of everything from 2001:
A Space Odyssey to Brainstorm. They
discussed the technological possibility of
marrying Persinger’s helmet with virtual
reality. “If you’ve done virtual reality,”
Persinger says, “then you know that once
you put on the helmet, you always know
you are inside the helmet. The idea is to
create a form of entertainment that is
more real.” But he adds, sounding like so
many people who’ve gotten a call from
the coast, “we haven’t cut a deal yet.”
I am being withdrawn from my body
and set adrift in an infinite existential
37
emptiness. Soon enough, it’s time for the
good professor to wish me well and lob
this last caveat: “If, for whatever reason,
you become frightened or want to end
the experiment, just speak into your lapel
microphone.” When the door closes and I
feel nothing but the weight of the helmet
on my head and the Ping-Pong balls on
my eyes, I start giving serious thought
to what it might be like to “see” God,
artificially produced or not. Nietzsche’s
last sane moment occurred when he
saw a carter beating a horse. He beat the
carter, hugged the horse while sobbing
uncontrollably, and was then carried
away. I can imagine that. I see myself
having a powerful vision of Jesus, and
coming out of the booth wet with tears
of humility, wailing for mercy from my
personal savior. Instead, after I adjust to
the darkness and the cosmic susurrus of
absolute silence, I drift almost at once
into a warm bath of oblivion. Something
is definitely happening. During the 35–
minute experiment, I feel a distinct sense
of being withdrawn from the envelope
of my body and set adrift in an infinite
existential emptiness, a deep sensation
of waking slumber. The machines outside
the chamber report an uninterrupted
alertness on my part. (If the researchers
see the easily recognized EEG pattern of
sleep, they wake you over the speakers.)
Occasionally, I surface to an alpha state
where I sort of know where I am, but
not quite. This feeling is cool; like being
38
reinserted into my body. Then there’s a
separation again, of body and soul, and,
almost by my will, I happily allow myself
to drift back to the surprisingly bearable
lightness of oblivion.
In this floating state, several ancient
childhood memories are jarred loose.
Suddenly, I am sitting with Scott Allen
on the rug in his Colonial Street house
in Charleston, South Carolina, circa
1965, singing along to “Moon River”
and clearly hearing, for the first time
since then, Scott’s infectiously frenzied
laughter. I reexperience the time I spent
the night with Doug Appleby and the
discomfort I felt at being in a house that
was so punctiliously clean. (Doug’s dad
was a doctor.) I also remember seeing
Joanna Jacobs’ small and perfect breasts,
unholstered beneath the linen gauze of
her hippie blouse, circa 1971.
Joanna was my girlfriend when I was
14. When I was sent off to boarding
school, she and I recorded cassette tapes
to one another. As a teenager, Joanna
was a spiritual woman and talked a lot
about transcendental meditation. Off at
boarding school, I signed up and got my
mantra from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,
right around the time Joanna dropped
me to move on to a tougher crowd.
If I had to pin down when I felt this
dreamy state before, of being in the
presence of something divine, it would
be back then, in the euphoric, romantic
hope that animated my adolescent
efforts at meditation. That soothing
feeling of near–sleep has always been
associated with what I imagined should
have happened between Joanna Jacobs
and me. Like the boy in James Joyce’s The
Dead, Joanna was a perfect memory, all
the potential of womanly love distilled
into the calming mantra–guided drone
of fecund rest. I’m not sure what it says
about me that the neural sensation
designed to prompt visions of God set
loose my ancient feelings about girls.
But then, I’m not the first person to
conflate God with late–night thoughts
of getting laid, read more about it in
Saint Augustine, Saint John of the Cross,
or Deepak Chopra. So: Something took
place. Still, when the helmet comes off
and they shove a questionnaire in my
hand, I feel like a failure. One question:
Did the red bulb on the wall grow larger
or smaller? There was a red bulb on
the wall? I hadn’t noticed. Many other
questions suggest that there were
other experiences I should have had,
but to be honest, I didn’t. In fact, as
transcendental experiences go, on a
scale of 1 to 10, Persinger’s helmet falls
somewhere around, oh, 4. Even though I
did have a fairly convincing out–of–body
experience, I’m disappointed relative
to the great expectations and anxieties
I had going in. It may be that all the
preliminary talk about visions just set
my rational left hemisphere into highly
skeptical overdrive. Setting me up like
that, you will experience the presence
of God - might have been a mistake.
When I bring this up later with Persinger,
he tells me that the machine’s effects
differ among people, depending on
their “lability”, Persinger jargon meaning
sensitivity or vulnerability. “Also, you were
in a comfortable laboratory,” he points
out. “You knew nothing could happen to
you. What if the same intense experience
occurred at 3 in the morning in a
bedroom all by yourself? Or you suddenly
stalled on an abandoned road at night
when you saw a peculiar light and then
had that experience? What label would
you have placed on it then?”
Point taken. I’d probably be calling Art
Bell once a week, alerting the world to
the alien invasion. But then, Persinger
continued, being labile is itself a
fluctuating condition. There are interior
factors that can exacerbate it; stress, fear,
injury, and exterior sources that might
provoke odd but brief disturbances
in the usually stable electromagnetic
fields around us. Persinger theorizes, for
example, that just prior to earthquakes
there are deformations in the natural
EM field caused by the intense pressure
change in the tectonic plates below. He
has published a paper called
“The Tectonic Strain Theory as an
Explanation for UFO Phenomena,” in
which he maintains that around the
time of an earthquake, changes in the
EM field could spark mysterious lights in
the sky. A labile observer, in Persinger’s
view, could easily mistake the luminous
display for an alien visit. As we sit in
his office, Persinger argues that other
environmental disturbances, ranging
from solar flares and meteor showers
to oil drilling, probably correlate with
visionary claims, including mass religious
conversions, ghost lights, and haunted
houses. He says that if a region routinely
experiences mild earthquakes or other
causes of change in the electromagnetic
fields, this may explain why the spot
becomes known as sacred ground. That
would include the Hopi tribe’s hallowed
lands, Delphi, Mount Fuji, the Black Hills,
Lourdes, and the peaks of the Andes,
not to mention most of California. From
time to time, a sensed presence can also
occur among crowds, Persinger says,
thereby giving the divine vision the true
legitimacy of a common experience, and
making it practically undeniable. “One
classic example was the apparition of
Mary over the Coptic Church in Zeitoun,
Egypt, in the 1960s,” he continues. “This
phenomenon lasted off and on for
several years. It was seen by thousands of
people, and the appearance seemed to
precede the disturbances that occurred
during the building of the Aswan High
Dam. I have multiple examples of
reservoirs being built or lakes being filled,
and reports of luminous displays and
UFO flaps. But Zeitoun was impressive.”
Persinger says there were balls of light
that moved around the cross atop the
church. “They were influenced by the cross,
of course. It looked like a circle with a triangle
on the bottom. If you had an imagination,
it looked like a person. Upside down, by
the way, it was the classical UFO pattern. It’s
curious that this happened during a marked
increase in hostilities between Egyptians
and Israelis, and both interpreted the
phenomenon as proof that they would be
successful. It’s just so classical of human
beings. Take an anomalous event, and
one group will interpret it one way, and
another group another.”
Might it surprise anyone to learn, in view
of Persinger’s theories, that when Joseph
Smith was visited by the angel Moroni
before founding Mormonism, and when
Charles Taze Russell started the Jehovah’s
Witnesses, powerful Leonid meteor
showers were occurring? Taken together,
Persinger’s ideas and published studies
go awfully far - he’s claiming to identify
the premium mobile underlying all the
supernatural stories we’ve developed
over the last few thousand years. You
might think Christians would be upset
that this professor in Sudbury is trying
to do with physics what Nietzsche did
with metaphysics, kill off God. Or you
might think that devout ufologists would
39
denounce him for putting neuroscience
on the side of the skeptics. “Actually, it’s
more a mind-set that gets disturbed than
a particular belief,” offers Persinger. “Some
Christians say, ‘Well, God invented the
brain, so of course this is how it would
happen.’ UFO types say, ‘This is good.
Now we can tell the fake UFO sightings
from the real ones.’”
Oh, I have no doubt. I mean, who among
all the churchgoers and alien fiends will
let some distant egghead with a souped-
up motorcycle helmet spoil their fun?
It goes without saying that the human
capacity to rationalize around Persinger’s
theory is far greater than all the
replicated studies science could produce.
The real tradition Persinger falls into is
that of trying to explain away mystical
experience. Jaynes thought visitations
from God were mere aural detritus from
the Stone Age. And just recently, another
study suggested that sleep paralysis
might account for visions of God and
alien abduction. Who knows? Perhaps
mystical visions are in fact nothing
more than a bit of squelchy feedback
in the temporal lobes. But that’s such a
preposterously small part of what most
people think of when they think of God,
it seems insanely grandiose to suggest
that anyone has explained away “God.”
It’s almost ironic. Every so often during
one of America’s little creation-science
tempests, some humorless rationalist
40
like Stephen Jay Gould steps forward
to say that theology is an inadequate
foundation for the study of science.
Noted. And vice versa. But Persinger’s
ideas are harder to shake off than that.
When I return to America, I am greeted
by the news that massive intersections of
power lines do not, in fact, cause cancer.
For years scientists had advanced the
power line-cancer connection, based on
the results of Robert Liburdy’s benchmark
1992 study. But a tip to the federal
Office of Research Integrity initiated
an investigation of Liburdy’s work; it
found that his data had been falsified.
Persinger’s experiments and resulting
theories suggest some new ideas about
our waning 20th century, which began
with Thomas Edison convincing the
world to cocoon itself inside electrically
wired shelters, throbbing with pulses of
electromagnetic fields. Granted, those
fields are quite weak, arguably too tiny
to affect our physical bodies in ways
Liburdy had suggested. But what about
Persinger’s notion that such fields may be
tinkering with our consciousness? Is it a
coincidence that this century, known as
the age of anxiety, a time rife with various
hysterias, the era that gave birth to
existentialism, is also when we stepped
inside an electromagnetic bubble and
decided to live there? We have never
quite comprehended that we walk about
in a sea of mild electromagnetism just
as we do air. It is part of our atmosphere,
part of the containing bath our
consciousness swims in. Now we are
altering it, heightening it, condensing it.
The bubble is being increasingly shored
up with newer, more complicated fields:
computers, pagers, cell phones. Every
day, entrepreneurs invent more novel
ways to seduce us into staying inside this
web. The Internet is well named.
Naturally, many people would presume
that such a change must be a malignant
force when directed at the delicate
gossamer of consciousness. Yet
evolution is a tricky business. Accidental
changes often turn out to be lifesaving
preparations for some other condition
that could never have been predicted.
A few might see a world of possibility
in Persinger’s theories. His booth has
helped us discover and confirm our
true predicament. “Seeing God” is really
just a soothing euphemism for the
fleeting awareness of ourselves alone
in the universe: a look in that existential
mirror. The “sensed presence”, now easily
generated by a machine pumping our
brains with electromagnetic spirituality,
is nothing but our exquisite and singular
self, at one with the true solitude of our
condition, deeply anxious. We’re itching
to get out of here, to escape this tired
old environment with its frayed carpets,
blasted furniture, and shabby old God.
Time to move on and discover true
divinity all over again.
 We’ve been
expecting
you.

