A Return to Subjectivity

Setting the Scene

Often we don’t remember very precisely the point in time when our life’s path led off in a quite different direction. One of those occasions occurred on a cold rainy November day when I was in Cyprus for a meeting of fishery scientists to discuss the state of health of eastern Mediterranean fish populations.

It was my free weekend, and I hired a car and drove along the coast road. A sign drew my attention, pointing to an excavation with ancient walls but no structures of particular interest. The small museum on the site was closed, but I persuaded a reluctant guardian to open up for me. In the main room, the exhibit was dedicated to the Goddess Aphrodite.

This was apparently the original shrine for the cult. ‘She’ dates back long before the classical Greek period, and at that time was known as Kypris: ‘the Lady of Cyprus’- a local version of the original great Mother Goddess Gaia who crops up in the belief systems of many early peoples. A wall map shows a floor plan of the original site in Roman times. The temple complex was centred round a holy of holies only accessible to the priestesses or initiates. The focus of mysteries for the cult was a roughly triangular object resembling a female sex symbol.

A large triangular stone dominated the main room, a smooth dark green rock close to human dimensions, with a texture similar to jade. It stood on a dais roped off to keep spectators at bay. The caption explained that this stone was buried on site, and could have been cult symbol of the goddess. It may originally have been retrieved from the sea, judging from the perfect smoothness of its surface. This agrees with the etymology of ‘Her’ name; derived from the Greek ‘aphos’ or foam: i.e. ‘foam-born Goddess’. Looking at ‘Her’ for long moments in the silence of the deserted building, in second attention, I see the same slow crawling of energy waves over the surface of the stone I have come to associate with cult objects that were important to many early peoples. Glancing round to check that the guardian was still outside, I stepped over the rope and embraced the Goddess: an electric sensation, a deep coolness invaded my palms. I closed my eyes and prayed to Aphrodite as mother and bride, to lend me her protection in exploration of the mysteries.

It feels right to start this book with such a deeply personal experience, where my ‘subconscious’ rejected the usual patronizing attitude to the beliefs of our ancestors. I was unexpectedly in a position to touch a religious symbol that had been hidden away while her believers were still alive – and she was the focus of adoration by the ancient Greeks and many others in the archaic world. This experience made me feel close in spirit to those millions of ancients who once paid tribute to their Goddess, and I vowed to take more seriously what I might find of ancient rituals. There was something deeply sad in finding a spiritual focus, once important, which has no meaning in the modern world and is slowly fading away within the implicate order we will discuss later.

If we think of the Earth as a ‘hole’, my colleague’s interpretation of the narrowness of my life experience has a wider implication. Nowadays, science fiction authors may use the term ‘gravity well’ to describe a planet as a hole in the cosmos: meaning a place, like a well, where descent from above is easy, but not vice versa. We could then ask what would happen if we became part of the ‘whole’ – not just ‘citizens of the galaxy’ - a concept dear to those listening (largely in vain) for radio messages from alien life, but also on the astral and mental planes, where in my view our contacts with alien life forms are most likely to occur. Judging from the spirit voyages of shamans, these occur frequently in trance states, but may not be recognized as such.

Even the revolutionary concept of the ‘implicate order’ discussed elsewhere in this book implies that we share a common ‘post box’ for ideas with other intelligent beings in this galaxy or elsewhere. Thus, if an alien scientific genius on a planet ‘far, far, away’ discovered the concept of relativity some hundred thousand years ago, this was then ‘uploaded’ into the implicate realm, and facilitated the next discoverer equipped to recognize the concept. On our planet this was Albert Einstein, who was mentally equipped to download from a cosmic source of information, and motivated to resist the commands of the Newtonian paradigm. If so, he may have reconstructed the theory after ‘incubation’ of the necessary ‘seed’ concepts he rearranged to produce the theory of relativity. (Of course, all this could have happened in reverse, if Albert was the real father of the concept). Similar examples could be found in the field of religion, art, music, poetry etc.

Going back to the physical dimension, and the prosaic approach to the same problem of interplanetary communication. i.e. listening to the stars by radio telescopes and sending messages on ‘Voyager’ etc, in his book ‘Contact’ Carl Sagan raised the horrifying prospect that the first TV images beamed into space came from the Nuremberg rally with Hitler haranguing his countrymen: (a great galactic advert for humanity!). Since then of course, literally ‘shitloads’ of mental pollution have been sent spacewards, both via the electronic media, and via mental and astral channels. Who knows what judgements have been made by our superiors or elder brethren off-planet on our suitability for galactic citizenship, or what undesirable forms of mental and spiritual life forms have been attracted by this rich mental ‘manure’ pile we unselfconsciously broadcast every day to the universe?

Are subjective experiences useful for science?

What do we mean by a ‘subjective experience’?

The Oxford English Reference Dictionary defines ‘subjective thought’ several ways, for example:

• representing a person’s views
• proceeding from personal idiosyncrasy or individuality
• not impartial or literal
• proceeding from or belonging to the individual consciousness or perception
• imaginary, partial or distorted.

From these definitions we have to conclude that subjective views are often considered biased and unreliable. This may be true in many cases, but not invariably, and a time for my personal revision on this subject has arrived. Many people question if there are valid alternatives to subjective thought, and this point of view has been raised to cult status under the name ‘Subjectivism’- the doctrine implying that there is no external or objective truth. Though I don’t go so far, we’ll see that this philosophy is not so easy to disprove as it seems.

We all start life watching a rapidly unfolding view of the world, amazed as new phenomena impinge on our sensory envelope. We have forgotten those early days when we were hardly self-aware. Perhaps we did not have a subjective view, since we didn’t see ourselves as separate from the ‘whole’ that surrounded us. We were soon shocked into recognizing phenomena impacting on the whole: that parcel of limbs and fat little body we could see in front of us. This eventually came to be called ‘me’, and so began our rapidly growing subjective view of the world. Our first inkling that there could be other points of view, and that they were all-powerful and controlled our little world of sensations, came from that loving despot, ‘Mother’. She crops up in early history in the form of female divinities who helped our ancestors recreate the security of their early lives. ‘She’ was probably a prototype of cosmic invincibility, as well as the symbol of life and growing things, at least until the father figure with his territorial imperatives took over at the head of the early armies of conquest.

As babies, we soon found that certain actions are under our control, and this gave great satisfaction, and our embryonic subjective view grew perceptibly. When did we first become aware of ‘objective reality’? Perhaps kindergarten was where we first learned that some aspects of our world are ‘just so’, and can’t be changed, irrespective of our personal wishes or fantasies. If like me, you then grow up to pass you life in pursuit of ‘objective truths’, the subjective view tends to get set aside so you can take part in some ‘serious thinking’. Perhaps returning to try and revaluate my early subjective world view is out of place for a scientist, and it certainly wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t run into new sensory modalities I couldn’t find ‘objective confirmation’ for in the field of science. This forced me to revisit the personal mythologies I was in touch with as a youth.

While trying to resolve this problem I came to see that bringing new perceptions to the notice of society comes inevitably from tapping the subjective worlds of inspired persons, or those outcasts who have rejected the societal consensus that blinds us, in order to be aware of other possibilities. From personal investigations it seems to me that the subjective worlds of those ‘on the fringes’ occasionally enter the mainstream. Here they may reprogram the thoughts and perceptions of the whole of society in what is now fashionably referred to as a ‘paradigm shift’. Turning the above definition of subjective thought on its head then, an innovative thinker faces the chaos implied by subjectivism in the hope of fishing something from the stream of consciousness. If it seems worthwhile, and there is an opening for a new concept to be accepted, it can be added to, replace, or enrich, the conceptual framework underlying the current societal consensus; thus contributing something to societies slow evolution towards a higher form of awareness.

Is it Science versus Spirituality? I don’t believe so.

For some time I have been looking for areas of agreement between science and spirituality outside the objective realm I occupy as a scientist. Surprisingly, there are quite a few such areas of agreement between modern science and mysticism, as other scientists have found before me. I’m a former agnostic, but I differ from those scientists who are still believers in the main world religions, and who face the harder task of reconciling their own faith and its dogmas with science. My task is easier since I started with few points of faith that have to be reconciled with science. Nonetheless, I feel myself to be part of a larger movement, and as James Redfield says in the Celestine Prophecy and its sequels, an ongoing spiritual transformation is occurring in our lifetimes, in which “new perceptions, feelings and phenomena…are coming to define life as we enter the third Millennium”.

It’s obvious from a quick glance at the shelves of bookshops and the Internet, that a great sea change is underway at the start of this millennium. The current materialistic philosophy of life is becoming less dominant in our society, and scientific world views have to accommodate to it. Perhaps this will be less difficult than it sounds, given the strange nature of recent scientific discoveries. From the other side, it is alarming that there is a general public ignorance as to where science has been going over the last few decades. The ‘sea change’ I referred to, is occurring, interestingly enough, among the more enlightened scientists, who are beginning to join the artists and religious thinkers in pointing to the deficiencies and unhappiness caused by an obsessive preoccupation with scientific materialism.

How can we live long enough to solve these problems?

In reply to a question as to how he had managed to live to 102 years of age, as reported in a recent newspaper interview, the philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer replied that this was through the continuous use of his mind – a practice which he saw as essential for every individual in their changing relationship with the world. According to his vision, the colonization of social viewpoints by technico-scientific thinking or its popularised versions, has damaged other forms of expression. He expressed the feeling that the resulting imbalance has created a paradox: the more modern society is organized along rational lines, the less citizens are called on to use their critical faculties and personal judgement. They come to rely more and more on anonymous functionaries and ‘experts’ on the web and media. All this he feels has led us to view phenomena through a false screen of comforting rationality between us and the world as it really is.

Of course when you try to pin down the connections between the subjective and objective worlds you immediately enter an unknown realm where no clear paths are evident. The situation with respect to objectivity seems superficially much better than it really is, given the common misperception of the certainties of science. This certainty is no longer a tenet of faith for many scientists after the work of Kurt Goedel. Kurt was the mathematician who showed that a subjective core of intuitively satisfying but unverifiable axioms forms the pedestal on which all scientific paradigms or ‘world views’ rest. On close examination, the axioms making up this ‘pedestal’ are found to be unverifiable ‘articles of faith’, determined in many cases by experience or intuition to be the ‘best guesses’ then available. As a result, facing up to uncertainty is a phenomenon common to all fields of scientific enquiry, and no hard and fast validation may therefore be possible for even the more objective phenomena.

In effect, we live in a mythological world of concepts that we try to make internally consistent and seek to fit them as well as possible to the world of physical phenomena. We have to recognize however, that our models can never be more than abstract. It is this insistence on internal consistency rather than absolute truth that characterises mathematics and science, but also subjective enquiries have to follow unwritten rules as to their consistency or they degenerate into chaos. At the same time, our shared experiences should lead us to be optimistic as to the significance of subjective perceptions, given that our common humanity makes us individual replications of a cosmic design. Thus we should be able to aim for consistency in describing our subjective perceptions, and set aside for the moment the question of whether these perceptions are ‘true’ or not (whatever ‘true’ may mean). By better communication I believe we can verify the consistency or replicability of key subjective experiences, and at the same time, strive for a possible expansion of our sensory envelope. Although subjective statements are ultimately unprovable, we may hope for a reasonable degree of correspondence between our individual perceptions, worlds, and actions. Perhaps it would be healthier if everyone were simply aware that there are at least two different modes of thought, each with its own indispensable place in the scheme of things: the objective and the subjective modes, but that the latter is often the basis for the former.

