Since I've been in a fair few debates with ESP deniers over the last year or so, I thought it might make for a good post to compile some of the most common arguments they tend to make against Psi and how I would refute them.
Myth: "There has never been any scientific evidence for ESP/Psi."
Fact: More than 140 years of independently replicated experimental evidence under strictly controlled conditions within Parapsychology have given us a clear answer to whether or not Psi exists and this answer is unambigiously in the affirmative. The invention of meta-analysis means that over the course of massive numbers of replication attempts, many of the most well known Psi experiments have achieved a level of statistical significance above six sigma (odds against chance of a million to one) and in some cases seven sigma (odds against chance of a trillion to one). Etzel Cardeña, Parapsychologist and Thorsen Professor of Psychology at Lund University in Sweden, published a 2018 meta-analysis in the APA journal concerning the experimental evidence for psi that looked at over 1000 experiments and contained commentary from various Parapsychologists and Physicists. Cardeña concluded that the experimental evidence for Psi was as strong as any other phenomena accepted in Psychology. In response, two skeptics, Alcock and Reber, wrote a rebuttal paper which they openly admitted that they refused to look at any of the experimental evidence because it contradicted their established beliefs.
You can also read many of the relevant papers here:
http://www.deanradin.com/evidence/evidence.htm
Myth: "Meta-analysis is unreliable because of the file drawer effect which means that negative results can go unpublished in order to attain a result that looks significant but really isn't."
Fact: This argument has been addressed by Parapsychologists many times but that hasn't stopped skeptics from continuing to repeat it. Whilst meta-analysis does come with the risk that negative results can sometimes be shelved, we know this isn't a serious problem in Parapsychology because all of the major experiments have simply had too many published trials run for it to be possible for researchers to have run enough trials with unpublished negative results within the relevant timeframe that could conceivably drop the overall result to chance levels. Furthermore, Susan Blackmore who is a hardcore skeptic investigated the possibility that a file drawer effect could nullify the positive result of the Ganzfeld Telepathy experiments and concluded that the shelved replication attempts would have only added to the statistical significance. Lastly, funnel plot graphs allow Parapsychologists to estimate how many replication attempts have likely been shelved and assess their effect on statistical significance from there. Suffice to say, this is another argument thrown around by skeptics that doesn't have much, if any, merit.
Myth: "There is no mechanism that would allow for Psi."
Fact: There are mutiple interpretations of Quantum Mechanics that would allow for and in some cases even imply the existence of Psi. You can read about some of them here. Skeptics are very fond of claiming that Psi would violate the "laws of physics" usually without specifying what law would be broken, using an outdated Classical understanding of physics and/or failing to explain why it would be a problem if Psi did violate our understanding of the laws of physics when new experimental evidence has lead to this changing again and again anyway.
Myth: "James Randi offered a million dollar challenge for anyone who could prove they had psychic abilities and no one was ever able to win this."
Fact: There is a fair amount I could easily say about this but I'm going to keep it fairly brief. I'll start by pointing out that even if there weren't a million problems with both the JRE Challenge and the person adminstering it, the simple truth of the matter is that Randi isn't a scientist and scientific proof doesn't proceed off prizes, it proceeds off independent replication under scientific conditions - neither of which can be found within the JRE Challenge. Not only does Randi have a huge grudge against the paranormal but there are terminal problems with the requirements of the Challenge in relation to Parapsychological experiments, one being that it requires them to achieve absolutely mammoth effect sizes that would never be seen as justifiable in mainstream science.
On a more personal note, I know of someone who worked for Randi and who was a hardcore skeptic before they started having psychic experiences themselves. They confirmed to me that that the Challenge is Randi's business model and can never be passed a result. In effect, the Challenge serves as a PR stunt and there is a considerable amount of research to suggest that organized skepticism in regards to Psi has functioned more as a PR campaign than a science based approach from the beginning.
Myth: "People who believe in the paranormal are just gulible and suffer from a lack of critical thinking skills."
Fact: The avaliable research on this subject suggests that there is no difference in the critical thinking abilities of skeptics and believers.
Myth: "If Psi were real then it would be accepted by academia."
Fact: Aside from the fact that surveys have shown that most academics don't think things like Telepathy and Precognition are impossible at all, even Ray Hyman and Chris French (two of the most prolific skeptics) have conceded that most psychologists have no idea about the existence of the experimental evidence for Psi, hence this cannot be taken as a meaningful scientific rejection of something,
Academia denied the experimental evidence that bats used ultrasound to travel for over 120 years so it really shouldn't be difficult to see how it could be so resistant to something like Psi which challenges certain assumptions that have been regarded by Western Academics as Sacred Cows for several centuries.
Myth: "Richard Wiseman refuted the evidence for Psi and showed it to be baseless."
Fact: Wiseman's criticisms of Parapsychology and the Ganzfeld Telepathy experiments in particular have been soundly refuted.