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S H I VA S H I D A P U

[ Light of Shidapu ]

Charles Tart, PhD
American psychologist and parapsychologist
known for his psychological work on the nature
of consciousness (particularly altered states of
consciousness), as one of the founders of the field
of transpersonal psychology, and for his research
in scientific parapsychology.
“closest
Hypnosis is probably the
metaphor as a state
but I don't know if I could
equate it [with television
watching]. Hypnosis is a
state where you destabilize
the ordinary state and then
eventually get people into an
altered state where they will
follow a particular stimulus
input much more strongly
and with much less critical
reflection than they would
normally; there is certainly a
lot of comparability there. ”
Transpersonal
Psychology
Transpersonal psychology is a
fundamental area of research, scholarship
and application based on people's
experiences of temporarily transcending
our usual identification with our limited
biological, historical, cultural and
personal self and, at the deepest and
most profound levels of experience
possible, recognizing/being "something"
of vast intelligence and compassion that
encompasses/is the entire universe. From
this perspective our ordinary, "normal"
biological, historical, cultural and
personal self is seen as an important, but
quite partial (and often pathologically
distorted) manifestation or expression of
this much greater "something" that is our
deeper origin and destination.
We are forced to use imprecise terms like
"something" because ordinary language,
as a partial manifestation of our ordinary
self, which is itself a partial manifestation
of our deeper transpersonal "self," is
of only partial use in our research and
practice in transpersonal psychology,
and needs to be supplemented with
other expressive and communicative
modalities. Transpersonal experiences
generally have a profoundly transforming
effect on the lives of those who
experience them, both inspiring those
experiencers with an understanding
of great love, compassion and non-
ordinary kinds of intelligence, and
also making them more aware of the
distorting and pathological limitations
of their ordinary selves that must be
worked with and transformed for full
psychological and spiritual maturity.
Because people ordinarily identify
primarily with the personal, which
tends to separate us, rather than with
the transpersonal, which experientially
impresses us with our fundamental
unity and oneness with each other and
all life, intelligent knowledge of and/or
contact with the transpersonal can thus
be of great potential value in solving
the problems of a world divided against
itself. Conventional scholarly disciplines
and activities are thus subsets of the
general transpersonal perspective,
important and useful in themselves, but
limited. Transpersonal psychology, as
both an area of scholarly and scientific
study and as an area of therapeutically
applied discipline, is one of these
subsets, focused on the psychological
factors that either facilitate or inhibit
contact with and understanding of
the transpersonal and the effects of
transpersonal experiences on the rest
of life. Transpersonal psychology draws
knowledge and practices from main-
stream psychology, anthropology,
history, sociology and other disciplines
when helpful and needed, and tries to
understand them from the more inclusive
transpersonal perspective.
43
Alien
Gardens
Mysterious Origins
of Crop Plants
by Will Hart
Today modern plant geneticists are
performing what would have been
deemed impossible, a century ago,
by creating new, hybrid plants that
have never existed before in nature. As
incredible as it may seem, a new type of
corn (Btcorn), actually the combination
of a bacteria and normal corn is already
in the fields. Why was a bacteria injected
into the genes of corn? Because Bacillus
thuringiensis helps the new hybrid
‘planteria’ fight off worms.
How is a designer plant like Btcorn
created? Technicians carefully take
genetic material from the bacteria,
isolate specific parts of its DNA, and
insert it into the DNA of corn. Then the
desired transformation is achieved in
a tissue culture. Technically referred
to as transgenetic plants, designer
vegetables involve the transfer of DNA
from one organism to another. The
hybridization seeks to improve the plant,
at least from a human perspective. We
are already creating plantanimals. Why
is it then so farfetched to envision an
advanced race — hundreds of millions
of years more sophisticated than we
are — genetically engineering life on
Earth? In fact, it is a plausible scenario
as Sir Francis Crick showed in his book
Life Itself and this author will attempt to
prove in The Genesis Race series. Most
soybean plants grown in the U.S. now
have been genetically altered to survive
the application of powerful herbicides.
44
Btcorn
is widely
grown and as
shown above was
engineered to produce
its own organic pesticide
thereby rendering the
plants poisonous to earworms.
Growth hormone has been
isolated in bovine DNA and
inserted into pigs to increase
their weight rapidly and to
reduce fat. Dolly, the first
genetically cloned sheep,
has already paved the way
for other biogenetic
experiments with
animal cloning.
This combination ‘alien
garden’ and Twilight Zone
barnyard is not all that lurks
on our hi-tech farms of today.
Just beyond the perfect rows
of uniformly green, identical corn
plants is a patch of ground in the Mid–
“doubt
Agriculture should, and no
actually does, extend
West enclosed by an electric fence. The back tens of thousands of
small, 10–acre plot has been planted years and not the 9,000 that
with a test crop, or rather a genetically
engineered “pharmacrop”, of corn that
modern science contends. ”
has been created to make a human
enzyme. It is hoped that the new hybrid
corn will produce lipase, an enzyme used
in treating cystic fibrosis. “Pharming,”
the practice of altering corn, tobacco,
and other plans to make drugs for
humans and animals, has been getting
a lot attention in the biotech industry-
and attracting plenty of controversy,”
reporter Lucinda Fleeson wrote earlier
this year. The article was titled ‘A Cure
for the common farm?’ It was published
in Mother Jones in April 2003. However,
bizarre and potentially risky these bio–
gen farming experiments are, Genitcally
Modified Foods (GMOs) and pharming
are sources of controversy and bitter
debate in Europe. However, they have not
received the press coverage in America
where their presence is much greater.
It may seem that I am writing this article
to either raise awareness of GMOs, to
alert you to their potential dangers,
or to sing the “gee whiz” praises of our
newest industry. However, none of the
above is my actual intent. My concern
is altogether different. I want to know
exactly how we got here so quickly?
I recall the days when horses were
harnessed to pull ploughs and manure
fertilized fields. In fact, that form of
agriculture was developed in Sumer and