The adventure of personally exploring new horizons took me back to events and emotional states I experienced as a child, but which a short while ago I wouldn’t have thought were still open to me. It has made sense of many things that have happened, and helped me see my life as a purposeful whole. This account is not unique: see for example the book by Michael Crichton cited in the references. Others have had some similar experiences, and in some areas these went well beyond mine. What may be different is that I have tried to see to what extent my subjective experiences, and theirs, are corroborated in the world literature, samples of which are given in the extensive reading list at the end of this text.

Are some forms of investigation ‘Paths with a Heart?’

Setting aside my scientific background for a moment, this personal exploration is also my ‘Path with a Heart’ that the shaman Don Juan Mateus refers to in Castaneda’s books. Despite published scepticism about this author and the validity of his sources, from personal experience, many of the phenomena he described in his books turned out to be subjectively true, and were verified by the emotion that accompanied them. After 30 years of scepticism about religions and the possibility of religious experience, the second of the two paths to the divine opened to me. This was described by Johannes Wilber, a Venezuelan shaman quoted by David Friedel and his colleagues, as follows. The first of these paths considers that a transcendental Creator existed ‘out there’ in distant space and time, started everything, then disappeared from the scene. This perspective led to my parting company from conventional religion as a young man. The more hopeful view is that ‘immanent Creation potentially manifests anywhere and anywhen’. This sentiment was also expressed by Albert Einstein, who is quoted as saying that there are only two ways of living your life – one is as if nothing is a miracle, the other is as if everything is. Personally, I know which point of view makes life worth living, though if you had asked me to choose a few years ago, I would have looked at you blankly and wondered what kind of crank I was dealing with.

Shamanism and Vital Energy

I’m now going to summarise my thoughts and experiences with two ancient areas of endeavour that only now are getting the attention they deserve, shamanism and the pursuit of vital energy. These are central preoccupations of many apparently unrelated fields of study, worship, and action, whose practitioners often seem unaware of their origins or early linkages. Shamanism is the oldest spiritual activity of our species, and is a largely unrecognized source for all cults and religions, without being a religion itself. It’s basis, often difficult to recognize in organized religions, is the view that we are energetic beings linked intimately to each other and to the rest of the natural world. Yoga, pranic healing, qi gong, meditation and the oriental martial arts, are all practical emanations from this source. Vital energy is perceived by everyone, at least subconsciously, but is often unrecognized as such. Apart from increasing our physical wellbeing and functioning, I will try to show that using vital energy is fundamental to the creative process in all its various forms, from science to the arts.

On another level, this narrative contains sections which resemble what Carlos Castaneda called ‘Tales of Power’, in that sections given in bold seem to mark moments when I added something important to my life experience. Here in parenthesis, I want to say that some of the descriptions in Castaneda’s books are internally consistent with my own experience, and I am convinced they are based on real teachings of a shaman we may as well call ‘Don Juan’ through the rest of this text. Apart from the personal verifications of Castaneda’s work described by Victor Sanchez and Ken Eagle Feather who used Castaneda’s reports as a source of practical teachings in Shamanism, the probable existence of a powerful teacher behind Castaneda’s works was a conclusion also reached by a Spanish journalist, Carmina Fort, who was one of the last persons to interview Castaneda.

Some of the more persuasive ideas in Castaneda’s books communicate a hidden message embedded in ‘Tales of Power’. These ‘Tales’ may not have any obvious purpose or meaning, but without hyperbole and exaggeration, they lay the groundwork at the psychic level, (or in the subconscious if you prefer), for new perceptions and transformations. Any account of subjective experiences that is perceived to be true can be absorbed by our lower mind/body, and may lead to a rearranging of synapses and the opening of formerly closed mental doors. ‘Tales of Power’ describing strange perceptual modalities may help clean the psyche of some of the impediments we all have to ‘seeing’ our world more clearly. Many older persons, like me, pass through existential crises later in life, when the world seems two-dimensional and insipid, and a new mode of seeing opens new possibilities. My hope is that this account will stimulate others to similar personal explorations, or at least help them escape a mental rut. Whether or not it is read by anyone else, the experiences described in this account has given my life a new significance it would not otherwise have had.

Teletransportation and other mysteries

The recent success of films such as ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’, ‘The Sixth Sense’, ‘The Lord of the Rings’, and many other wide screen mythologies, have a huge appeal to those who like to indulge their ‘irrational’ subjective minds. Right brain dominance is apparently coming back into fashion at a great rate outside the small coterie of Cartesian thinkers, but perhaps even these are not immune to the groundswell of psychic revolution now underway! A commonly expressed view is that a scientific paradigm shift is complete when all the adherents to the old belief are either dead or retired. This has always struck me as an exaggeration, but it does illustrate our stubborn resistance to change. Nonetheless, many people find the idea of alternative realities a convincing enough hypothesis to be curious to see what Hollywood has to offer in this area. Subliminally, I suspect that many people believe (correctly in my opinion), that alternative realities exist, and even though this remains unproven for most people, the scorn such an assertion met with in the 1960s is more likely to be in the form of gentle irony nowadays. In fact, a belief in psychic phenomena would have been seen as irrational from the perspective of Science as it was understood in the 19th Century, and would have been regarded as a return to superstition and a rejection of logical thinking. This it may well be, given that many adults who are not professional scientists but have acquired some high school ‘scientific literacy’, tend to identify science with Newton’s mechanistic universe they learned about at school. Things have moved on from there however.

Nonetheless, Science does not have a negative image now for many people. It’s interesting to note the popularity of the twin cult images of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein: people intuitively relate to the mixture of sexuality and fragility emanating from the first, and the combination of spiritual calm and wisdom projected by the second. We may take these two modern cult figures as symbolising the duality of heart and brain that should characterise informed empathic thinking. It is just the technological and mechanistic, as opposed to the relativistic view of the universe, that induces an allergic reaction in much of the public, except for the most ardent technophiles; not the pure search for knowledge of Science itself. For all its incomprehensibility, ‘pure science’ often seems to be equated by most people with a modern alchemy, and the quest for new perceptions in science or the arts, is for me, an escape from dreary materialistic thinking and the deadening left brain dominance of quantitative thought. It must be evident to everyone that being ‘well-informed’ is not the same as being wise. This latter quality implies a combination of experience and knowledge plus intuition, which is rarely seen as a specific objective in modern society.

When discussing the mysteries of the universe, some physicists seem to be quite open to fairly bizarre explanations, which is not surprising when you consider the esoteric nature of their work. Others have been led to speculate about the implications of our physical universe in terms which would be familiar to psychics (or even psychotics). I believe however that we are nowhere near getting to the bottom of reality yet, and that in fact a far-reaching revolution about the nature of reality is on the horizon when a whole field of new phenomena will eventually be admitted into ‘reality’. A single example illustrating the lack of barriers between physics and psi, is the idea that physical effects might occur at a distance. The so-called ‘EPR effect’ discovered in the 1930’s was one of the predicted violations of relativity that most disturbed Einstein. In 1997, Professor Zeilinger of the University of Innsbruck showed that under certain conditions referred to as ‘entanglement’, measurements on two sub-atomic particles, even if widely separated spatially, remain linked in some way, so that observations on them are not independent. Thus, in an interview on 12 August 2001 for the Italian newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, Professor Zeilinger said that the results of such experiments depend in some way on how we ask questions of nature. More fundamentally, they depend on what is Nature – a question so far asked without any satisfactory reply. His attitude to the possibility of using such effects in the future for teletransportation, had for me the necessary attitude of mind to adopt when speaking of vital energy effects. A rough translation of his reply quoted in the newspaper was:

‘These are fantastic hypotheses’ (e.g., teletransporation) ‘but I believe, as a matter of principle, that nothing is impossible. I don’t mean to say that I expect that this could really succeed, but neither do I feel able to totally deny the possibility’.

Let us assume for a moment that the phenomena described in this book are ‘real’ (whatever that means), and not simply the product of my inflamed imagination. Following the laws of logic and Occam’s razor, I invite you to consider what would be the simplest hypothesis on the nature of reality which could accommodate such phenomena? One can understand the extreme scepticism shown by Victor Stenger and others, since if only half the phenomena reported in the psi literature represent reality, a drastic redefining of the axioms underlying the laws of physics seems inevitable.

How I refocused myself

There wasn’t any point in time when I could say “Yes! On such and such a day I began to perceive things in this new way!” The consciousness of a different modality of looking at the world crept up on me gradually, growing out of remembered events and a closer awareness of my body and the present moment. It developed close at hand so to speak, and can be expressed by the fundamental meaning of the term ‘to realize’, with its implication of an ongoing unfolding of awareness over months and years, closer to me than my breath. It was reported at the end of 2003 that ‘embedded’ was one of the most popular new words in the public lexicon that year – I find this encouraging, since one of the messages I would like to pass on, is that we are ‘embedded’, not only in this world, but in some parallel dimensions within which we float and think and dream.

I am still looking for some rationale, however speculative, that would make vital energy and creative processes compatible with the existing body of scientific thought, and I would be more comfortable with this novelty embedded in the field of energy of this planet. In doing so, a bit like Dr Zeilinger, I have real problems in reconciling some of the more bizarre psychic aspects of vital energy reported with conventional scientific thought, but since my experience is direct, it is not easy for me to discard it as an illusion.

The imbalanced influence of the two halves of our brain on our behaviour may be one of the major impediments to achieving happiness and social harmony. It also affects our ability to find creative solutions to problems. Williamson and Hudspeth said that “most of what we all desire in our students for good problem-solving requires the use of both hemispheres, a process called lateralization”; i.e., we need to integrate the analytical approach of the left hemisphere which uses symbols and logic, and the holistic approach of the right hemisphere which sees the way to the solution and feels the most meaningful solution when it appears. Here the use of visualization seems important. John Curtis Gowan points out that the freedom from logic and structure which makes visual thinking so effective in generating new ideas, makes it unable to evaluate them logically. This is the role of the left brain, which can grasp and test a good idea when it appears but like the good calculating machine it is, is incapable of generating anything that is not implicit in the data it has to hand.

Various characteristics and distinctive stages of creative right brain activities have been mentioned by authors on creative mental processes. The separate stages recognized are preparation, incubation, visual imagery, finally leading to illumination. In the preparation stage there is the motivation to move towards a solution, immersion in the problem and any relevant information. There is an effort to shut down the verbalization of the dominant left hemisphere and turn over visualization to the right. The incubation stage is perhaps the most mysterious process, and involves time spent with the problem while we are occupied with other unrelated activities, such as physical exercise, daydreaming, fantasy, prayer or sleep. In the ancient world, ‘incubation’ in sacred places, involved leaving yourself open to the direct influence of the Gods through the right hemisphere. Thomas Manetsch says that Albert Einstein told him of the key role flow-like mental images (a right brain process) played in the development of his relativity theories – their subsequent manipulation by his left hemisphere transformed these ‘flashes of insight’ into revolutionary new theories. If we were asked to describe the transition from the Newtonian world of physics to that of relativity, we might express this in common terms by saying ‘you can’t get there from here’, since what was changed was not so much Newton’s great theory, but the new pedestal it rested upon: its axioms. New axioms I guess, are usually discovered by a flash of intuition.