Wiseman has also conceded that Psi has met the standard for scientific proof.
I think I'll publish this with the list as it is for now and perhaps add more examples over time. Suffice to say, the "skeptics" case against Psi and Parapsychology is almost entirely meritless.
Sunday, July 26, 2020
Thursday, April 9, 2020
Does Occams Razor really favour Materialism?
A common argument from materialists is that Occams Razor favours their viewpoint. Materialism is a philosophical view that states that everything in existence is reducible to matter which is defined quantitively in terms of mass, frequency, momentum etc, etc whilst qualities like taste, colour and pain are said to be generated epiphenonmenally by the brain. Materialists also believe that consciousness is produced by the brain and is identical with brain states although the eliminative materialists (who I don't intend to discuss further today) such as Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland believe that consciousness is an illusion and doesn't actually exist at all. Materialism is therefore incompatible with other well known philosophical worldviews such as panpsychism, metaphysical idealism or interactive dualism as a few examples.
Invented by a 14th century Franciscan Friar by the name of William of Ockham, Occams Razor postulates that if there are multiple potential explanations for a phenomenon then the explanation that requires the smallest number of assumptions, i.e the simplest theory, is usually correct. There is a caveat here however, and this will be essential to my argument, that the application of the Razor is only valid when both explanations are equally plausible and even in this case, it is not universally valid. In this post I intend to argue that whilst this argument that the Razor favours materialism may look compelling to a lot of people, the truth is that Occams Razor is actually anything but favourable to materialism when thought about critically. I should add that there won't be anything original in any of my arguments, I'm just aiming to write a piece that combines the most crucial arguments against this outlook into one post.
Before I dive into my reasons for why I think this however, I want to quickly outline some of the reasons that I've been able to deduce as to why materialists think they have a good argument here. I will not claim to be able to produce an exhaustive list of the reasons why someone would become a materialist but I'll do my best to outline what I think the major reasons are. For starters, I can see that it's easy to look at our biological origins as a result of Darwinian evolution, the vast size of the universe and the amount of suffering in the world and from all this conclude that our existence is a random accident. It may well be that it is and this idea doesn't necessarily validate materialism or mean that consciousness isn't fundamental to existence rather than something produced by the brain for some evolutionary purpose (the latter is a common argument by materialists for the existence of consciousness but as we will see later it has its share of problems). Nevertheless, I can understand why some people look at these things and become materialists as a result.
There is also an undeniable relationship between brain states and conscious states (although it may not be as straight forward as materialists like to think it is ) which materialists often take as conclusive proof that the mind is the brain and therefore dies when it dies. This assumption is so common in academia that many people, consciously or perhaps unconsciously, think that the scientific method and science itself are identical with materialism when the latter is at most a philosophical interpretation of scientific data. One also might be inclined to suspect that the backlash against religion that has grown increasingly in strength in the west since the enlightenment plays quite a large role in academic hostility towards parapsychology and anything else that doesn't fit easily into the materialist paradigm. Lastly, in the modern age, it's common for a lot of people to look at the world and simply assume that what you see is what you get.
Where to begin in demonstrating why I think these arguments don't line up? For starters, it's common for materialists to mistakenly assume that materialism is simply the belief that everything that exists is physical. In actuality, what reductionist materialism states about reality is more specific than this as it claims that everything in the physical world is reducible to quantitive measurements such as mass, frequency and velocity whilst claiming that the brain somehow produces our perception of qualities like colour, taste, pain etc, etc. In other words, the redness of the colour red is fully reducible to a wavelength frequency. As critics of materialism have pointed out, this reductionism creates an insurpassable explanatory gap because a purely quantitive description of reality can never capture the qualitive aspects of experience and thus can't be considered a complete description of existence. For example, one can know the wavelength frequency of a particular red but knowing that frequency wouldn't enable a blind person to be able to experience the redness of that red in their head because there is something inherently qualitative in the experience of doing so. This problem is known as the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" as coined by Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers. As computer scientist and metaphysical idealist Bernado Kastrup puts it:
What is perhaps equally problematic in the reductionist model is that if the brain as a physical organ can only be defined in quantative terms, as this model claims, then it seems impossible that it could generate qualities or qualia epiphenomenally since it would not possess these in the first place. It's worth noting here that whatever their issues might be, none of the major alternatives to reductionist materialism suffer from problems as intractable as this. So right from the get go, making the argument that Occam's Razor favours this model is highly problematic in my eyes because I don't accept that the competing models are equal in their explanatory power.