lasted some 4500 years. What happened
since the 1950s? How did we get here in
the broadest sense from the wild grasses,
the ancestors of modern cereal crops -- to
these Frankenplants? If you think that our
modern geneticists and plant scientists
know the answers and can point to the
evidence showing how our primitive
Stone Age ancestors domesticated wild
plants, you are a victim of a scientific shell
game. That is what you are supposed to
assume. However, the history of plant
domestication is fuzzy, full of ‘missing
links’ and logical inconsistencies though
the public is given the impression that
the history of agriculture holds no
real mysteries.
We are told in our history and
anthropological textbooks that our fist
civilizations were spawned on the heels
of the ‘agricultural revolution, which
occurred in major river valleys. What the
textbooks fail to tell us is that our Stone
Age predecessors did not harvest and
eat the seeds of wild grasses during their
long sojourn through the Paleolithic era.
They were hunter–gathers who subsisted
on leafy greens and lean muscle meats.
How come they suddenly figured out
how to domesticate and turn into major
food sources circa 5,000 BC? This raises
some obvious and very sticky questions
concerning the period of trial and error
experimentation and development that
must have gone into domesticating wild
wheat into bread wheat and wild corn
into the domesticated variety.
Let us begin with the enigma of the
modern corn plant. The humble origin
of corn remains mysterious because
the ancestral wild plant has never been
located. It is an established, scientific fact
that corn is a cultigen, a plant engineered
by humans. This means that
it has become so altered by humans
that it cannot reproduce naturally
and is entirely dependent upon man’s
continued cultivation. In short, it is now
a man–made plant and has been for
some time. Scientists have not been
able to trace the lineage of corn to the
ancestral wild plant. How can this be if
the ‘agricultural revolution’ only occurred
7–8,000 years ago?
Corn is a form of wild grass, as are the
majority of the other major crop plants,
there is no good reason for the ancestral
variety to have vanished and/or become
extinct. 10,000 years may seem like a
long time in human terms yet it is a very
short time in terms of the evolution
and life span of a plant species. There
are ancient plants that have existed
continuously for hundreds of millions of
years. If you believe that our ancestors
domesticated crop plants, you have to
start by assuming that people without
any agricultural experience were brilliant
enough to select and breed the best
wild seed candidates to turn into major
cereal crops. It is a historical fact that
in spite of 5,000 years of continuous
agricultural development we have
not genetically bred a new major crop
from a wild species. Just how ingenious
were our Stone Age predecessors who
performed this agronomic feat without
any agricultural or genetic knowledge?
Basing the agricultural revolution on
the notion that people who lacked any
understanding of the scientific basis of
plant breeding created seems a very
shaky premise. Skepticism is warranted
45
due to the fact that, if it actually occurred,
this was the riskiest of gambles, since it
represented a complete departure from
the only way of life and only food sources
that Stone Age people knew. But first
let’s step back to an earlier point and ask
how we know that 100,000 generations
of Stone Age humans did not eat wild
grass seeds. Our guts are still not adapted
to digest uncooked grains. After all we
are not birds. In addition, our Paleolithic
ancestors lacked the technology to
harvest, thresh, process and cook wild
grass seeds. The seeds of wild species
are miniscule and they are attached to
the seed heads making them difficult
to harvest and hardly worth the effort.
These are little known facts that raise
deeper issues. Our hunter–gatherer
ancestors mainly subsisted on leafy
greens and lean muscle meats. If they
lacked an extended experience with wild
grasses how did they know which ones
to select to turn into wheat, rye, corn,
barely and rice? In other words these
are still the principal food crops that our
civilizations are based upon. After at least
5,000 years of continuous agriculture
we do not seem to have improved upon
the first selections of our ‘scientifically
ignorant’ ancestors. That hardly seems
logical. This amazingly prescient selection
of wild seeds seems not only more than
a little surprising it looks to border on
being a minor miracle. There are an
estimated 195,000 flowering plants
that they could have turned into food
46
sources and primitive man chose less
than .01 to base agriculture upon. This
happened at a point in time when people
had no concept of domesticating plants
or animals, which means no experience
with artificial selection. To further
appreciate the paradox that this situation
imposes upon us we have to understand,
domesticated crop plants are nothing like
their wild ancestors. Farmers have long
known this fact.
The differences are so great that most
of the specific ancestral locations of our
cereal crops remain a mystery. We must
ponder what this really means. What
are the implications of our scientists
not being able to trace the specific
wild ancestors of modern corn, wheat,
rye, barely and rice? When we look
at the problem of how our ancestors,
lacking in both tools and knowledge,
domesticated wild plants it is really
tantamount to pondering how the
Great Pyramid was conceived, designed,
engineered and constructed with stone
tools and primitive methods. There is
something out of focus in the picture
we have of the history of civilization on
this planet, how and when agriculture
and precision–engineered architecture
were developed and by whom. It is as
if our ancestors were gathered around
the campfire inside a cave and one was
using his hands and fingers to tell stories
by throwing shadows against the wall
one minute; the next minute they are
watching satellite TV and giddily channel
surfing. That is how great the gaps are
between the late Stone Age and the birth
of agriculture and civilization. How were
these quantum leaps made and where
is the evidence to support the orthodox
theory that humans engineered them?
The real problem with the orthodox
scenario is the lack of a long incubation
period during which early humans
experimented with selective breeding
and with constructing megalithic stone
monuments. Agriculture should — and
no doubt actually does — extend back
tens of thousands of years and not the
9,000 that modern science contends. The
creation of dogs from wild wolves, a true
genetic engineering feat, is proof of this.
A more thorough examination of these
issues, including evidence that human
beings could not have domesticated
wild wolves 15,000 years ago and turned
them into man’s best friend appears in
The Genesis Race.
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Photography by Rick Palmore