Despite the importance we give to subjective thoughts and judgements in our personal lives, ever since the early seventeenth century our intellectual life and science in particular, has been dominated by the Cartesian paradigm promoted by Rene Descartes. Often termed positivism or rationalism, this is based on the search for universal truths whose verity can be objectively proved. It assumes reality is driven by unchangable universal laws, and that the role of science is to discover these, with the ultimate aim of controlling nature. Another philosopher who was operating just after the time of Descartes was Baruch Spinoza, who perhaps made the earliest statement of man’s right to freedom of choice on religious matters. Spinoza paid for his dangerous contention that ‘since the soul died with the body, there was no reason to fear punishment after death for deeds perpetrated in this life’, by being excommunicated from his synagogue. He then came under the influence of an ex-jesuit, Franciscus Van den Enden, who had also been expelled from his order for ‘sowing the seeds of atheism in his young students’. Together, they were probably the founders of modern atheism; a religion indeed, since it is as much based on an unsubstantiatable belief as its opposers. Since the collapse of communism, atheism as a religion has seen a considerable shrinkage in the number of its ‘believers’.

The viewpoint Spinoza represents is that a God who acts as a judge of human actions is an ‘absurd anthropomorphism’; ‘only suitable to feed the superstition and prejudice which is at the base of all institutional religions’. One statement he is supposed to have made ironically links him to the ancient category of pantheists, namely that God is identical to the totality of nature. Perhaps it is not too much to say that Spinoza was both the father of secular thought, and the patron saint of atheists. Although I can thank him for freeing our thought processes from dogma, the dogma of materialism that assumes that all nature can be eventually explained, tamed and dominated, is the dark side of his inheritance, but also has been inherited as the basic credo of science. While the ranks of the atheists may have been thinned recently, they have been replaced by a much less categorical or aggressive group, the Agnostics. An Agnostic is defined by the Oxford English Reference Dictionary as “A person who believes that nothing is known of the existence of God, or of anything beyond material phenomena”. This is a much more dangerous credo, and taken to its logical conclusion, agnostics, whether declared or by instinct, probably now are near the top of the list among world belief systems, at least among ‘educated’ persons. Taken to its logical conclusion, the agnostic can be certain of only two imperatives: the need to satisfy material needs and security, and to improve ones status or spending power in society.

Can we understand a phenomenon by investigating its components separately?

Fikret Berkes points out that we usually assume that scientists are detached from the world and operate in a value-free environment. They are supposed to use ‘reductionism’, which involves breaking a system into its components, analysing them, and then making predictions based on the properties of the parts. Knowledge is then synthesized into principles which are supposed to be independent of context, space, and time. The idea is that studying the universe is essentially like repairing a Model T Ford: we break the universe into its separate parts, describe each part in detail, and then claim we understand how the whole thing works. While this is not a bad way of passing ones time, it effectively results in a Tower of Babel. With time, most scientists have become ever more specialised in their micro-disciplines, and even have difficulty in understanding each other’s vocabularies and hence in perceiving the whole picture!

Although towards the end of the American Indian wars, Chief Seattle probably did not say ‘All things are connected’, this famous quotation represents fairly well our ancestors’ view of the world, and is a view that shamanism, as well as my own ‘chosen’ ancestors, the Celts, and other ancient tribal worlds of thought, can be seen to reflect. On the other hand, society desperately seeks and imposes consensus, even if this inevitably leads to a voluntary blinkering of our minds and perceptions. Aldous Huxley expressed a related idea in his classical study ‘The Doors of Perception’, to the effect that a limitation of consciousness is necessary if civilization is to continue: “people just can’t go around in a trance or altered mental state all of the time”. Unfortunately (or perhaps otherwise), accumulated evidence suggests that going around in a semi-conscious state is precisely what many people do for much of their lives. They subconsciously take for ueugranted that well-worn thought patterns are necessarily built on a solid infrastructure.

In discussing the traditional knowledge systems of aboriginal or native peoples, Fikret Berkes goes on to refer to the intolerance of many scientists towards ‘traditional’ knowledge and the insights that long preceded institutionalized western science. ‘Scientists tend to dismiss understandings that do not fit their own; this includes understandings of other scientists using different paradigms’. In explaining the contemptuous attitude of some scientists to traditional knowledge, Berkes offers the explanation that many scientists would feel that it is their duty to remain skeptical when confronted with an area which does not lend itself to scientific testing. To my mind this is fair enough, though it has its down side. I am not in the business of debunking the considerable achievements of the rational side of the mind, and I am still firmly opposed to dogma, either scientific or religious. I despise those who willingly take advantage of the gullible, either by claiming to have received some special message from God, or to know infallibly that God does not exist. I find my point of view on dogma perfectly expressed by the following quotation from J.B.S. Haldane, the famous mathematical biologist: “Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose… I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, in any philosophy”. (from ‘The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations’).

Among the ‘spam’ that regularly fills my letter box and e-mail, a colour-printed photostat for John Caddy arrived today from Eva de M., a self-defined medium and astrologist, who wrote:

“Dear Mrs Caddy, as I was filling in the documents for award of the cheque for US $4,250 addressed to you, I felt a strange sensation in my fingertips. As this feeling spread through my whole body… I had a clear vision: you were at my side… I understood straight away that something very powerful and quite out of the ordinary was happening, so I immediately decided to prepare your astral chart… You should know that normally I charge US $210 for preparing an Astral Guide to Destiny, but as an exception, I will do the work for you for the very modest sum of US 28.50!”.

This communication illustrates why a degree of scepticism is inevitable before unleashing your right brain unfettered onto the world; in this case confirmed by the change of sex granted me by Eva. Using mass communication to play on the gullibility of simple persons is shameful, and I am convinced will eventually have serious repercussions on the spiritual plane, as it will on all those who scatter morally contaminated material on the internet. There are plenty of suckers around however, since as noted by G.K.Chesterton: “When people leave organized religion, they do not believe in nothing, they believe in anything”. I hope the distinction is clear between following your intuition to discover what is ‘right and true’ for you, and falling for tricksters and self-appointed gurus? When in doubt, follow your daimon or inner voice; this will give you good advice.

Gregory Bateson felt that the division between man and the world western civilization is based on, is a reflection of the Cartesian dualism between mind and matter. This separation of ourselves from the world justifies the idea and objective of man seeking to dominate nature. All the ecological disasters of recent centuries arguably grow from this source. Regarding the ‘physical’ world as an inanimate conglomeration of ‘animal, vegetable and mineral’ that we can mine to our advantage is the disease that will kill us all. When we discuss vital energy, these kinds of reflections have to be turned on their head: in essence we have to make the change from viewing the world as inert and subhuman, to viewing the universe as sacred and filled with life, love, and divine energy. As Claude Levi-Strauss said in another context: “The universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs”: perhaps he could have gone on to say that a thought is like an infectious disease which flashes through society faster than the speed of light.

Being recently reawakened to the subjective world, I took another look recently at what is meant by ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, and came to understand that while science strives to be objective and replicable in its activities, the subjective world we live in for most of our time takes an entirely different approach. I then began to classify terms that are associated with objective and subjective thought patterns. Though no hard and fast rules emerge, this exercise gave some clues as to how we operate in an ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ state. The table below seems to suggest that in English, two types of vocabulary, and modes of thought, exist:

An examination of early texts such as the Bible, shows that the original mode of thought for all but a few in the ruling category was predominantly subjective. Perhaps the advisors to rulers such as Machiavelli, were among the few to take a hard look at the underlying motivations for, and consequences of human action. An example that was at hand while this idea occured to me in Merida, October 2000, came from a guidebook to Mayan culture by Fernando Ruiz:

“Unlike modern man, the (ancient) Mayans were not reasoned thinkers. Intellect did not intervene between their emotions and the expression of their emotions which was generally innocent and fatalistic. Thus the Mayans threw themselves wholeheartedly into their dancing, singing and drinking during religious celebrations. It was not their intention to seek artificial pleasure from these pursuits as man of today does – the Mayans acted spontaneously in the declaration of their feelings, the main objective of which was to honour their gods and interpret the universe”.

Apart from a certain paternalism often seen in outsider’s descriptions of the Mayans, this may not be far from the truth, and implies that self-awareness and self-criticism did not intervene between the stimulus and the response as it often does in western societies. In fact, Julian Jaynes makes a good case from classical literature and archaeological relicts that for long periods of human history, self-consciousness as we experience it today did not exist. Individuals received ‘instructions’ from the otherwise silent right hemisphere in the form of oracular statements in the voice of the king or high priest that could not be readily refused. An early champion of objective thought, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, described an encounter with an Italian nobleman in a horse-drawn carriage during his travels in Italy in the late eighteenth Century. This gentleman expressed the view, apparently common in high European society until fairly recently, that self-review of one’s actions or any form of introspection, was not healthy: it may even have been socially unacceptable in some societies. Fairly sizeable pockets of largely subjective thought still exist nonetheless, and I dare say dominate the media and popular entertainment, as well as producing most of our artists and mystics.

In English, words with Latin roots often seem to imply a degree of detachment from events that the Saxon words don’t permit with their emotional immediacy, and words with latinized roots now dominate objective thought processes in the English language. It is interesting and paradoxical that Latin roots generally communicate a more disinterested or ‘objective’ impression when adopted into the English language, than they do when used in one of the modern Latin tongues.

Whatever the linguistic basis for emotion, we are used to the contrast between rapid emotive responses and slower, more reasoned approaches where the factors involved in a decision are added up, and the consequences followed through mentally, before responding. In fact from childhood we are urged to take a ‘common sense’ or ‘rational’ approach to decision making, and to ‘avoid letting our emotions take control’. This is obviously good sense and necessary, and I am not arguing that rational processes should not be in control, otherwise society would collapse into internal strife. Another aspect of this duality is that personal relationships and family ties usually seem to be placed above civic responsibility to society as a whole in Latin countries. Placing society’s needs first, is a more modern, northern and ‘rational’ concern (though on reflection, civic sense is not widespread in the Anglo-Saxon world either!).

How ideas come around…

Driving to Progreso from Merida through the flat Yucatecan landscape on Sunday morning I was able to follow one of those series of impressions that the intuitive mind presents for our consideration, although we are rarely aware of how this process works while it is underway. I will spell it out here to illustrate how the mind subtly converges around its deeper problems and preoccupations.