Another weakness of reductive materialism is that it struggles to provide any compelling reason as to why consciousness should exist if it is just an epiphenomenon that doesn't do anything and is at the whim of unconscious processes within the brain. Some might argue that it is a necessary for making the brain care more about survival but there is really no evidence that this actually occurs and the ever expanding ability of AI to carry out more and more tasks without consciousness suggests that it would be superfluous. Some materialists like evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne have suggest that consciousness could be a spandrel, i.e accidental byproduct of the complexity of the brain as it developed over time. As Kastup pointed out in his reply to Coyne, most spandrels have been shown to serve some functional purpose, there is no reason to believe that the complexity required for strong cognitive skills and for the production of consciousness would look similar. He also notes that this argument also fails to explain why consciousness appears to be present to some degree in organisms that don't appear to have the required complexity for this argument to be plausible. In a minute, I'll also show why mind-matter experiments in parapsychology also have troubling implications for the view that the mind is an epiphemenon that doesn't do anything.
Furthermore, while the undeniable correlation between brain state and mind can serve as an argument for the materialist notion that the former is a product of the latter, it can equally be made to fit a transmission theory of the mind-brain relationship in which the brain serves as a filter or intermediary for mind just as a TV set serves as a means for transmission of the content it displays without ever being the source of or containing the content in question. Chris Carter discusses this model in more detail:
At this point, putting aside the earlier philosophical arguments against reductive materialism dicussed in this post, one might be tempted to argue, even if a transmission based understanding of consciousness can be plausibly reconciled with the relationship between the brain and mind that it is still simpler to presume that the materialist production theory of brain and mind is correct. Unfortunately for this argument, there exists a wealth of experimental data in parapsychology to support the existence of extra sensory perception (ESP or psi), some of which is documented here by Dean Radin. Before you go dismissing parapsychology as a quack or fringe science, please consider the fact that the Parapsychological Association is an affiliated organization of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (when no skeptical organization is) and that parapsychologists have published their work in the most prestigious science journals in the world. Meta-analysis, which is now used as an experimental method all across the sciences was also invented in parapsychology. In fact, a recent and comprehensive meta-analysis of the experimental evidence for ESP by Parapsychologist Etzel Cardeña stated that:
Furthermore, although skeptics have devoted considerable time and resources to lengthy and often fanatical attacks on parapsychology, much of this has been shown to be meritless as one can see if they take a look at Johann Baptista and Max Derakhshani's lengthy and meticulous critical analysis of CSICOP skeptic Richard Wiseman's criticisms of the field and the Ganzfeld Telepathy experiments in particular. Nancy L. Zingrone also devoted her Ph.D thesis to demonstrating that while parapsychology has made major advantages over the last 120 years, the quality of the criticism directed at it has not advanced much at all. Zigrone believes that this is largely a result of the criticism of this field being plagued by a lack of critical thinking, a lack of self-reflection and a lack of openess to communication. While I'm not a parapsychologist, I do have a lot of anecdotal experience in debating with skeptics and that experience would firmly lead me to consider Zigrone's criticism to be entirely valid. In fact as George P.Hansen has noticed in an article published in the American Society for Psychical Research, organized skepticism towards ESP is far less focused on producing scientific research to challenge the findings of parapsychological experiments than it is on an agenda driven public relations campaign to discredit the field through the use of media.
What is the relevance of all this to materialism? Well while it may be possible that the reality of ESP can be reconciled with it this seems highly unlikely as telepathy and field consciousness (both of which have been demonstrated to exist beyond any credible doubt) imply that our individual consciousness is not an epiphenomenal product of the brain that is seperate from everyone elses consciousness but rather than that there is a universal consciousness that our individual consciousness is a part of. Also problematic for materialism is that mind-matter experiments in parapsychology imply that mind can act directly on the physical world which doesn't fit with the materialist argument that mind is an epiphenomenon that doesn't do anything and is controlled by unconscious mechanisms in the brain.
To borrow Kastrup's analogy, our individual consciousness would be like a whirlpool in the ocean. Dean Radin speculated that it's quite likely that we are all constantly having Psi experiences as a result of this but that the brain subconsciously filters almost all of this out the vast majority of the time because the information overload would not be useful to our surivival. A lot of this may seem far out but it's actually supported by several intepretations of quantum physics, Stapp's version of the Copenhagen Interpretation which you can read about here and David Bohm's interpretation which postulates that as well as there being an outer world of separation that we see and interact with, there is also an implicit order in which nothing is separate which explains how quantum entanglement is possible and also explains why the fact that quantum entanglement can't function as a form of information transfer (a criticism that skeptics use routinely) doesn't prevent it from potentially providing a mechanism for ESP/Psi because no information transfer would need to take place in a system whose parts are already all connected. It may also be that quantum physics isn't really needed much to provide a mechanism here as ESP may just be an inherent byproduct of our individual consciousness being interconnected fragments of a universal one.
Potentially even more devastating to the materialist view of consciousness, although not as well established yet as ESP, is that there is now considerable evidence that near death experiences ( commonly referred to NDEs) aren't hallucinations but may actually be real, based on the amount of cases with verified veridical perceptions. I won't dwell on this subject but you can read about it here and here. Suffice to say, this is an exciting field of research that is growing rapidly and that I strongly believe we will know a lot more about within the next decade.