The
Fusion
Illusion
48
a discourse
on energy
by Max Schulz

T
o hear President Barack
Obama tell it, we need to
fundamentally overhaul the
way we produce, deliver,
and consume energy. After the House
of Representatives passed the Waxman–
Markey cap–and–trade bill in June, the
president said it would “spark a clean
energy transformation in our economy. It
will spur the development of low carbon
sources of energy—everything from
wind, solar, and geothermal power to
safer nuclear energy and cleaner coal.
It will spur new energy savings, like the
efficient windows and other materials
that reduce heating costs in the winter
and cooling costs in the summer. And
most importantly, it will make possible
the creation of millions of new jobs.” He
repeated those sentiments before the
G-8 in Italy several weeks later when
he stated, “One of my highest priorities
as president is to drive a clean energy
transformation of our economy.”

That’s pretty ambitious, if not audacious.

Transforming our energy economy
would require replacing the massive
infrastructure and production and
supply mechanisms that power our
lives. Moreover, the renewable energy
technologies that the president prefers,
like wind, solar, and biomass—now
make up only three percent of our
electricity use, and an even smaller share
of our overall energy consumption. This
negligible portion of America’s energy
economy comes despite the fact that
many tens of billions of dollars in state
and federal subsidies have been pumped
into renewable for roughly three decades.
It is these sources that the president
proposes should overtake and replace