The stocky figure of a Mayan walking down the side of the road with his machete in his hand caught my attention. His solid and strong body made me think they must have been fierce warriors in the past despite their short stature, and I recalled recent discoveries at ancient Mayan sites that prove that warfare was central at least in the later periods of their astounding civilization before the fall of the Mayan cities. This brought me to think of another short fierce people, the Ghurka’s, mercenary soldiers of the British army in India where my father met them when he worked there as the chief of the colonial army’s postal service immediately after the Second World War. He brought home with him a shiny and lethal Kukri blade in a black leather case given him by a Ghurka. They terrorized their enemies everywhere by their dextrous use of this heavy, short sword for decapitation. I recalled that when I was a teenager it had eventually lost its special status and ended up rusty in the shed, where it was used for splitting firewood. I then remembered that when dad came back to England I was already six, and had bonded to my maternal grandfather as my ‘father figure’ in the village in Cumbria where we had been evacuated to his small cottage during the bombing of London. Dad’s military officer manner and tendency to lose his temper and raise his voice, compared poorly with my granddad’s gentle working man’s ways, and father and I never managed to have an easy exchange of opinion on any subject. Despite this, I recalled that I could on occasions see the love burning from his fierce brown eyes when he looked at me. It then occurred to me that he and I had more in common than I had previously thought: not just ’his’ cough I inherited, that often startles me into thinking of him. I remembered the emotional letters he received from his Indian colleagues when he returned to England, and while driving along the road to Progreso, I got the sense that the best years of his life, like mine, were passed in a foreign land. I wondered also if he would have appreciated the motives for my stay in Mexico. This brought me close to him in thought: both of us sharing a readiness to be an outsider or loner in another culture. Both of us also shared difficulties in recognizing and dealing with our emotional reactions, and an impatience with others when things don’t go our way.

I give this sequence of what were in effect subconscious thoughts in its entirety, since I believe it shows how the higher self brings us gently face to face, through ‘sleight of mind’ so to speak, with the problems we must resolve. We then find that an apparently random sequence of thoughts is not random at all.

Even when based on a quantifiable mathematical approach such as the ‘Principia Mathematica’ of Alfred Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, any mathematical system depends on ‘axiomatic statements’ which cannot be proved, but have to be accepted if the form of reasoning being proposed is to be adopted. As we discuss later, Kurt Goedel showed that Whitehead and Russell were optimistic: no mathematical system is self-defining or independent of the initial assumptions made. David Berlinski remarks that “Mathematics, Goedel discovered, is incomplete and incompletable”, and proceeds “from the same dark place in the intellectual unconscious as a unified theory of physics”.

One scientific strategy is to create a mathematical model of a phenomenon using existing information believed to be correct, and seek to disprove it using statistical theory. Remember that, once complete, any model not yet disproved is not regarded as proven, but remains at best, a ‘conditional explanation of reality’. Reality then, remains in some sense ‘indeterminate’ since more sophisticated models for the phenomenon can of course be imagined, bringing into play a wider range of phenomena. I can still identify with this as a reasonable way to proceed as long as you remember no certainties emerge from it. One criticism of many scientists, which one part of my mind still shares, is of those self-styled gurus who make dogmatic statements about psychic and other phenomena that cannot be verified, but have to be taken on trust. I feel this same reaction to dogmatic mysticism for example, when reading confident assertions by ‘gurus’ telling us how to manipulate phenomena such as auras and chakras. I later found from personal experience that there is an element of truth and reason in their dogmatism: such assertions need to be made boldly if the internal skeptic is to be overruled, and the perceptual model underlying ‘objective reasoning’ can be set aside for the moment.

Evidence of a relative kind’ is where a phenomenon is perceived, or deduced to occur, in terms of ‘something else’, i.e. it is bigger, smaller than, or moving faster or slower than, or resembles, ‘something else’ known to the observer; where the ‘something else’ is a familiar phenomenon whose reality is not questioned. As in many literary accounts, the observer’s position and the time of the observation may not be specified. Examples from Castaneda’s books are his descriptions of movements into other dimensions. Given that altered states of perception are involved, it would be difficult for the subject to remember details experienced during trance states when subsequently back in ‘ordinary reality’. This accounts for the apparently ambiguous nature of many descriptions emerging from trance states. In his books we find that many of the apparently bizarre experiences lived through in the ‘second attention’, like dreams, cannot always be remembered or described verbally once you have returned to a ‘normal’ state of consciousness or ‘first attention’. The fact is, that unfamiliar sensations perceived in altered states are not easily verbalized, and this contributes to the impossibility of acting as a truly ‘objective’ observer when seeking to describe internal sensations or emotional states.

‘Subjective evidence’ includes those personal reports on a phenomenon or event by an observer where the aspect of reality experienced, and its validity, depend on the perception of this single observer. These experiences can be communicated to others through language or drawings, but only the person experiencing them is able to confirm them from direct perception. We may however be more inclined to believe the observer if his actions, observations and approach in response to reality, are methodical and not influenced by excessive hyperbole, and if this description fits our own experience. Unfortunately, subjective experience is the only way we can experience the world directly, and an important but rarely mentioned axiom of the scientific method is that our sensory experience and language is replicated in other individuals. If this were not the case, we would individually have to personally recapitulate the whole of human knowledge and experience! Although ‘common sense’ or ‘logic’ can be used when hearing an observer’s story so as to judge its likely truth, absolute proof will never be provided. Of course, if the listener has had, or shared the same or similar experiences, he/she will be inclined to feel that a sort of validation has occurred, by assuming of course that the two observers share a common interpretation of the language used in communication. That such a common linguistic interpretation exists in the form of human grammatical structures was the great discovery of the linguist Noam Chomsky. His view was that the amazingly fast way that children learn languages comes from a complex inborn structure in the brain, or as I would deduce, even further back in the implicate order. However Steven Harnad points out that this structure probably did not evolve in the usual way, but that a ‘universal grammar’ may have been as much a part of the universe’s underpinnings as the structure of matter since the Big Bang. This implies as I just asserted, that ‘grammatical structure’ is stored in and accessed from, the implicate order we discuss in Chapter Seventeen.

As Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier say in their book “The morning of the Magicians”, “A revolution is taking place before our eyes – the unexpected remarriage of reason, at the summit of its victories, and intuition”. Intuition, or better still, inspiration in a creative trance state, has always played a vital role in key discoveries. Unfortunately the fusion the last-quoted authors are hoping for may not be so easy to achieve, since they depend on two separate modalities of perception. On this I would like to quote Steven Harnad’s explanation of consciousness. Steven notes that the easy way out when discussing non-ordinary or psychic phenomena, is to suppose that they can be grafted onto existing physical laws. The problem is that this cannot be done without greatly revising our concepts of causality and other fundamental relationships. As we discussed in the last Chapter, this would mean rewriting the fundamental laws of physics, and such unacceptable paradigm shifts account for the resistance to accepting phenomena such as telekinesis on the part of Science.

The different subjective uses of the same words or concepts by two persons is another unsolvable uncertainty, despite the suggestion of Wittgenstein, who felt that the structure of language is the only hope for communication of concepts. But the nature of subjective experience is also an irreducible barrier to the confirmation of what is being communicated, especially where one half of our brain communicates its conclusions visually. In the case of shamanism, experiences with subtle energy and spiritual enlightenment may both occur in alternative mental states where verbalization is not possible, even within the mind of the one experiencing these states. Remembering them afterwards, like dream recall will be difficult, and the observer will have to look for clues in associated bodily sensations if he or she hopes to recreate such mental states. It will take many repetitions of the experience before an interpretation or ‘model’ of the mystical reality the observer has experienced can be arrived at. This will not be aided greatly by the often unreliable new phenomena being perceived.

Buying my ticket at the underground I cross London on the Picadilly line to check out an exhibition advertised at the British Museum that looked promising: ‘Unknown Amazon: culture in nature in ancient Brazil’. This temporary exhibit in the BM is an impressive collection of feather, wood and pottery artifacts. The pottery came from the recently discovered remnants of an agricultural society which flourished from the fourth to fourteenth Centuries on Marajo Island at the mouth of the Amazon, and the much more recent (and culturally quite different) living artifacts of recent jungle dwellers from further upstream. What strikes me is the complexity and chromatic beauty of the perishable items, and the faded bichromatic pottery from archaeological excavations of the long dead. It occurs to me how little we can deduce from non-biodegradable relicts about the rich but transient living materials used by a culture. By analogy, there is likely to be a similar gulf of comprehension between the archaeologists who prepared the notes for the exhibition as to the significance of the pottery designs, and how they would be interpreted in terms of the spirit world by a shaman. Reference is made in one panel to the shaman ‘who inhabits the spirit of the jaguar to gain powers’ and ‘takes psychedelic plants to aid in spirit journeys’. As I was able to find out from personal experience in the Amazon, this comment seems to me to only be glimpsing the edge of a much larger canvas.

As usual in these exhibitions of ‘anthropological artifacts’, the focus is mainly on the skills of the artisans and the supposed practical uses of the artifacts. The average visitor to the exhibit is left no wiser as to the meaning of the symbology, despite the projection of jungle scenes onto a waving cloth near the ceiling of the exhibit, which rightly sees the biodegradable artifacts as intimately connected with the living world. In the British Museum Reading Room afterwards, I access the museum’s ‘Compass’ (Collections Multimedia Public Access System) data bank, looking for items in the collections related to shamanism. I discover only four: two Alaskan artifacts of the Yap’ik tribe from the last Century, one depicting a shaman’s helper; and two pre-Colombian gold artifacts - a humanoid bird-like figure supposedly showing a shaman in flight while in an altered state. This paucity of information about a central theme of all early hunter-gatherer societies in one of the world’s great centres of learning, is disappointing. It seems to me to reflect a general lack of knowledge by modern scholarship of worldwide shamanic traditions, largely because we lack the psychic skills to put ourselves in the minds of their users. This is an omission that could be partly rectified if shamans or other sensitives could spend time with these artifacts and attempt to enter into contact through the timeless zone with those who made and used them.

The previous night in my hotel room I watched a program on British TV on a similar theme. Starting from the first manifestations of writing in Egypt and Mesopotamia it promised to take us back to visit our early ancestors ‘who were as intelligent as you or I’. We visit ‘Otzi’ the 5000 year old body of a late Stone age hunter disgorged from a glacier on the Italian-Swiss border some years ago where he had been trapped for several thousands of years. We marvel with a modern acupuncturist that Otzi has tattoos at critical points on the same energy meridians now used by Chinese energy masters. By analogy with modern practice, these would have been designed to cure the arthritis he apparently suffered from. This observation shows that the energy ‘meridians’ of the human body were known millennia ago by our European ancestors, but have long been forgotten, and had to be ‘rediscovered’ by the West from traditional Chinese medicine not so long ago. The esoteric knowledge lost from the destruction of the druidic culture by the Romans and the burning of ‘witches’ during the inquisitions of the Middle ages, is now impossible to recover, and cuts us Europeans off from our distant ancestors. We must now relearn the mysteries of vital energy from the ‘uncivilized’ remnants of ‘backward’ races patronized, colonized, and largely eliminated by our same western civilizations. Somewhat belatedly, nowadays all of the diverse manifestations of energetically-linked schools seem to be merging on the internet, when their ancestral sources are almost at the point of disappearance. There must be a way to extract common elements from our earliest energetic heritage and combine them with our discoveries in the arts and sciences! Perhaps in the process we may restore a lost spirituality to our lives.