I could continue to go on and on but these are basically my main objections to the assertion that Occams Razor sides with materialism as the best explanatory model for our existence and our consciousness. This is mostly because I think the argument could only be valid if all the competing explanatory models here were equally plausible and for all the reasons given, I don't think that they are at all. Materialism suffers from a huge range of theoretical problems, cognitive bias amongst it's adherents that they don't even appear to be aware of, let alone capable of fixing and has also been challenged by a considerable bulk of experimental evidence. For all these reasons I don't think Occams Razor can be employed as an argument in favour of materialism and I also consider it a worldview in a serious, irredeemable state of crisis
Invented by a 14th century Franciscan Friar by the name of William of Ockham, Occams Razor postulates that if there are multiple potential explanations for a phenomenon then the explanation that requires the smallest number of assumptions, i.e the simplest theory, is usually correct. There is a caveat here however, and this will be essential to my argument, that the application of the Razor is only valid when both explanations are equally plausible and even in this case, it is not universally valid. In this post I intend to argue that whilst this argument that the Razor favours materialism may look compelling to a lot of people, the truth is that Occams Razor is actually anything but favourable to materialism when thought about critically. I should add that there won't be anything original in any of my arguments, I'm just aiming to write a piece that combines the most crucial arguments against this outlook into one post.
Before I dive into my reasons for why I think this however, I want to quickly outline some of the reasons that I've been able to deduce as to why materialists think they have a good argument here. I will not claim to be able to produce an exhaustive list of the reasons why someone would become a materialist but I'll do my best to outline what I think the major reasons are. For starters, I can see that it's easy to look at our biological origins as a result of Darwinian evolution, the vast size of the universe and the amount of suffering in the world and from all this conclude that our existence is a random accident. It may well be that it is and this idea doesn't necessarily validate materialism or mean that consciousness isn't fundamental to existence rather than something produced by the brain for some evolutionary purpose (the latter is a common argument by materialists for the existence of consciousness but as we will see later it has its share of problems). Nevertheless, I can understand why some people look at these things and become materialists as a result.
There is also an undeniable relationship between brain states and conscious states (although it may not be as straight forward as materialists like to think it is ) which materialists often take as conclusive proof that the mind is the brain and therefore dies when it dies. This assumption is so common in academia that many people, consciously or perhaps unconsciously, think that the scientific method and science itself are identical with materialism when the latter is at most a philosophical interpretation of scientific data. One also might be inclined to suspect that the backlash against religion that has grown increasingly in strength in the west since the enlightenment plays quite a large role in academic hostility towards parapsychology and anything else that doesn't fit easily into the materialist paradigm. Lastly, in the modern age, it's common for a lot of people to look at the world and simply assume that what you see is what you get.
Where to begin in demonstrating why I think these arguments don't line up? For starters, it's common for materialists to mistakenly assume that materialism is simply the belief that everything that exists is physical. In actuality, what reductionist materialism states about reality is more specific than this as it claims that everything in the physical world is reducible to quantitive measurements such as mass, frequency and velocity whilst claiming that the brain somehow produces our perception of qualities like colour, taste, pain etc, etc. In other words, the redness of the colour red is fully reducible to a wavelength frequency. As critics of materialism have pointed out, this reductionism creates an insurpassable explanatory gap because a purely quantitive description of reality can never capture the qualitive aspects of experience and thus can't be considered a complete description of existence. For example, one can know the wavelength frequency of a particular red but knowing that frequency wouldn't enable a blind person to be able to experience the redness of that red in their head because there is something inherently qualitative in the experience of doing so. This problem is known as the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" as coined by Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers. As computer scientist and metaphysical idealist Bernado Kastrup puts it:
"there is nothing about the parameters of material arrangements—say, the position and momentum of the atoms constituting our brain—in terms of which we could deduce, at least in principle, how it feels to fall in love, to taste wine, or to listen to a Vivaldi sonata."
What is perhaps equally problematic in the reductionist model is that if the brain as a physical organ can only be defined in quantative terms, as this model claims, then it seems impossible that it could generate qualities or qualia epiphenomenally since it would not possess these in the first place. It's worth noting here that whatever their issues might be, none of the major alternatives to reductionist materialism suffer from problems as intractable as this. So right from the get go, making the argument that Occam's Razor favours this model is highly problematic in my eyes because I don't accept that the competing models are equal in their explanatory power.
Another weakness of reductive materialism is that it struggles to provide any compelling reason as to why consciousness should exist if it is just an epiphenomenon that doesn't do anything and is at the whim of unconscious processes within the brain. Some might argue that it is a necessary for making the brain care more about survival but there is really no evidence that this actually occurs and the ever expanding ability of AI to carry out more and more tasks without consciousness suggests that it would be superfluous. Some materialists like evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne have suggest that consciousness could be a spandrel, i.e accidental byproduct of the complexity of the brain as it developed over time. As Kastup pointed out in his reply to Coyne, most spandrels have been shown to serve some functional purpose, there is no reason to believe that the complexity required for strong cognitive skills and for the production of consciousness would look similar. He also notes that this argument also fails to explain why consciousness appears to be present to some degree in organisms that don't appear to have the required complexity for this argument to be plausible. In a minute, I'll also show why mind-matter experiments in parapsychology also have troubling implications for the view that the mind is an epiphemenon that doesn't do anything.