49

the fossil fuels that dominate our current
energy economy. He is engaged in a
staggering exercise in wishful thinking.
The limitations of these technologies
and fuels are well known by now: they
are prohibitively expensive, they are
intermittent power providers, and they
have a low energy density compared to
fossil fuels. Renewables will one day play
a somewhat larger part in our energy
economy—a majority of states have
passed laws in recent years mandating
that utilities supply power from them,
costly as they are—but because of their
severe limitations, the contribution from
renewable sources will be marginal.
Curiously, the Obama administration
has been lukewarm in its supposed
support for nuclear energy, which is
the one proven technology capable of
generating large supplies of reliable
power while emitting no greenhouse
gases. For instance, the president appears
to be pulling the plug on the proposed
Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository,
without providing an alternative method
for dealing with spent nuclear fuel. For
all President Obama’s talk about a post–
carbon society, there appears to be little
place in his thinking for nuclear power.
Is it really possible that we can transform
our energy economy, phasing out the
system that has grown more or less
organically over the course of a century
and replacing it with one powered by
the clean, green sources the president
endorses? We would be wise to consider
a similar exercise in wishful thinking
about energy that has frustrated
scientists and dreamers for more than
half a century. The pursuit of fusion
energy—essentially, harnessing the
force that powers the sun—provides
a cautionary tale for those who would
remake today’s energy economy. It
should be heeded by those who so
casually put their faith in government’s
ability to foster scientific breakthroughs
that will render the current global energy
infrastructure obsolete.
50
F
usion has been the Holy Grail
of energy since long before
anyone ever worried about
global warming or strategic
dependency on OPEC. Since the dawn of
the atomic age, armies of scientists and
researchers and government officials
have invested billions of dollars and
countless hours of toil and labor to
replicate, in a controlled environment,
what the sun is constantly doing:
converting matter into energy through
a fusion reaction. To figure this out
would be to solve humanity’s energy
needs once and for all. The development
of successful fusion power plants
would put an end to all the economic,
environmental, and foreign policy
troubles that plague the current global
energy regime. Unlike windmills and solar
panels, the potential of fusion energy is
virtually limitless.
This vision has spurred a movement of
would-be discoverers lighting out for the
fame and glory that would accompany
the breakthrough of controlled fusion.
A recent book chronicles this wild, oft–
contentious scientific pursuit. Charles
Seife, a former Science magazine
writer and the author of the heralded
2000 bestseller, Zero: The Biography
of a Dangerous Idea, has written a
lively account of the history of fusion
research—“a tragic and comic pursuit
that has left scores of scientists battered
and disgraced.”
Sun in a Bottle is an engrossing, accessible
work that tells a fascinating story about
the quest for fusion. It is a story that
covers the heights of man’s knowledge
of physics as well as the depths of his
vainglory—a tale of great scientific
achievement as well as the maneuverings
of charlatans, frauds, cranks, and modern-
day alchemists. And it is a story of false
hopes; the promise of fusion has forever
been just a decade or two away. Yet today
the faith in fusion is, in some quarters, as
strong as ever.
Fusion is, essentially, the opposite of
nuclear fission, which is the process
used by our commercial nuclear power
plants to generate electricity. With fission,
atoms are split and energy is released.
With fusion, atoms are made to stick
together, and the process converts a tiny
portion of the mass of these atoms to
produce gargantuan amounts of energy.
That’s what happens on the sun, where
hydrogen nuclei in the very hot plasmas
that make up its center constantly slam
into each other to produce helium as
well as energy. This is the nuclear furnace
at the heart of any star. It’s what makes
the sun shine, and also threatens to
blow it up, but the sun does not explode
because the intense force of its own
gravity holds it together. While science
and industry have been successful at
producing power from fission, fusion
appeals to us because it is quite a bit
more powerful than fission. More than
that, fission requires rare plutonium or
uranium for its fuel, while fusion requires
common atoms like hydrogen. Fusion’s
supplies would be as inexhaustible as
the oceans.
Enrico Fermi conducted the first self–
sustained nuclear fission reaction in
December 1942 under a squash court
at the University of Chicago. Both the
bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
fission devices, and a fission bomb turned
out to be relatively simple to build; the
key is just having enough fuel. A fusion
reaction would be far trickier, both to
start and to keep going for more than
an instant. But if a fusion reaction could
be sustained for just a few fractions of a
second, it was soon realized, the energy it
could produce would be immense.
In just seven years, researchers had
figured out how to build fusion bombs
dwarfing those that ended the war with
Japan. The Ivy Mike blast on the South
Pacific island of Elugelab in November
1952 was ten megatons, or roughly the
equivalent of exploding seven hundred
Hiroshima bombs. In 1961, the Soviets
detonated a weapon (the “Tsar Bomba”)
that was five times more powerful
than Ivy Mike. “With Ivy Mike and its
successors,” writes Seife, “the fusion bomb
scientists had succeeded at creating a
tiny star on Earth.”
 “The
pace of science forces
the pace of technique.
Theoretical physics forces
atomic energy on us; the
successful production of
the fission bomb forces
upon us the manufacture
of the hydrogen bomb.
We do not choose our
problems, we do not choose
our products; we are
pushed, we are forcedöby
what? By a system which
has no purpose and goal
transcending it, and which
makes man its appendix.
” sold in liter-sized bottles similar to milk
Uncontrolled nuclear fusion had been
achieved. The challenge was to figure
out how to produce a controlled and
sustained fusion reaction. The energy
potential from fusion for civilian purposes
promised to dwarf civilian fission power
just as the H-bomb had dwarfed Fat Man
and Little Boy.
This material is well-plowed ground,
though Seife does an excellent job
distilling complicated questions of
physics into something the lay reader
can easily understand. The real value of
Sun in a Bottle begins at this point, when
Seife takes readers on a journey over
the numerous attempts to create that
sustained, controlled fusion reaction. It
is a story that goes to the heart of how
science is done, and it drips with drama,
double-dealing, and politics.
I
n early 1951, Argentine President
Juan Perón made a startling
announcement: he claimed to
have solved the world’s energy
problems. A group of scientists under
his sponsorship, headed by the Austrian
Ronald Richter, had supposedly
created controlled nuclear fusion
in their lab on the island Huemul.
Perón’s announcement touched off an
international frenzy, but the physics
community was rightly skeptical. It was
clear that Perón had no idea what he was
talking about when he said the Huemul
discovery might lead to energy being
bottles used by Argentines. Attempts to
validate the experiment independently
were met with stonewalling, and what
details did emerge convinced the
international scientific community
that the claim was fraudulent. (One
Manhattan Project physicist said
the material they were using was
“baloney”; the New York Times dubbed
it the “Baloney Bomb.”) It soon became
apparent even to Perón that Richter
had not produced a controlled fusion
reaction. He was a crank who had conned
Perón into believing they had saved the
world—a huge international black eye for
Perón and Argentina.
Meanwhile, real physicists were pursuing fusion. Within a year of their
fusion with great zeal. Lyman Spitzer
worked on a figure-eight shaped reactor
at Princeton he called the Stellarator that humiliation similar to that of Richter
would exploit the properties of plasma
(a hot phase of matter that makes up
the sun’s core) rather than trying to
exactly replicate the hydrogen fusion of
atomic weapons. The trick was to confine that had supported so much fusion
the plasma yet still get it hot enough.
Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory began work on a
“magnetic mirror” fusion reactor that
used a straight tube for its magnetic
bottle to contain plasma. British
scientists, meanwhile, toyed with a similar to great fanfare, or even officially
device that would “pinch” the plasma—a
so-called “pinch machine.” A visiting Los
Alamos physicist took this idea back
to the United States and built a device
cheekily dubbed the “Perhapsatron.”
Despite the Argentine farce, legitimate