The television program then went on to describe the world’s oldest temples: those in Malta, dedicated to the earth mother goddess and dated from some 8000 years ago. Again, while discussing the architectural skills of these early builders, the experts thought it probable that those early peoples believed in an earth mother and the cyclic return of the living, as implied by the spirals on the walls. They were however at a loss to describe what really went on in those places. We then visit the Hypogeum, the underground shrine whose special acoustics were demonstrated by tantric chanting – a not improbable reconstruction of the sonic background to such fertility-related underground ceremonies in my opinion; even if the producers had to go to Mongolia to find a living tradition of this musical form. The interpretation of the grossly ‘fat ladies’ sculpted at such sites as representations of the earth mother, made me think however of the article in the Times today. This discussed how African fashion designers are now emphasizing models with Junoesque proportions, on the grounds that a well-built lady will not be suffering from Aids or related diseases. For an early Mediterranean agricultural society, seasonal famines cannot have been a rare phenomenon, and by ‘fattening up’ its priestesses, a matriarchal society may have provided an augury of better times to come. Gunter Grass in ‘The Flounder’ even postulates that the mother figures of the tribe kept their power by refusing to inform their mates of their role in conception. Thinking over the day’s revelations, I wonder again what could be achieved by sensitives spending time in such places and architectures, searching to recreate the real meaning and atmosphere of these early religious sites.

When talking about preliterate peoples we often assume their mental processes are similar to ours. Julian Jaynes in fact suggests that prior to the Greeks, mental organization in our very plastic brains was very different, even though the physical structure at the macro level was almost identical in evolutionary terms. He suggests that in some sense the ancients were not self-aware, or ‘self-conscious’ as we are. What activities were their brains occupied with then? He suggests that for early city dwellers, the Sumerians and later Babylonian civilizations, the right brain was usually silent, but occasionally (under the influence of the priests or king whose voice was reproduced in the imagination), made pronouncements to the left hemisphere, heard as a voice in the head. He cites evidence that these pronouncements were taken as commands coming from the king or the gods, and were acted upon almost instinctively by the common people. Whether one believes this hypothesis or not, it is certainly feasible to suggest that radical changes in both perception and the organization of behavior have occurred, paralleled by changes in an organ as plastic as the brain.

According to another view, the real change occurred with literacy, but literacy should not be identified with learning. Thus, Nora Chadwick notes that: “Among illiterate peoples the training of the memory is cultivated to a degree undreamed of among readers of books …(hence) artistic speech is highly cultivated, and a high standard of eloquence is the aim of the intelligentsia among illiterate people everywhere”. Her acceptance that illiterate people may have had an intelligentsia is edifying. Talking about the ancient Celts she notes that “The education of the young and the intellectual life of all classes was carried on by two classes of men known as druids and seers, who taught entirely by means of poetry orally transmitted”; and: “In societies ignorant of books and the written word, all knowledge is regarded as a spiritual possession and acquired by spiritual means or ‘inspiration’. In fact, she notes that the eloquence of the Gauls impressed the Romans deeply…”

What these few examples seem to show is that the plasticity of our nervous system has responded, and will continue to respond, to social programming, and that it is currently doing so in a way that takes us further away from the immediacy of our contact with the living world we are part of.

The scientific method versus spiritual perception?

Science is a process for learning about nature in which competing ideas about how the world works are measured against observations (Richard Feynman). With this quote, Ray Hilborn and Marc Mangel begin the chapter of their book on alternative approaches to scientific discovery. They note that all scientists operate within one or other fundamental philosophical world views, and that at least four such philosophies are in current operation in ‘pushing back the frontiers of science’.

The ideas expressed in the book ‘Strong Inference’ by Trevor Platt extend those of Karl Popper, who revolutionized the philosophy of science by arguing that hypotheses cannot be proved, but only disproved. According to this commonly-held view, Science proceeds by falsification of alternative hypotheses, not by confirming any. What has not yet been disproved has of course not been proved either, so all final judgements on the nature of reality are suspended or provisional under this philosophy. Thus, if you buy this hypothesis, trying to make any assertions about reality is like lifting yourself up by your shoelaces. In its essence, this approach reinforces the real mystery of existence – the Great Spirit allows us to detect errors, and use ‘currently best theories’ as a basis for action, but holds tightly onto the ultimate truth.

Other approaches to scientific investigation are those associated withThomas Kuhn, who believed that at any one time, a science follows a single or dominant ‘paradigm of thought’ with fixed basic assumptions or axioms, such that a series of hypotheses follow one another, and are tested in sequence. At a certain point, the results of scientific testing are found to be at variance with the basic axioms. Since axioms are essentially unprovable, those axioms now questioned are replaced by others, presumably selected by an inspired guess or ‘act of creation’. Changing the axioms leads to another paradigm with different ‘built in’ assumptions as to the ‘solid’ basis underlying the new theoretical structure. A period of ‘paradigm shift’ then ensues of variable duration, during which old perceptions and assumptions are overturned, and experts pushing the old paradigm die off or retire. The old paradigm lingers on for some time, as does the morphic field associated with it in the implicate realm: both getting progressively weaker as the last of its adherents leave the stage. It would be an exaggeration to say that a paradigm shift is equivalent to knocking down a city and rebuilding it every time a new architectural style is adopted, and in fact old and new paradigms often co-exist for a considerable length of time. Viewed in retrospect, we see the limitations in Isaac Newton’s view of reality although these are negligible at the human scale of physical reality. We should nonetheless be conscious that some 100 years from now our current scientific theories will almost certainly be considered laughable or at least old fashioned.

Michael Polanyi took a broader view, saying that multiple conceptions of how the world works are acceptable. Confrontation between different views is what he advocates as the method for searching out ‘the truth’. This seems the philosophy that most accords with the one I am followingImre Lakatos also allowed for multiple hypotheses, and believed that it is the confrontation between these and the data, mediated by statistical methods, that allows us to arbitrate between different hypotheses. We can then choose the ‘best one’ that satisfies both logic, what we already know about the phenomenon, and its statistical verification. As learned by hard experience however, picking the winner by the ‘best statistical fit’ alone can uphold scientifically implausible relationships, and is not a foolproof guarantee that reality has been pinned down.

It seems to me therefore that there is nothing sacred or mysterious about the workings of scientific discovery, and not a lot fundamentally that is different from common sense. All are dependent on basic axioms which are neither provable or disprovable, but reflect deeply-held convictions in Western society. It is here that the divide between science and spiritual activities emerges: but after further reflection, disappears again, since as Sheldrake says, scientific axioms are in a sense mythologies. In a parallel subjective universe, as I see it, the process of spiritual development takes place as the ‘unconscious’, ‘spirit body’, or whatever else you may wish to call it, is taught to extend its range of perception, and concentrate on perceiving while expressing a strong desire or ‘Intent’ to receive enlightenment. This process is impossible under the influence of continuous scepticism or doubt. The approach of science is slower, and certainly has more checks built in, but its direction is still influenced by those who in the past were inspired enough to decide which underlying axioms led to a satisfying or ‘more elegant’ theoretical structure.

Making the most use of any new and surprising imagery that enters the mind, after long incubation, requires some simple techniques of working with the mind open to what could be called ‘subconscious suggestion’. Elsewhere in this book I have preferred to consider this to be more appropriately described as ‘using a trance state to access the implicate realm’. Whichever interpretation you prefer…just don’t consider creativity as a planned or logical process!

Michael Dames takes a more controversial position concerning science that reflects perhaps its dependence on axiomatic statements: “The recent appreciation by Popper and others that ‘scientific discovery is akin to explanatory story-telling…’also places Science in the broad mythic field”, and the idea of ‘objectivity’ appears as ‘just one of many story-telling techniques’.

One common suggestion made to authors is that it is essential to recognize the divide between creative and critical modes of thinking. One tip often extended to writers for example, is to write first, obeying your muse. Do not lift your pen from the paper to read what you wrote until the flow of ideas entering your mind dries up. Only allow your critical faculties to operate once you are re-reading what your muse has written, now that you are in that other trance state called ‘the editing mode’. This simple example illustrates that we may operate in different mind states each with its specific mode of thinking.

Given the importance of creativity, nonetheless, some approaches to science, for example those of Polyani and Lakatos, at first sight are more applicable to investigations of paranormal, shamanistic phenomena, etc. than others. In testing paranormal abilities however, how do you distinguish between a low statistical probability because the answers given were correct once in three times (and hence statistically invalid), from the results of a session where the paranormal sense of the subject was functioning only one third of the time, since for the remaining time their ‘talent’ was contaminated by the preconceptions of the person running the experiment? Could it be that the faith of the subject in his or her abilities was shaken by emanations of scepticism from the experimental controller transmitted on the astral plane? In other words, were the preconceptions of the experimental observer having a Heisenberg-like influence on the results of the experiment? Such considerations incline me to think that with this kind of experiment we are approaching the outer limits of application of the scientific method.

There used to be a duality in classic times between ‘Logos’, those statements susceptible to reasoned analysis, and ‘Mythos’ which are statements about mystical events which do not have to be logical and are not easily confirmed or denied. For many scientists, religion would fall in the second category, in as much as it focuses on events in the past that cannot be personally verified. The ‘Logos’ paradigm now reigns supreme in our society, whereby ‘The Word’, instead of bringing reality into being as was believed by many primitive societies, as well as expressed in the Bible, the ‘word’ has merely become a vehicle for abstract thought. Michael Dames traces this ‘sea change’ in western thought back to the fifth century BC, when the Sophists of ancient Greece claimed back the language from its mythical roots to become “a transparent vehicle for abstract thought, rational argument and logical discourse”. He notes however that the archaic practices typical of the rich Irish mythical tradition, are tending to be supported at some fundamental level by today’s theory. Even though the ‘Logos’ mode of thought, i.e., frontal lobe reasoning as first introduced by the Ancient Greek philosophers, has been immensely useful, it has also introduced some frightening offspring that we now seek to live with, without the guidance of tradition, religion or myth. Being largely free of spiritual inputs the mental framework of materialism and its modern offspring consumerism, has evidently run into its limits, and hopefully is showing signs of senescence. As Samuel Beckett implied, in modern thought, form (unnaturally) tends to be divorced from content, from context. The free-association of magic language, and the total ‘message’ that carries you to its mythical origins is missing. Nowadays, according to one definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Myth’ is a “A widely held but false notion”, and as noted by Michael Dames, other dictionaries propose similarly pejorative definitions.