Furthermore, while the undeniable correlation between brain state and mind can serve as an argument for the materialist notion that the former is a product of the latter, it can equally be made to fit a transmission theory of the mind-brain relationship in which the brain serves as a filter or intermediary for mind just as a TV set serves as a means for transmission of the content it displays without ever being the source of or containing the content in question. Chris Carter discusses this model in more detail:
"The argument in its essence is that the transmission and production hypotheses are equally compatible with the facts materialism tries to explain - such as the effects of senility, drugs, and brain damage on consciousness - but that the hypothesis of transmission has the advantage of providing a framework for understanding other phenomena that must remain utterly inexplicable on the basis of the materialistic hypothesis. The materialists simply deny that these other phenomena even exist, as they rightly realize that the existence of these phenomena threatens their ideology with extinction."
At this point, putting aside the earlier philosophical arguments against reductive materialism dicussed in this post, one might be tempted to argue, even if a transmission based understanding of consciousness can be plausibly reconciled with the relationship between the brain and mind that it is still simpler to presume that the materialist production theory of brain and mind is correct. Unfortunately for this argument, there exists a wealth of experimental data in parapsychology to support the existence of extra sensory perception (ESP or psi), some of which is documented here by Dean Radin. Before you go dismissing parapsychology as a quack or fringe science, please consider the fact that the Parapsychological Association is an affiliated organization of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (when no skeptical organization is) and that parapsychologists have published their work in the most prestigious science journals in the world. Meta-analysis, which is now used as an experimental method all across the sciences was also invented in parapsychology. In fact, a recent and comprehensive meta-analysis of the experimental evidence for ESP by Parapsychologist Etzel Cardeña stated that:
"The evidence provides cumulative support for the reality of psi, which cannot be readily explained away by the quality of the studies, fraud, selective reporting, experimental or analytical incompetence, or other frequent criticisms. The evidence for psi is comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines, although there is no consensual understanding of them"
Furthermore, although skeptics have devoted considerable time and resources to lengthy and often fanatical attacks on parapsychology, much of this has been shown to be meritless as one can see if they take a look at Johann Baptista and Max Derakhshani's lengthy and meticulous critical analysis of CSICOP skeptic Richard Wiseman's criticisms of the field and the Ganzfeld Telepathy experiments in particular. Nancy L. Zingrone also devoted her Ph.D thesis to demonstrating that while parapsychology has made major advantages over the last 120 years, the quality of the criticism directed at it has not advanced much at all. Zigrone believes that this is largely a result of the criticism of this field being plagued by a lack of critical thinking, a lack of self-reflection and a lack of openess to communication. While I'm not a parapsychologist, I do have a lot of anecdotal experience in debating with skeptics and that experience would firmly lead me to consider Zigrone's criticism to be entirely valid. In fact as George P.Hansen has noticed in an article published in the American Society for Psychical Research, organized skepticism towards ESP is far less focused on producing scientific research to challenge the findings of parapsychological experiments than it is on an agenda driven public relations campaign to discredit the field through the use of media.
What is the relevance of all this to materialism? Well while it may be possible that the reality of ESP can be reconciled with it this seems highly unlikely as telepathy and field consciousness (both of which have been demonstrated to exist beyond any credible doubt) imply that our individual consciousness is not an epiphenomenal product of the brain that is seperate from everyone elses consciousness but rather than that there is a universal consciousness that our individual consciousness is a part of. Also problematic for materialism is that mind-matter experiments in parapsychology imply that mind can act directly on the physical world which doesn't fit with the materialist argument that mind is an epiphenomenon that doesn't do anything and is controlled by unconscious mechanisms in the brain.
To borrow Kastrup's analogy, our individual consciousness would be like a whirlpool in the ocean. Dean Radin speculated that it's quite likely that we are all constantly having Psi experiences as a result of this but that the brain subconsciously filters almost all of this out the vast majority of the time because the information overload would not be useful to our surivival. A lot of this may seem far out but it's actually supported by several intepretations of quantum physics, Stapp's version of the Copenhagen Interpretation which you can read about here and David Bohm's interpretation which postulates that as well as there being an outer world of separation that we see and interact with, there is also an implicit order in which nothing is separate which explains how quantum entanglement is possible and also explains why the fact that quantum entanglement can't function as a form of information transfer (a criticism that skeptics use routinely) doesn't prevent it from potentially providing a mechanism for ESP/Psi because no information transfer would need to take place in a system whose parts are already all connected. It may also be that quantum physics isn't really needed much to provide a mechanism here as ESP may just be an inherent byproduct of our individual consciousness being interconnected fragments of a universal one.