scientists believed that the fusion
breakthrough was just around the corner.
In 1955, the president of the United
Nations Conference on the Peaceful
Uses of Atomic Energy said, “I venture to
predict that a method will be found for
liberating fusion energy in a controlled
manner within the next two decades.
When that happens, the energy problems
of the world will truly have been solved
for ever, for the fuel will be as plentiful as
the heavy hydrogen in the oceans.”
It looked to have happened not in two
decades, but two years. In 1957, British
scientists appeared to have won the race
with a machine called the Zero Energy
Thermonuclear Assembly, or ZETA.
Several weeks later Japanese researchers
made the same claim. The media was
wild with claims about “unlimited
energy from seawater” and an end to
worries about energy supplies. The Brits
announced plans to build on the success
of ZETA by constructing a reactor that
would heat plasmas to a hundred million
degrees and, most importantly, would
produce more power than it consumed.
That, after all, was the ultimate goal for
civilian nuclear fusion.
But these researchers had
miscalculated. They had not achieved
announcement, they were forced
to retract their claim, suffering a
and Perón. After several false starts,
public cynicism began to grow,
including among the government
officials who held the purse strings
research. In 1958, not long after the
British fiasco, American scientists finally
were able to produce a tiny controlled
thermonuclear fusion reaction with a
pinch machine called the Scylla. But
nobody noticed. It was not announced
announced at all until 1960, when it
was buried in a government report to
Congress. Still, the research continued.
Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov made
breakthroughs with a donut-shaped
51
machine called a tokamak, which
combined features of the Stellarator
and pinch machines to contain
plasma. Collaborating with British and
American researchers, Sakharov began
to apply light from lasers, which could
concentrate an incredible amount of
energy into a tiny space. The tokamak
represented a great advance over the
earlier Stellarator, and reinvigorated
the fusion community. By the early
1970s, government scientists from a
number of countries were routinely
achieving small-scale fusion with
lasers. These efforts, however, all
consumed vastly greater amounts of
energy than they were yet capable
of producing. Fusion would be a
pointlessly expensive proposition if
it ran an energy deficit. But in 1974, a
private company called KMS Industries,
headed by a man named Keeve M.
Siegel, claimed to have demonstrated
“laser fusion.” He promised to deliver
efficient fusion power “within the
next few years.” He didn’t, of course;
in fact, he died of a stroke in 1975.
Still, news of his announcement
helped persuade Congress to ramp
“Our energy problems are
solved by markets and the
cutting–edge technologies
those markets provide, not
by government mandates
that will raise already
extremely high prices.
” consensus before, and had been proved
52
up federal spending on fusion. In the
late 1970s, Livermore scientists were
talking about having a workable fusion
power plant in operation by the early
1990s. In the decade and a half after
Siegel’s celebrated announcement,
government scientists would spend
hundreds of millions of dollars on laser
fusion research, none of which really
seemed capable of solving the most
Photography by Rick Palmore
pressing dilemma of fusion: how to
ignite and sustain a fusion reaction
that would produce more energy than
it consumed.
Then came a stunning announcement
from the University of Utah in 1989.
Two chemists, Martin Fleischmann and
Stanley Pons, announced that they had
figured out how to generate a fusion
reaction at room temperature: “cold
fusion.” They were claiming to have
made an end run around everything
the scientific community knew about
fusion. Their announcement sparked
a huge media storm, fueled in part by
boosterism from the president of the
university, who said their discovery
“ranks right up there with fire, with the for every four that it consumed. Turns
cultivation of plants, and with electricity.” out it was not. About the same time,
researchers manning JET, a large tokamak
Curiously, Fleischmann had made his
mark in the 1970s with a scientific
operated by a European consortium of
researchers, gained attention for their
discovery regarding the detection of bid to achieve break-even conditions.
trace amounts of a chemical on silver In reality, they were only producing six
that the conventional wisdom held was watts for every ten put into it. Writes
impossible. He had defied the scientific Seife: “It was a record, and a remarkable
correct. But like the Brits in 1957, and
achievement, but a net loss of 40 percent
of energy is not the hallmark of a great
Richter before them, Fleischmann and power plant.”
Pons hadn’t achieved what they said
they had. Within two months, they were In 2002, scientists at the Oak Ridge
a laughingstock, their reputations in National Laboratory in Tennessee
tatters. The ensuing years would reprise claimed to have created fusion in
this familiar storyline: Researchers would beakers of acetone at a temperature of
make a grand announcement heralding tens of millions of degrees. This “bubble
a new advance in fusion, potentially fusion” approach was scheduled to be
solving many of the world’s energy– announced in Science, the prestigious
related problems, only to have their claim journal that was then Seife’s employer. In
wither under the harsh light of rigorous the run-up to publication, it became clear
scientific scrutiny. Japanese researchers in there were real problems with bubble
the mid-1990s insisted they had achieved fusion: several other Oak Ridge scientists
“break-even plasma conditions” and that were convinced that their colleagues had
their tokamak was producing five watts failed to produce a fusion reaction. Oak
Ridge officials ordered other scientists
to attempt to replicate the experiment;
that effort, using more finely tuned
equipment, evinced no sign of fusion.
An internal tug–of–war broke out at
Science over whether or not it should
publish the paper. Ultimately the journal
did, giving its imprimatur to the Oak
Ridge claims even as those claims were
being disproved. Seife was in the curious
and uncomfortable position of being a
reporter covering the bubble fusion story
that intimately involved his employer; his
detailing of the awkward controversy is
among the real treats of Sun in a Bottle.
Despite the cold fusion and bubble
fusion debacles, not to mention Richter’s
fraud, there actually have been a number
of successful tabletop fusion reactions.
When teenager Thiago Olson made a
homemade tabletop fusion device in his
Michigan basement in 2006, he became
the eighteenth amateur to pull off the
stunt. (The first to accomplish it, strangely
enough, was Philo T. Farnsworth in the
1960s; Farnsworth is much better known
as one of the inventors of television.)
Seife notes that the idea of tabletop
fusion would seem “impossible—a pipe
dream sought after only by cranks....But
in fact, tabletop fusion—fusion reactions
carried out cheaply in a small piece of
laboratory equipment—is real. It just
isn’t yielding any more energy than it
consumes, so it is useless as a source
of power.”
T
he future of fusion now seems
to lie with the International
Thermonuclear Experimental
Reactor (ITER), an enormous
long-term multilateral effort to build a
tokamak reactor in Cadarache, France.
The ITER idea has been around since
Mikhail Gorbachev proposed it at a
summit in 1985. These efforts went
nowhere until the United States took an
active lead during the administration of
George W. Bush, and construction on the
massive reactor is slated to begin soon.
Will it work? It will still take decades to
find out. Though generally optimistic
about ITER, Seife is still skeptical that it
will ever achieve ignition and sustained
burn. But that sort of skepticism is the
exception among fusion enthusiasts,
despite the numerous setbacks over the
years. “The fusion community clings to
the hope that fusion energy is just thirty
years away—and that it will solve all
our energy problems,” Seife notes. “The
promise of a fusion reactor a few decades
away has been a cliché for a half century.”
And it will continue to be so. After all,
says Seife, “there’s something uniquely
powerful about the promise of fusion
energy. It harks back to the ancient quest
to build a perpetual motion machine, but
this time the source of unlimited energy
doesn’t violate the laws of physics.”
Which brings us back to today’s energy
debates, and how and whether we can
reduce or eliminate the carbon emissions
produced by our primary energy sources.
President Obama would have us do so
with renewables; for him, to believe we
should is to believe we can. But as the
53
story of fusion shows, wishing a project’s
success is not enough to make it so. The
laws of physics make it very unlikely that
renewable sources will ever provide the
reliable power needed to replace our
current carbon-based sources, no matter
how much money we throw at them.