Continuing on the theme of dualism, and how this distorts our vision of the world, Michael Dames notes that: “The incoming tide of Christianity split the ancient world into a dualism of Good and Evil, where previously Light and Dark had been accepted as equally necessary and interdependent, like winter and summer”. He later makes the observation that through Dualism, “A person divided in two implies an equivalent split in the microcosm”, which reiterates the principle ‘As above, so below’ put forward by the magician Hermes Trismegistus. In other words, by recognizing the division between good and evil at the personal level, early Christianity required a division of the cosmos along similar lines. Going back further to the origin of another dualism also accepted in the Western world, in the part of a dialogue he assigns to Socrates, Plato has him say that the soul of the philosopher ‘greatly despises the body’. This attitude became absorbed into Christian philosophy, without any evidence that it was supported by Christ, and inevitably led to the physical world becoming “a soulless mass of gross matter”, in which the spirit that had formerly infused the living and inorganic world was driven out, or at least was blocked out by the mind and no longer perceived. Only humans were seen as potentially ‘spiritual’. In this grim landscape created so as to allow us to ‘have our way’ with the rest of creation unhindered by scruples, we continue ‘to trudge on, out of cultural habit; flagellating the world as a soulless Thing, to be treated with contempt’, paraphrasing Dames’ words. Where this view has led us to is evident for all to see.

Are you missing a piece of the puzzle?

You may extend your range of perception by exercise, meditation, fasting, or by training with a spiritually or energetically more powerful person, but probably a group experience will be needed to overcome prejudices or conditioning that do not easily give way during solitary practice. In science we generally move in the opposite direction: rejecting or closing down all those inputs and sensations, which from our logical preconceptions, are not directly relevant to the question at hand. This implies that we are obliged to ignore those intuitive faculties that may suggest we are on the wrong track. Despite this, an uncomfortably high proportion of important discoveries reach us from a directions at variance to that our research was originally pursuing.

Arguing with Newton

One observation that I made in my own field of marine biology applied to fisheries, is that a mode of calculation, while patently artificial and ‘unrealistic’ as a representation of what is actually going on in nature, will be accepted and published by journals if reference can be made to other investigators who used it in the past. In this way, any real novelty of approach is often discounted, and the discipline in question draws in its horns, preferring to work the ‘safe’ territory in the ‘core’ areas of its specialization. This is all ok and quite cozy, until some maverick who has hidden like a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ eventually ambushes and strips bare the currently dominant paradigm in a way that no-one can any longer deny the emperor’s clothes are non-existent!

Scientists are not perhaps the major impediment to progress in psychic affairs, though they may be when acting en masse to protect their favourite paradigm. In fact, some of the most ferocious resistance to unconventional perceptions of reality and paradigm changes, strangely enough comes from those who apply theory, such as engineers, and much less so from physicists and other scientists working at the conceptual forefront of science. Most people have some basic ideas about science which are usually Newtonian and rigorously based on the primacy of the law of action and reaction, implying a linear flow of time. This leads people who received some basic science training in the 1970’s and earlier, to accept concepts such as causality as basic to science. Thus they are seriously resistant to ‘flights of fancy’ such as time travel, voyaging to other dimensions, etc, or so-called psychic phenomena and their implications. They have a point; but pushing it too hard creates a wall in our subjective minds that blocks off new perceptions that are at variance with conventional explanations.

Dr George Egely, a Hungarian physicist, an expert in energy transfer processes, was sufficiently unconventional a scientist to investigate what he referred to as ‘life energy’ or ‘Qi’. He designed and built the Egely Wheel, which in essence is a light aluminium toothed wheel balanced on a fine point so that it rotates freely. Other elements were added such as electronic lights that give a calibrated speed of rotation, but as far as I can tell, these have nothing to do with its function, since a much more rudimentary piece of equipment can be purchased or made from a pin and sheet of aluminium foil that works the same way.

By placing a hand alongside the wheel without touching it, it rotates at a faster rate which from my personal experience confirms his assertion that the speed of rotation of the wheel is a function of the ‘energetic health’ of the person concerned, or their current state of mind. Apparently the nature of this ‘life energy’ was somewhat of a mystery to Dr Egely, though in the booklet sold with the wheel he mentions experiments (e.g. in a vacuum) which show that heat radiation, light and magnetism were not responsible for the rotation. More convincing is the fact that with practice, it can be made to rotate from a distance of half a metre or so by simply willing the rotation, or projecting ‘energy’ along the finger. I was able to do this immediately prior to a recent operation, but it has taken some months to restore my energetic ‘health’ to close to its previous condition. Experiments in which the telekinesis effect was demonstrated using the Egely wheel are reported in the catalogue for the instrument, but can be replicated by a group of people sitting round a table on which the wheel is placed, and jointly willing the wheel to move. Egely reports that 1200 people trained in mind control seated in a large hall were asked to collectively focus on the Egely wheel placed on a table on the stage. The audience was asked to concentrate on turning the wheel clockwise – it soon reached the maximum speed of revolution shown on the scale.

Apparently the state of mind of the subject affects the response given by the wheel: thinking of pleasant experiences or simply meditating seem to promote a higher rate of revolution. On his web site (www.ambro.hu/borze/egely/index2.htm) and in the booklet that comes with the equipment, Egely found that “Extrovert charismatic personalities, healers, people who regularly practice meditation, and independent nonconformists tended to show the highest scores; more passive, nervous, inward personalities scored lower. The lowest ratings were scored by people who were depressed or ill”. Chess players usually score high, but the highest rating recorded by Egerly apparently came from mathematician Erno Rubik, the developer of Rubik’s cube.

Later I found that I could achieve a high rate of rotation placing the wheel under my basketwork chair, since it seems my lower chakras are the most powerful. Others have reported turning the wheel with their crown chakra when sitting under it when placed on a table. One of the more difficult problems is in deciding whether the wheel is measuring ground energy or the energy of a person. You first need to find a place where ground energy is minimal before placing your hand next to the wheel to assess your energetic state. Alternatively, by staying at a distance of more than a metre, it seems that the wheel responds to bundles of energy emanating from the ground as a grid with spacing roughly 1-2 metres apart, which have been described as ‘Hartmann lines or nodes’ and are also picked up by dowsing.

One of the first tasks Don Juan set Carlos Castaneda overnight was to find a ‘safe’ spot to sit in his veranda. After crawling around on the dirt floor half the night looking with his eyes crossed for a particlar ‘colour’, he awoke in the morning on what Don Juan said was the right spot. I performed a similar ‘mapping’ of my veranda with the Egely wheel, and found several spots at a fairly regular spacings where rotation rate was high, and intermediate points where the wheel was stationary. In a seminar on dowsing I attended in Sardinia, M. showed how these ‘Hartmann nodes’ in combination with water pipes under the floor, reinforce or weaken the dowsing experience.

Keeping science ‘pure’

Some professional sceptics band together to ‘support the purity of science against ‘voodoo manifestations posing as reality’, and form associations designed to objectively investigate and debunk those who make ‘unscientific’ claims. Statements abound like: ‘I could find you an explanation for any phenomenon you care to mention using scientifically established principles, …and if I can’t I am sure you were mistaken’.

- This is a sad business, but although sceptics are necessary to protect against fraud, sceptical overkill is an inevitable consequence of this strategy described earlier and adopted by conventional science as its procedure for disproving hypotheses. I believe that if not controlled, professional scepticism can be damaging on the person habitually exercising it, if it spills over into a permanent attitude to life. At the same time, if the theory has any validity that humans can progressively enhance their capabilities by ‘pushing the envelope’, (and I believe it does), hostile scepticism can be negative in the real sense of the word…and certainly will blind the observer to the possibility of experiencing a psychic phenomenon in person, for reasons that I believe emerge from this account.

I think most scientists would admit that an objective ‘proof’ of the causes and mechanisms that underlie natural phenomena rapidly becomes impossible when the matter is complex. The approach then becomes more one of building a mathematical model of the phenomenon you are investigating, in which you include all of the processes you think you know for certain and then run the model and see if it fits reality. (Almost certainly you will also have to ‘tune’ the model to get any reasonable fit to reality, but that is an aspect that most scientists don’t usually care to dwell upon). The now familiar idea of building a computer model to simulate reality has other implications which emerge when you consider how we believe the brain works. The physicist William Teller describes the brain as a ‘pattern-forming, self-organizing structure’. Like tornados or food webs, the brain as defined by Iflya Prigogine, is a ‘dissipation structure’; a complex natural phenomenon somewhat like a whirlpool, programmed by its environment, and compatible with chaos theory. It maintains its overall physical form but changes continually its electrical connections while being in a state of open exchange with its surroundings. The parallel between dissipation structures and chakras at the subtle energy level also seems obvious. Scott Kelso also likens the brain to the flow of a river, in which patterns appear and disappear.

As we noted earlier, a solid body of evidence seems now to have emerged showing that the mind is taught or creates its own ‘programmes’ of reality, and that it only pays attention to a phenomenon when there is a divergence between what the model is predicting and what is perceived. Thus, if certain sensory inputs are never used, presumably they are ignored by the brain and in fact may be dropped from the ‘control program’ and eventually can no longer be perceived consciously. Many authors have referred to this presumed process of ‘sensory curtailment’ as occurring during childhood, when we are being ‘trained’ to see what it is acceptable to see, and I apologise if come back to emphasize this point which for me has central importance.

Reasoning by association and by analogy are ancient modes of thought and seem responsible for the development of much of the vocabulary we use to communicate. Hence they are fundamental to our mental processes. The early progress in sciences such as taxonomy showed that many analogies and similarities between species and parts of their anatomies were incorrect, since similarities can arise in evolution between structures in genetically quite distinct organisms: a common functional need produces structural convergence to a common and successful pattern. For example, birds and bats both have wings but came from different vertebrate origins, while beetles, crabs and turtles have hard shells, but are not closely related. Making progress in science has often involved overturning many of the associations and analogies that underlay proto-sciences such as alchemy and astrology, and probably the process is still incomplete, since we are still deeply influenced by the clockwork paradigms of ‘mechanics’ such as Newton. At the same time, there may be deep similarities between how beetles, crabs and turtles see the world, and this is the basis for ‘sympathetic magic’, where an object is used to diagnose or influence another resembling it in appearance.

Thus, there are older approaches to seeking knowledge than Newton’s that do not involve reasoning, but work through multiple associations and analogies in seeking predictions of the future. Systems such as the Jewish Cabala and the Chinese I Ching reflect long experience and ancient systems of thought developed around an intimate knowledge of our mental processes and how in the world, events tend to recur in a repetitive fashion. It would be a foolish person who would say that these systems are no longer valid, but perhaps one prosaic way of describing them is to see them as mnemonic tools systematising the use of the imagination and improving recall as we seek new insights into our current situation through non-ordinary perceptual paths, or by the ‘lateral thinking’ procedures of de Bono.

A problem we face when discussing psychic phenomena seems to be that standards of evidence need to be established. What is perceived by one observer is given more credibility when it can be confirmed by others within the real limits of communication that an imperfect common language permits. We all experience things in the privacy of our minds that we are unsure are duplicated by the experience of others. The problem comes when we try and describe these experiences to others. Even the simplest experiences acquire a mysterious slant when you really pay attention to the mental state you are in.