Potentially even more devastating to the materialist view of consciousness, although not as well established yet as ESP, is that there is now considerable evidence that near death experiences ( commonly referred to NDEs) aren't hallucinations but may actually be real, based on the amount of cases with verified veridical perceptions. I won't dwell on this subject but you can read about it here and here. Suffice to say, this is an exciting field of research that is growing rapidly and that I strongly believe we will know a lot more about within the next decade.
I could continue to go on and on but these are basically my main objections to the assertion that Occams Razor sides with materialism as the best explanatory model for our existence and our consciousness. This is mostly because I think the argument could only be valid if all the competing explanatory models here were equally plausible and for all the reasons given, I don't think that they are at all. Materialism suffers from a huge range of theoretical problems, cognitive bias amongst it's adherents that they don't even appear to be aware of, let alone capable of fixing and has also been challenged by a considerable bulk of experimental evidence. For all these reasons I don't think Occams Razor can be employed as an argument in favour of materialism and I also consider it a worldview in a serious, irredeemable state of crisis
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
Ken Wilber's Integral Psychology discussion Part 1
In 2019 I've made it a goal to try and read more again. While my success hasn't been altogether consistent I have certainly read some interesting books this year. Most recently I've been working my way through Ken Wilber's Integral Psychology and it's given me some real food for thought that I'll be discussing in this post. For those unfamiliar with Wilber, he's a writer in Integral Theory and Transpersonal Psychology. What this means is that Wilber aims to take what he deems valid from every framework of thought imaginable from Developmental Psychology to Mahayana Buddhism and combine them into an overarching, integral understanding. Anyone interested in an introduction to Wilber should probably read his 1996 work A Brief History of Everything as I did before moving onto the work in discussion here. I should make it clear that this post is in no way intended to be a review but a surface summary of what I've taken from the book and perhaps something that might be of interest to anyone totally new to Wilber. I'll also be dividing my summary into three posts, in accordance with the three parts of the book.
In Integral Psychology Wilber makes use of countless sources from both East and West with the aim of drawing out a complete model of human consciousness and it's development within both the individual and on a collective level. Early on Wilber contends that - with the exception of the modern West - the most important thinkers of every civilization (he gives the examples of Plotinus and Sri Aurobindo here) have recognized a Great Nest of Being that incorporates different levels of consciousness in a very similar way generally categorized as Matter (physics), Life (biology), Mind (psychology), Soul (theology), Spirit (mysticism) and Spirit in a Non-Dual form. Wilber makes it clear that while these categories can be simplified or broken down further, he considers the version presented to be the result of strong cross-cultural agreement over thousands of years. It should be noted that while Wilber uses the word "levels' in reference to the qualitative distinctness of the Great Nest he also uses the word "structure" to emphasize the different levels as holistic patterns and describes them as "waves" to avoid the misunderstanding that the degrees of the Great Nest are rigidly seperate from one another.
Wilber then proceeds to use the Great Nest to demonstrate his concept of holarchy. Wilber defines each level as a holon, something that is a whole within itself but also part of a greater whole. An atom is whole in itself but also a part of a molecule, a molecule is whole in itself but also part of a cell which is part of an organism and upwards. Each level transcends yet includes the previous level and and this results in Spirit, the highest level of Wilber's Great Nest, being both transcendent and immanent. None of this of course, would be acceptable to anyone who subscribes to the Scientific Materialist paradigm. If you are looking for a book that raises evidence against that worldview in the form of NDE or ESP research for example then this is the wrong one as Wilber simply states the existence of transpersonal states of being matter of factly and doesn't attempt to provide proof. I don't say this as a criticism, rather that it seems likely that Wilber intended the book for people who already believed in or were at least very open to these ideas.
Wilber asserts that through this model of consciousness flow developmental lines of which there are around two dozen. These include moral, cognitive, creative and spiritual lines (meditative stages and religious faith are both listed as examples of this). One thing I found really interesting here is that while all developmental lines always pass through the same waves of the Great Nest, they do not do so at the same rate and progress at different rates for every individual. Hence it's possible to have for somone to be at a highly spiritually developed whilst being at a much lower level of moral development. Maybe this explains why a lot of spiritual guru types turn out to be sex abusers or financial exploiters of their followers. Then again, a lot of them were probably just charlatans to begin with.
Next, Wilber discusses the self that moves along these developmental lines and he divides this into two, the first being an experienced "I" which he calls the proximate self and the second being the "me" part of the self which he calls the distal self with the two of them forming the overall self. Wilber's notion of the self is developmental as it proceeds through the Great Nest. What is considered the subject "I" of one phase in an individual's psychological development becomes an "object" in the next phase with Wilber stating that according to the mystics of every spiritual tradition that this process with the realization of the subject's oneness with pure consciousness. It is the proximate self, according to Wilber, that undergoes consciousness evolution and that navigates through the waves of the Great Nest of Being.