We would be wiser instead to turn to

the technology we know can provide
such reliability and capacity, and that we
already have: nuclear fission. But if we
insist on looking to the horizon, let us
focus our hopes and our investments not
on the windmills and solar panels that
we know will always remain a small part
of our energy supply, but on the fusion
reactors that at least hold the potential
for unlimited power.
54
The first fusion reactors that will be used to generate
electricity will use Deuterium and Tritium as fuel, as
they will fuse at a lower temperature. Deuterium can
be extracted from sea water, which contains 1 in 6500
Hydrogen Atoms which is Deuterium, and Tritium can
be harvested from lithium, which is plentiful in the
earths crust. The two atoms of Deuterium and Tritium
will the be forced to fuse, and then will produce a atom
of Helium, and an energetic neutron, which will then
produce heat energy, and heat the water. Another set
of fuels that can be used are Hydrogen and Boron.
When these two fuels are used, there is even less
material released with the free neutrons, which results
in an even cleaner method of producing energy.
Photography by Rick Palmore
Tourism Authority
58

“Humans have been in contact
with “alien” life-forms and
intelligences for millennia.”
new book
It appears that humans have been in
contact with “alien” life-forms and
intelligences for millennia. Anyone who
is open-minded enough to investigate
honestly the available cultural, physical
and historical evidence will quickly
come to the conclusion that it is
unlikely we are the only intelligent
beings in the Universe. Ancient rock
paintings in North America, North
Africa and Australia; olden tales of
elves, fairies, and pixies; and stories of
thousands of people who claim that
they have been contacted or abducted
by alien beings, all attest to our long-
standing and ongoing relationship to
non-human intelligences.
Even our religious texts are full of
compelling descriptions of non-human,
“spiritual” beings with which we have
had contact and relationships. Check
out the Genesis story in the Bible– it
talks about “sons of the gods” who
walked on Earth, whose giant offspring
resulted from their union with human
women. In addition, angels of all sorts
continually appear in the Hebrew
Bible. And Ezekiel, the Old Testament
prophet, describes in great detail a
chariot flying in mid-air, upon which
non-human beings appear. In his
book “Genesis Revisited,” Zecharia
Sitchin interprets the Hebrew
texts in light of their similarity to
Sumerian counterparts, and proposes
that humans were created by a
technologically advanced alien race,
called Annunaki.
 new book
Conscious Dreaming:
A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life

Robert Moss is a lifelong dream

explorer, a shamanic counselor, novelist
and historian. His fascination with the
dreamworlds springs from his early
childhood in Australia, where he survived
a series of near-death experiences
and first encountered the ways of a
Dreaming people through his friendship
with Aborigines. For many years he has
taught and practiced Active Dreaming,
an original synthesis of dreamwork and
shamanic techniques.

Written by a popular leader of dream workshops and

seminars, Conscious Dreaming details a unique nine-
step approach to dreams, especially precognitive and
clairvoyant ones, that uses contemporary dreamwork
methods and techniques developed from shamanic
cultures around the world.

60
 new book
The Biology of Belief:
Groundbreaking Work in the Field of New Biology

A groundbreaking work in the field

of New Biology. Author Dr. Bruce
Lipton is a former medical school
professor and research scientist. His
experiments, and that of other leading
edge scientists, have examined in great
detail the processes by which cells
receive information. The implications
of this research radically change
our understanding of life. It shows
that genes and DNA do not control
our biology; that instead DNA is
controlled by signals from outside
the cell, including the energetic
messages emanating from our positive
and negative thoughts. Dr. Lipton’s
profoundly hopeful synthesis of the
latest and best research in cell biology
and quantum physics is being hailed
as a major breakthrough showing
that our bodies can be changed as we
retrain our thinking.

61
 new book
Snow crystals are so perfectly symmetrical!
Are there not some special forces at work
that ensure this perfection?

If you haven’t heard of Mr. Emoto, he has

published several books claiming that ice
crystals grow differently when water is
first exposed to different thoughts and
feelings. For example, he may start by
playing assorted varieties of music — jazz,
classical, rock-and-roll, etc. — to different
containers of water. The music is then
turned off and the “treated” water is used
to grow snow crystals. He claims that the
different musical treatments yield different
types of snow crystals, and shows us
pictures of the results to prove his case.

62
 new book
“Remote viewers “see” objects
and scenes hundreds or thousands
of miles away by closing their
eyes and focusing on the object or place.”

Is it possible to see
across space and time?
Even those who accept
that humans can reach
beyond the conventional
five senses typically think
of psychics as “special”
or “gifted” with unusual
abilities. But David
Morehouse teaches
otherwise — all human
beings, including you, have
the innate capacity for
remote viewing.

63
64
 new book
In the past two decades, the ‘War Against
Drugs’ has effectively thrown a heavy curtain
across the subject of psychedelic drugs and
their effect on human consciousness. (The
Spirit Molecule) But now, as a new generation
seeks to smash out of the spiritual vacuum
created by our materialistic society, there is
renewed interest in these substances which
have been used since ancient times by shamans
and mystics to plug in to alternate realities.

Perhaps one of the most interesting of these

psychedelics is DMT – dimethyltryptamine – the
main component of the South American shamans’
brew ayahuasca.

spiritual vacuum created by our

materialistic society
 new book

There are different paths

to future memory.

Author P.M.H. Atwater

“Says the future memory allows
people to “live” life in advance
and remember the experience in
detail when something triggers
that memory.”

The author, one of the foremost

investigators of the near-death
experience, experienced the future
memory process firsthand following
her own three NDEs. She shows
how these “rehearsals” for future
events differ from other modes
of futuristic awareness such as
clairvoyance, precognition, and
deja vu.