I’m heading down the Pontina highway into Rome, the road that is on the black list of Italian dangerous routes: narrow and full of curves, marked by the battered metal partition in the central line. Everyone thinks they are racing drivers and the traffic rarely goes below 120 km/hour with about 4 car lengths between vehicles. I adjust automatically to the eternal struggle that marks driving in Rome as soon as I leave the side road and accelerate into the fast lane. Angelo’s Sea Food is already impatient with me and passes on the inside, swerving back into the outer lane as soon as he is 10 metres in front of me. Meanwhile, I have gone into my driving trance and my body automatically adjusts foot pressure on the brake to slow slightly while I continue to think about the film yesterday, and what I plan to do when I get to work. Just as in the Seven Samurai, the master swordsman meditates while contemplating a flower, and then in a lightening burst of action cuts down the brigand emerging from the wood; so we need to realize that fast reflexes once cultivated, become automatic. The body calls on a well of experience to decide what to do until overridden or given new instructions by the conscious mind. This was why our forefathers, like the bipedal carnivorous animals they were, were such successful predators: decide on a course of action consciously, then shut off the frontal lobes and let past successful patterns guide you! Unfortunately, as in driving, it is unreliable to place the mind on autopilot when exploring the nature of reality; this requires your senses to remain firmly in the present.

The observer is part of the phenomenon

Returning to the ‘limits of science’, we note that physicists often talk in terms of the ‘collapse’ of a phenomenon described as ‘a wave’ under one paradigm, into a discrete entity or ‘particle’ under another. Thus, a ‘field’ extensive in space, resolves itself instantaneously at the moment of observation and measurement into a discrete particle occupying a specific time-space location. This allows it to be detected by an observer at that location. For quantum mechanics, this ‘collapse’ is integral to the act of observing and measuring an event, and according to von Neumann, is a direct consequence of the human consciousness observing the phenomenon. A still more extreme view was expressed by the Texan physicist, John A. Wheeler, to whom the act of observation is an ‘elementary act of creation’. As also noted by that physicist turned shaman, Fred Alan Wolfe, we can see direct parallels here with the use of the imagination and the will by shamans through specific use of ‘intent’, and some phenomena in the quantal world. Thus, the projection of personal will to bring about the result of a shamanic invocation may in some way affect events, in the same way that the ‘observer effect’ influences physical measurements.

Returning to the relevance of modern physics to spiritual themes, we can say that once we have measured a phenomenon it is necessary to communicate the results unambiguously to others. As we have noted, the underlying difficulty of communicating the results of ‘measurements’ stems from the limitation of language. The famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noted,

“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”.

The experience of shamanism and energy-related disciplines refutes this statement, since in the trance state often referred to as ‘second attention’, there are phenomena that can be recognized, and dream actions that can be manipulated, which cannot be verbalized, but are activated knowingly by wordless intent.

‘Paranormal’ states can be induced by, or are associated with, sensations such as a stiffness and coldness of the forehead when entering a trance state, or an inability to move the extremities. Thus, these mental states and associated bodily perceptions are inextricably linked and in some sense replicable and capable of manipulation, but do not have a vocabulary. This contributes to the difficulty we face in attempting to ‘quantify’ the various spiritual disciplines using the so-called ‘rigorous’ approach of science. More prosaically, the idea that for every word we coin there is a real phenomenon corresponding to it, may be more misleading than being aware of, and manipulating a real phenomenon but not having the right words to express, or even recall, what you did when you return to ordinary reality.

As Raymond van Over says, ‘The English language is particularly deficient in words to describe altered states of consciousness’. For example, in English we have a limited range of names for colours, but there is no particular reason why a particular range of wavelengths could not merit its own specific name. Fikret Berkes notes that the Hanunoo of the Philippines have names for over ninety varieties of rice, while the Quechuan languages of the Andes have several hundred named varieties of potatoes. Similarly, the Bodi tribesmen of East Africa have many different words for colour patterns which find origin in the varied colouring of their cattle. Such a proliferation of names is not an attempt to be erudite or to split hairs, but reflects the importance of fine distinctions in an area of central concern for a particular group of people. Pruit notes that the proliferation of words ‘is to aid in the precision of our speech and thoughts’. For example, Van Over asks…”what would happen if a man lived in a world that had, say, only two colours – blue and gray – and as he was sitting under a tree he suddenly saw bright yellow in the sky? If he were an educated man, his first reaction would be that the new colour was a hallucination. The individual who sees his world in a new way also sees himself in a new light….only if he is capable of remaining open to the new and surprising”.

Thus, if there is some doubt according to Berkes about the common myth that the Inuit have hundreds of names for different types of snow, it is still true that in the high arctic, without the ability to recognize different states of frozen water, we are unlikely to perceive anything except snow, even when our safety might depend on being able to make more critical distinctions. Should direct spiritual experience ever enter the mainstream of life, it is likewise certain that a similar proliferation of terms and roadmaps for experiences of this type would greatly help those entering this area of perception. At the same time, many of our experiences will have to remain wordless. This is not a bad thing, since despite the proliferation of books on the ‘sixth sense’, it doesn’t help if all you do is read about it! This makes for frustration for example, in reading Sanskrit accounts of the ‘rousing of the Kundalini’: even the common use of superlatives will not bring the reader closer to the nature of the experience.

Tales of power

According to Van Over: “Not only do people fear the unusual and mysterious, but they also fear the uncontrollable. It is an ironic fact that we fear the uncontrollability of our own unconscious minds, and thus are afraid of a major part of our being….This negative evaluation of the unconscious is Freud’s undesirable legacy…these attitudes imply that when delving into the unusual, or into the inner mind, you are taking your life in your hands”. To be properly understood, the human being must be considered as a microcosm that in the American psychologist Gardner Murphy’s words, repeats “like the sympathetic vibration of wire, the vaster processes of the microcosm”. Putting yourself consciously into the hands of fate may require you to convince your subconscious of the reality of the phenomena associated with vital energy. It is here that the convincing ‘tales of power’ of others can play a role in softening our rigid attitudes.

Castaneda’s description of the training process for Mexican sorcerers as he experienced it, in fact places emphasis on certain magic ‘tales of power’ that are passed on from one generation to the next. These stories contain a ‘kernel’ that whether evident or not, helps to convince the spirit that the next step in the slow development of skills is possible, or serves to ‘open up’ the apprentice to their own potentiality. In my case, I have found that as soon as I show an interest in, or accept the possibility of, alternative or supplementary skills or powers, synchronicity brings me contacts and personal accounts from people I trust, that somehow convinces my mind that there is something real and important going on there, not allowed for in conventional mechanisms.

An example of the ubiquity of these kinds of non-ordinary experiences was provided by 2 fellow scientists who had worked with me in Canada in the 1970’s, who I had considered (perhaps incorrectly?) to be rational and sober individuals. In the summer of 1998, they visited me for the first time since I left Canada in 1979. I admit that in our conversations, by mentioning my own experiences with subtle energy, I may have provoked responses such as those which follow, but both had experienced surprising events for which a logical perception in scientific terms is not yet available. For instance, my friend, G. described in a matter of fact way going to sleep on one of a pair of twin beds in a motel, but awaking to find he had fallen between them. A hairy arm hanging down from one of the beds told him that at least one of the beds was occupied, and he was surprised to recognize his wristwatch on the arm hanging down. He then floated up to see himself lying on the bed before ‘re-entering’. A similar account was provided by another acquaintance who described being in a hammock below deck on a sailing ship but being completely aware of events from the level of the masthead – illustrating incidentally, one of the characteristics Mexicans ascribe to hammocks – being out of contact with the ground allows the aura to expand. Richard Feynman the physicist described similar experiences in a sensory deprivation tank. In these experiences which he described in a light-hearted fashion, he was eventually able to displace his point of identity downwards in his body, off to the side, and finally out of the tank. In this state, for example when his point of observation was behind him he could see the back of his head. I was greatly impressed that one of the fathers of modern physics was able to discuss these ‘subjective’ experiences – until he referred to them as ‘ illusions’ ( = the faulty perception of an external object – the Oxford Dictionary) – without explaining what other possible mechanism could have given rise to these perceptions. Often we protect ourselves against our observations in this way so as to avoid subjective impressions overturning our carefully established view of reality.

Abandoning for the moment the preoccupations of scientists with psychic phenomena and passing over to a subjective view, I suggested earlier that relying on the spiritual experiences of others contravenes the rule mentioned earlier in the book. However, ‘tales of power’ to me are still more reliable if they come from a person I know than if they are read about in a book (like this one), or in the form of written accounts from distant sources. We use our personal judgement to evaluate the racconteur, and if we know them, to judge whether they are usually reliable or subject to flights of fancy. This can help us distinguish between fantasy and genuine experience. Even though such accounts are admittedly second-hand, if they come from persons I regard as reliable, they form essential evidence in making any progress in understanding vital energy and how it works. Subjective judgements are also essential for breaking down mind programmes that previously had excluded such phenomena as impossible, and hence had excluded them from consideration by the conscious mind.

At this point it seems to me worthwhile to ‘verify’ psychic phenomena in a more systematic way. Even though none of the following types of evidence would be accepted by a scientific critic as objective proof, following from our earlier subjective and objective phraseologies, the categories in the following questionnaire may be useful and recognizable to those who can accept personal accounts as the next best thing to ‘objective evidence’.

Verifying’ psychic phenomena

Our future techno-anatomy?

In the next hundred years or so, if scientists get a free hand, we can look forward with some apprehension to neural or electronic add-ons to enhance considerably to our thinking power and perhaps even make for effective telepathy through cellular linkage to telecommunications equipment. We can expect stem cell replacement of the brain and organs, effective immortality as cyborgs if we want it, not to mention genetic engineering of the human body to adapt it to different environments such as space or the deep sea, and to make it immune to different diseases. These are not prospects that entirely fill me with enthusiasm, but I mention them simply to illustrate that using new memes, we can ‘progress’ onwards and upwards in our breakneck evolution through an ever-closer marriage of our physical bodies with technology and bioengineering. We no longer need to wait for natural selection to achieve this. In fact, natural selection has probably played its major part in getting us to the ‘jump off’ point we are at now. Now we have mapped the human genome, however superficially, our future physical evolution is likely to be self-initiated and only dependent on technological advance and the social will to apply it, or otherwise. All of the discussion in this chapter is largely by the way as far as the theme of this book is concerned. I am perhaps more interested to suggest that perhaps there is some ancient ‘hard wiring’ that we have neglected. In fact, an alternative way forward may be to eliminate at least temporarily the dominance of memes on our mind, and in the silence after their temporary exit, find out what there is of interest in that box of tricks left us by our ancestors, the Cro-Magnon and earlier proto-men. Undoubtedly to my mind they had perceptual skills that we have lost with our strong dominance by left brain thinking.