This discussion of the self allows Wilber to break down this model of consciousness development into smaller fragments and this includes a considerable discussion and comparison of the works and theories of various developmental psychologists such as Robert Kegan, Jane Loevinger, Clare Graves and Don Beck (whose Spiral Dynamics are discussed more in the next chapter). I don't claim to really know anything about developmental psychology so I can't say if the ideas of all the theorists mentioned (and there are a lot of them) line up with Wilber's views as well as he seems to think or if their theories enjoy the prominence in developmental psychology that he asserts they do.
In the last section of part one, Wilber outlines the first and second tier of Spiral Dynamics, a system that allows him to colour categorize different perspectives that he describes as not only phases that a self passes through but as permanent capacities and coping strategies that can be activated whenever a situation that requires them presents itself.
First Tier:
Beige. Archaic-Instinctual: Wilber describes this as a basic level of survival where food, water and sex take priority with the distinct self barely being awakened.
Purple: Magical-Animistic. Described as having animistic thinking with good and bad spirits and with kinship and lineage used for political links. Atomistic rather than holistic.
Red: Power Gods. This phase is considered to be the first emergence of a self distinct from the tribe. Wilber describes this phase as powerful, egocentric and heroic. The basis of feudal empires and domination without remorse.
Blue: Conformist Rule. This level is defined by conformist rule based on an absolutist and unquestioned code of conduct and is the typical basis of ancient neighbours.
Orange: Scientific Achievement. A level at which an individual escapes the herd mentality and seeks truth through experimentation and rationalistic, mechanistic explanations of reality. Achievement orientated and focused on economic gain and manipulation of earth's resources.
Green: The Sensitive Self. A level at which the human spirit seeks to free itself from greed and one that values the earth. Multicultural, relativistic and egalitarian. Subjective and nonlinear thinking.
2nd Tier:
Yellow: Integrative. Wilber describes this level as recogizing life as a kaleidoscope of holarchies, systems and forms. Egalitarianism is recognized but so are natural degrees of excellence. Knowledge and competency are valued above rank, power or status.
Turquoise: Holistic. At the turquoise level a universal holistic syste emerges where holons unite feelings with knowledge and all levels of the Great Nest of Being are interwoven into one conscious system.
Perhaps because we don't have any living examples of second tier societies, I find myself feeling uncertain about what they might look like in practice. I've also never read Beck and Cowan's work so I don't know if Wilber's version of spiral dynamics presented here is identical or not.
At the end of this chapter (also the end of part one of the book), Wilber asserts that if an integral psychology is ever to exist in practice that the rupture between premodernity and modernity must be resolved and western scientific materialism will have to give way. In part two I'll attempt to summarize what Wilbur has to say about the transition from premodernity to modernity and what he believes needs to be integrated from both in order to create an integral psychology.
In Integral Psychology Wilber makes use of countless sources from both East and West with the aim of drawing out a complete model of human consciousness and it's development within both the individual and on a collective level. Early on Wilber contends that - with the exception of the modern West - the most important thinkers of every civilization (he gives the examples of Plotinus and Sri Aurobindo here) have recognized a Great Nest of Being that incorporates different levels of consciousness in a very similar way generally categorized as Matter (physics), Life (biology), Mind (psychology), Soul (theology), Spirit (mysticism) and Spirit in a Non-Dual form. Wilber makes it clear that while these categories can be simplified or broken down further, he considers the version presented to be the result of strong cross-cultural agreement over thousands of years. It should be noted that while Wilber uses the word "levels' in reference to the qualitative distinctness of the Great Nest he also uses the word "structure" to emphasize the different levels as holistic patterns and describes them as "waves" to avoid the misunderstanding that the degrees of the Great Nest are rigidly seperate from one another.
Wilber then proceeds to use the Great Nest to demonstrate his concept of holarchy. Wilber defines each level as a holon, something that is a whole within itself but also part of a greater whole. An atom is whole in itself but also a part of a molecule, a molecule is whole in itself but also part of a cell which is part of an organism and upwards. Each level transcends yet includes the previous level and and this results in Spirit, the highest level of Wilber's Great Nest, being both transcendent and immanent. None of this of course, would be acceptable to anyone who subscribes to the Scientific Materialist paradigm. If you are looking for a book that raises evidence against that worldview in the form of NDE or ESP research for example then this is the wrong one as Wilber simply states the existence of transpersonal states of being matter of factly and doesn't attempt to provide proof. I don't say this as a criticism, rather that it seems likely that Wilber intended the book for people who already believed in or were at least very open to these ideas.