• Series of steps to assist in

developing future memory

• New models of time, existence,

and consciousness

• An in-depth study of the brain

shift and how it can be experienced

66

New Children and Near-Death
Experiences is an expansion of the
first book ever written that provides,
from the view of the child, an in-depth
study of children who have experienced
the near-death phenomenon and the
pattern of physiological and psychological
aftereffects which follow. Atwater
notes that the child who returns from a
near-death experience is not the same
...from the
view of
the child
child as before, but is a “remodeled,
rewired, reconfigured, refined version
of the original.” Presenting data to
support her contention that these
children have experienced structural,
chemical, and functional changes in the
brain, she also shows how their greater
empathic abilities as well as dramatically
higher intelligence are qualities that
are also present in children born since
new book
1982 enhanced abilities that cannot
be tied to simple genetics. Atwater
shows that understanding the near-
death experiences of children can help
us prepare for a quantum leap in the
evolution of humanity. Extensive resource
suggestions and ideas are included, along
with an explanation of the protocol used
in arriving at the research in this book.
67
 ALEX
GREY
spiritual & psychedelic art
by Alex Grey
A
lex Grey was born in
Columbus, Ohio on
November 29, 1953
(Sagittarius), the middle child
of a gentle middle-class couple. His father
was a graphic designer and encouraged
his son’s drawing ability. Young Alex
would collect insects and dead animals
from the suburban neighborhood and
bury them in the back yard. The themes
of death and transcendence weave
throughout his artworks, from the earliest
drawings to later performances, paintings
and sculpture. He went to the Columbus
College of Art and Design for two years
(1971-73), then dropped out and painted
billboards in Ohio for a year (73-74).
Grey then attended the Boston Museum
School for one year, to study with the
conceptual artist, Jay Jaroslav.
At the Boston Museum School he met
his wife, the artist, Allyson Rymland
Grey. During this period he had a series
of entheogenically induced mystical
experiences that transformed his
agnostic existentialism to a radical
transcendentalism. The Grey couple
would trip together on LSD. Alex then
spent five years at Harvard Medical
School working in the Anato my
department studying the body and
preparing cadavers for dissection. He also
worked at Harvard’s department of Mind/
Body Medicine with Dr. Herbert Benson
and Dr. Joan Borysenko conducting
scientific experiments to investigate
subtle healing energies. Alex’s anatomical
training prepared him for painting the
Sacred Mirrors (explained below) and
for doing medical illustration. When
doctors saw his Sacred Mirrors, they
asked him to do illustration work.Grey
was an instructor in Artistic Anatomy and
Figure Sculpture for ten years at New York
University, and now teaches courses in
Visionary Art with Allyson at The Open
Center in New York City, Naropa Institute
in Boulder, Colorado, the California
Institute of Integral Studies and Omega
Institute in Rhinebeck, New York.
In 1972 Grey began a series of art
actions that bear resemblance to rites of
passage, in that they present stages of a
developing psyche. The approximately
fifty performance rites, conducted
over the last thirty years move through
transformations from an egocentric
to more sociocentric and increasingly
worldcentric and theocentric identity.
The most recent performance was
WorldSpirit, a spoken word and musical
collaboration with Kenji Williams which
was released in 2004 as a DVD. Grey’s
unique series of 21 life-sized paintings,
the Sacred Mirrors, take the viewer on a
journey toward their own divine nature
69
by examining, in detail, the body, mind,
and spirit. The Sacred Mirrors, present
the physical and subtle anatomy of
an individual in the context of cosmic,
biological and technological evolution.
Begun in 1979, the series took a period
of ten years to complete. It was during
this period that he developed his
depictions of the human body that
“x-ray” the multiple layers of reality, and
reveal the interplay of anatomical and
spiritual forces. After painting the Sacred
Mirrors, he applied this multidimensional
perspective to such archetypal human
experiences as praying, meditation,
kissing, copulating, pregnancy, birth,
nursing and dying. Grey’s recent work has
explored the subject of consciousness
from the perspective of “universal beings”
whose bodies are grids of fire, eyes and
infinite galactic swirls.
Renowned healers Olga Worral and
Rosalyn Bruyere have expressed
appreciation for the skillful portrayal
70
of clairvoyant vision his paintings of
translucent glowing bodies. Grey’s
paintings have been featured in venues
as diverse as the album art of TOOL, SCI,
the Beastie Boys and Nirvana, Newsweek
magazine, the Discovery Channel, Rave
flyers and sheets of blotter acid. His
work has been exhibited worldwide,
including Feature Inc., Tibet House, Stux
Gallery, P.S. 1, The Outsider Art Fair and
the New Museum in NYC, the Grand
Palais in Paris, the Sao Paulo Biennial in
Brazil. Alex has been a keynote speaker at
conferences all over the world including
Tokyo, Amsterdam, Basel, Barcelona and
Manaus. The international psychedelic
community has embraced Grey as an
important mapmaker and spokesman for
the visionary realm. A large installation
called Heart Net by Alex and his wife,
Allyson, was displayed at Baltimore’s
American Visionary Art Museum in 1998-
99. A mid-career retrospective of Grey’s
works was exhibited at the Museum of
Contemporary Art, San Diego in 1999.
The large format art book, Sacred Mirrors:
The Visionary Art of Alex Grey has been
translated into five languages and has
sold over one hundred thousand copies,
unusual for an art book. His inspirational
book, The Mission of Art, traces the
evolution of human consciousness
through art history, exploring the role of
an artist’s intention and conscience, and
reflecting on the creative process as a
spiritual path.

Transfigurations is Alex’s second large

format monograph containing over 300
color and black & white images of Grey’s
work. Sounds True has released The
Visionary Artist, a CD of Grey’s reflections
on art as a spiritual practice. ARTmind
is the artist’s recent video exploring the
healing potential of Sacred Art. Grey co-
edited the book, Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism
and Psychedelics (Chronicle Books,
2002). In 2004 Grey’s VISIONS boxed set
containing a portfolio of new works and
a Sacred Mirrors and Transfigurations, his
collected works. The Chapel of Sacred
Mirrors, CoSM, a long-term exhibition of
fifty works of transformative art by Grey
has opened (Fall 2004) in New York City.
He lives in New York City with his wife, the
painter, Allyson Grey and their daughter,
the actress, Zena Grey.

Alex Grey
American artist specializing in spiritual and
psychedelic art or visionary art. Grey is a
Vajrayana practitioner. His body of work spans
a variety of forms including performance art,
process art, installation art, sculpture, visionary
art, and painting.

71
Eduard Gurevich
Impression in colors

www.eduardgurevich.com
72
 Oeno
GALLERY
Ongoing Group Exhibition in Alcoves

Open December-April, Friday-Monday

www.oenogallery.com
613-394-2216
316 Old Orchard Road, Carring Place
Prince Edward County, Ontario

73
Oleg Korolev

74
 “I was born in 1968 in Siberia, Russia. From 1979 studied in the
Art Studio and in the Art School and later from 1984 to 1990
studied and graduated from the Art College. In 2000 I have
become a member of the Society of Art of Imagination. From
1990 up to this time I have been participating in various art
exhibitions. My works are represented in private and corporative
art collections of Russia, Europe, North America and Australia.”

Oleg Korolev is one of 50 Artists

featured in our first publication
entitled Metamorphosis. Divine Gloom
 PATRICK FISHER
the art of glassblowing

76
P
atrick Fisher is a
Glassblower from
Toronto, Canada. He
is a recent graduate
of Sheridan College's Crafts and
Design, Glass.program, Class of 2008.
Since graduation, he has continued
to strive towards the perfection of his
craft. This pursuit has led him to Black
Diamond, Alberta, where he worked as
a glassblower's assistant to renowned
Artists Julia Reimer and Tyler Rock
at their Firebrand Glass Studio, and
to Mississauga, Ontario where he is
currently creating his unique work.

He has been the recipient of the Betty

Kantor Scholarship Award forexceptional
creativity, innovation, craftsmanship, and
substantial contribution to the student
community in 2006, the Harbourfront
Centre Summer Residency Scholarship in
2007, and of the Colour Fusion Award for
excellence in 2008.

77
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