As I have been discussing, memes attach to other memes that have compatible elements in order to form ‘trains of thought’ that lead the mind to pre-programmed conclusions. Such trains of thought can be considered as colonies of aggregated memes. Examples of these so-called aggregations of memes have been called memetic structures. Some examples of memetic structures are ‘points of view’, ‘schools of thought’, scientific methodologies, architectural designs, symphonies, philosophies, moral codes, and even sets of religious dogmas or systems of religious belief. Some of these clusters of memes are likely to overlap, or parts of them become detached. An example: even atheists in a predominantly catholic country such as Italy may have strong views on the role of the family, or the importance of charity, or of helping one’s fellow men, while stoutly denying that they share the Christian heritage of the majority of their countrymen. Thus, some of the memes that are central to Christian beliefs, such as ‘God created man’, ‘Good people go to heaven’, will be reinforced as components of the implicate order since they are accessed by many Catholics as basic axioms, and in so doing will affect those who are not of this creed. Others, such as the requirement to attend church every Sunday, or to be chaste before marriage, are probably less frequently invoked, and accumulate less of what may be called spiritual energy in the implicate realm. In fact some memes will inevitably be dropped from an aggregation of memes over time and replaced by new ones from the global consciousness, as the whole memetic structure evolves under the impact of sociological change. We can see examples of this fairly commonly in the news: for example, the call for marriage ceremonies and for rights of adoption by homosexual couples, the ordination of female priests, or the need to respond to sexually transmittable diseases such as Aids by the use of contraceptives, all pose difficulties for the Catholic hierarchy. Without flexibility however, at a certain point, these new memes may become ‘the tail that wags the dog’ and their rejection by the church hierarchy in the face of widespread social acceptance will decrease markedly the numbers contributing psychic energy to the old forms. At this point, a paradigm shift can be said to be underway.

I learned of ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru the previous year, and was curious to experience a shamanic initiation par excellence. The shaman, Diego Palma I was to work with is one of a new breed of ayahuascero (www.ayahuasca-wasi.com): an educated man who accompanies the effects of ayahuasca by singing praises with his guitar to ‘Hari Krishna’, in place of the ‘icaros’ or traditional songs local shamans use to smooth our experience of this hallucinogen. The Hindu theme fitted well with the oriental-baroque visual experience of ayahuasca, which has a definitely non-Christian feel to it; resembling a dream of participating in some oriental ceremony. This suggests to me that many jungle cults (as in India, Bali), were influenced by similar experiences.

We reached the lodge by motor skiff from Puerto Maldonado, set on the banks of the Madre de Dios River, a tributary of the Amazon. About half a kilometre from the lodge a forest trail led to the thatched roof of the ceremonial temple; a building some 15 metres in diameter with a covered entry porch looking onto a forest clearing. Our first appointment with Ayahuasca was that first evening, which for me was too soon given the ‘visceral’ aspects of this experience, and the fact that two days of travel had left my intestines in a mess. Other participants were in a similar situation: Luis stressed out by work, and Arthur by his recent brush with the law, so perhaps it wasn’t surprising we were the three who had what could be called ‘bad trips’ the first time round. This perhaps illustrates that Ayahuasca, ‘the vine of truth’ used by many tribes of Amazonia is linked to a spirit of a voluptuous woman and often gives back experiences reflecting the state of body and mind of participants. Identifying a ‘hallucinogenic’ vine extract with the spirit of a plant is matter-of-fact knowledge to those with experience of natural ‘hallucinogens’ such as ayahuasca and peyote, and separates the traditional ceremony from simple drug-taking. Experienced users see this as a sacrament permitting a higher form of vision, and not a ‘hallucination’. In the ceremonial context evolved around its use the ‘ayahuascero’ or shaman is the guide through an almost telepathic contact with the participants. After a large cup of Ayahuasca at the start of the ceremony, Diego could move through the darkness of the temple, playing the guitar, singing his ‘icaros’, and supporting those having difficulties.

After praying to Pancho-Mama the goddess of the Earth, we kneeled before the ayahuascero and received a cup of a moderately foul concoction for a few moments before draining it, while thanking the ayahuasca spirit with the spoken dedication: ‘Causay-Paj’ (for life), and making a wish for some particular illumination. My wish was to experience more clearly the subtle energy that I have come to see over the last few years, and I kept my eyes open throughout the experience.

The ceremony began at 9.30 pm and continued until dawn the next day. Despite the blackness of the lodge, and the faint light coming through the screen windows, my vision improved: a glow surrounded things as the extract took effect. After 40 minutes I was ‘in it’: being battered by visions that continued until about 4 in the morning. During this long interval I was flinching since the visual experiences were all ‘in my face’ so to speak, though my face seemed to have disappeared, and I couldn’t say where the ‘outside’ component ended and the internal one began. The fact that there was no sense of inside or outside caused a feeling of anguish, added to by the impression that I was exposed; visible and accessible to entities I felt surrounded us: a ‘third eye’ type of perception. The experience started when the lower edge of the window 15 metres away extended towards me to form a black line lying right across the inside of my eye like a bar. Below it a swirl of baroque surfaces and stylised images of plants and animals, all tiled in a mosaic of bright colours. These surged towards me, billowing upwards continuously – brightly coloured and invasive. This continual motion went on for several hours, accompanied by the sensation that my face was itching. I felt ‘threads’ in my mouth like hairs that I could not locate with my tongue or spit out. The sound of the ‘icaros’ from Diego seemed to synchronize the visions, and was punctuated by groans, sighs and the sounds of vomiting, which I shortly joined in with, using the bucket on my knees, that I later clutched as the most precious relict in the world.

At one point I heard what seemed to be the scream of a jaguar, but when we discussed the session afterwards, I learned this was Isobella, an ayahuasca adept, exaggerated the vomiting noise for internal cleansing, both of the body and of spiritual contamination. As she demonstrated later, she opened her jaws wide and stuck her tongue far out like a gargoyle, to accompany her outflow.

Now I have to speak about Luis’s experience who sat between me and the door, since this was terrible: he saw the screen door open, but nobody physical entered. He spent the following 4 hours repelling an ‘entity’ in a black business suit he referred to as ‘the devil’, who kept touching him and asking him to come with him. Later he saw a room full of insane people and was frightened they would notice him and drag him in amongst them. Given his catholic upbringing, he prayed to the Virgin Mary, promising to live less sinfully and to leave more space for spiritual activities in his business-dominated life. His reaction, like mine the next day, was that he was certainly not going to repeat this experience. What was relevant to me is what Luis said in the after-session discussion the following day, that he saw me suffering, vomiting, and swearing during the early part of my experience, but that I calmed down when a tall dark figure behind me started to massage my shoulders – I vaguely remember this, but can’t see how it was possible, since I was braced back against the wall through this whole experience. Others also said they saw the same entity around me, whom I interpreted as the protective ‘higher self’ or guardian spirit I had begun to feel several years ago when I began this search.

Diego persuaded us not to be too influenced by these negative experiences, since the first session is in some sense cleansing, though he said it had been one of the most disturbing sessions in his experience. Two days later, after an excursion during which we ate little and walked 5 kilometers through the jungle heat to swim in a pirana-infested lake (making sure not to have any cuts on us beforehand!), we began the second session that evening. We’d learned from the first experience, and started this second session with purification and mutual bonding exercises led by Isobella – these consolidated the rapidly growing companionship which distinguishes these types of activity and makes participating strangers into a species of ‘tribe’. Mutual protection and care is an important aspect of psychic adventures, since the medicine removes our protective barriers to outside ‘dangers’, perhaps for the first time since childhood. While waiting for this ceremony to start, I exercised (apparently successfully as it turned out), my shamanistic ‘Intent’ by calling on my higher self to prevent entry of mischievous entities into the temple. While doing so I placed my hands against the walls of the temple and imagined placing a golden light barrier around the outside of the building – a technique recommended whenever you are in spiritual danger. Before taking only half a cup of ayahuasca this time, I asked to meet my guardian spirit during the session. I wore the ‘chakra shirt’ bought on the internet, which shows the same multicoloured mosaics I had seen in the previous ceremony.

The phrase ‘bestial beauty’ came to my mind as the rolling clouds of visions began again, recalling the over-ornamented temples I visited in India and Bangkok. The main impression from the whole experience was that the world we enter with ayahuasca is filled with an alien beauty, in which the events going on there are not related specifically to humanity, hence I felt in one sense an intruder. Sounds during the ceremony were filled more with significance than usual: thus, the mooing of cows in an adjacent field seemed to announce the imminent appearance of Shiva among us! The visions were equally strong this time, but shorter, and being prepared by the first session helped. The transition from and back to normality was also slower, allowing more details to be experienced. This time I was convinced that what surrounded me was not a figment of my imagination or a hallucination, but some normally-hidden aspect of reality that I had already partially experienced in earlier shamanic activities.

The second time, the visions again began with roiling clouds of tiled surfaces washing ‘into my face’; but these soon gave way to a waterfall of sparkling colours that flowed into the room through the mesh windows, to ‘feed’ a geometric structure that built itself in the middle of the room, it being made of cubes, pyramids, lines and surfaces; forming a mandala-like in three-dimensions, which moved up and down the room, repeatedly washing against the front of my brain like a steam roller, or like storm waves breaking on a beach: causing me to flinch at each impact. Walter, a doctor from Chile was sighing ecstatically at this time, and later reported the same structure, saying he was in Nirvana and taking the rest of us along with him. I didn’t quite share his full enthusiasm, despite it being a sublime manifestation of the universe pouring down on us from the night sky. In fact through all these experiences I found it necessary to look at these visions in repeated short glimpses, since the sinuous movement of the patterns was the main cause of my sense of nausea. Again I had the impression that I was looking through the shell of my aura to see the energies flowing into the room.

As I went back inside, the pressure of the visions decreased. I settled down on my mat, almost in comfort, and propped my head against the wall on the pillow I had brought from the cabin. I wrapped the thick blanket around me against the intense shivering that comes with the ayahuasca experience. Looking casually over to the window to my left, I was amazed to see some 3 or 4 figures standing outside the temple looking in through the window. My first reaction was to note that although they had heads, they were not human: a multi-coloured ‘skin’ covered with excrescences or long fibres hung down from their muzzles which had hints of animal snouts. My impression was that they resembled Balinese stick puppets, or even Mayan kings with their fantastic headdresses. Several days later in Cusco, I saw pictures of the Nazca gods (the civilization prior to the Incas) depicted on pottery vessels from around 400 AD. These were like the entities that peered in through the windows. My impression is that they were nature spirits of the forest, curious about our ceremony, and I wondered if they had been excluded by my golden circle.

Altogether, my impression after this second experience was that ayahuasca, though not a pleasure, is generally benign, but the anguish was still there. Despite this, I felt no enthusiasm to experience the third session two days later, though it is interesting that Luis decided he needed to affront the experience again after skipping the second session. (Friends from the seminar sent messages a week later by e-mail, saying the third session had been light and peaceful, with no traumas). I felt the need to internalise the experience before repeating it, since the lessons of both sessions seemed to take time to absorb. Even though I regret that I missed the third and final ceremony, I left for Cusco and the unbreathable heights of the Andes at 3600 m; marvelling that a country spanning 4000 metres or more of inhabited verticality resembles the Shikasta novels of Doris Lessing, with beings and cultures occupying different ‘shells’ of the biosphere. This must have given a richness to the human and religious experience of Peru, before it was cruelly crushed by the Spanish invasion.

Encouraging to know however that some of the native wisdom and esoteric sources of knowledge still persist into the modern day. They offer a spiritual way forward in this materialistic age. The most encouraging aspect for me of these experiences was to confirm that I have a guardian angel, and that my dim but accurate impression of how living energy fills the world is a true one.