Wilber asserts that through this model of consciousness flow developmental lines of which there are around two dozen. These include moral, cognitive, creative and spiritual lines (meditative stages and religious faith are both listed as examples of this). One thing I found really interesting here is that while all developmental lines always pass through the same waves of the Great Nest, they do not do so at the same rate and progress at different rates for every individual. Hence it's possible to have for somone to be at a highly spiritually developed whilst being at a much lower level of moral development. Maybe this explains why a lot of spiritual guru types turn out to be sex abusers or financial exploiters of their followers. Then again, a lot of them were probably just charlatans to begin with.
Next, Wilber discusses the self that moves along these developmental lines and he divides this into two, the first being an experienced "I" which he calls the proximate self and the second being the "me" part of the self which he calls the distal self with the two of them forming the overall self. Wilber's notion of the self is developmental as it proceeds through the Great Nest. What is considered the subject "I" of one phase in an individual's psychological development becomes an "object" in the next phase with Wilber stating that according to the mystics of every spiritual tradition that this process with the realization of the subject's oneness with pure consciousness. It is the proximate self, according to Wilber, that undergoes consciousness evolution and that navigates through the waves of the Great Nest of Being.
This discussion of the self allows Wilber to break down this model of consciousness development into smaller fragments and this includes a considerable discussion and comparison of the works and theories of various developmental psychologists such as Robert Kegan, Jane Loevinger, Clare Graves and Don Beck (whose Spiral Dynamics are discussed more in the next chapter). I don't claim to really know anything about developmental psychology so I can't say if the ideas of all the theorists mentioned (and there are a lot of them) line up with Wilber's views as well as he seems to think or if their theories enjoy the prominence in developmental psychology that he asserts they do.
In the last section of part one, Wilber outlines the first and second tier of Spiral Dynamics, a system that allows him to colour categorize different perspectives that he describes as not only phases that a self passes through but as permanent capacities and coping strategies that can be activated whenever a situation that requires them presents itself.
First Tier:
Beige. Archaic-Instinctual: Wilber describes this as a basic level of survival where food, water and sex take priority with the distinct self barely being awakened.
Purple: Magical-Animistic. Described as having animistic thinking with good and bad spirits and with kinship and lineage used for political links. Atomistic rather than holistic.
Red: Power Gods. This phase is considered to be the first emergence of a self distinct from the tribe. Wilber describes this phase as powerful, egocentric and heroic. The basis of feudal empires and domination without remorse.
Blue: Conformist Rule. This level is defined by conformist rule based on an absolutist and unquestioned code of conduct and is the typical basis of ancient neighbours.
Orange: Scientific Achievement. A level at which an individual escapes the herd mentality and seeks truth through experimentation and rationalistic, mechanistic explanations of reality. Achievement orientated and focused on economic gain and manipulation of earth's resources.
Green: The Sensitive Self. A level at which the human spirit seeks to free itself from greed and one that values the earth. Multicultural, relativistic and egalitarian. Subjective and nonlinear thinking.
2nd Tier:
Yellow: Integrative. Wilber describes this level as recogizing life as a kaleidoscope of holarchies, systems and forms. Egalitarianism is recognized but so are natural degrees of excellence. Knowledge and competency are valued above rank, power or status.
Turquoise: Holistic. At the turquoise level a universal holistic syste emerges where holons unite feelings with knowledge and all levels of the Great Nest of Being are interwoven into one conscious system.
Perhaps because we don't have any living examples of second tier societies, I find myself feeling uncertain about what they might look like in practice. I've also never read Beck and Cowan's work so I don't know if Wilber's version of spiral dynamics presented here is identical or not.
At the end of this chapter (also the end of part one of the book), Wilber asserts that if an integral psychology is ever to exist in practice that the rupture between premodernity and modernity must be resolved and western scientific materialism will have to give way. In part two I'll attempt to summarize what Wilbur has to say about the transition from premodernity to modernity and what he believes needs to be integrated from both in order to create an integral psychology.
Tuesday, January 1, 2019
Book Review: Secret of the Veda - Sri Aurobindo
Since the inception of
the study of the Vedas, through both Indian and European scholarship,
the age and subsequent obscurity of the Rig Veda has caused considerable
confusion in attempts to interpret its meaning and this has commonly
resulted in either naturalistic/ritualistic interpretations or
historical ones. Whilst not denying that these interpretations may
possess some exoteric validity, in Secret of the Veda, Sri Aurobindo
aims to demonstrate the esoteric psychological/spiritual inner layer of
the text.
Most of the book consists of Aurobindo employing his philological method to explain the use of symbolism within the Rg Veda. We learn that the Cows of the Rg Veda represent the divine light and that the Pani's who steal them in the text represent it's concealing in an un-purified conciousness, the seven great rivers represent the metaphysical streams that flow to the Superconscient, and Surya himself represents not just the physical sun but the Superconscient truth itself.
I am not a philologist nor am I in anyway an expert on the Vedas but I found his interpretation compelling and illuminating and it is now easy to consider the Upanishads and Puranas as later developments within the same spiritual philosophy rather than as any kind of spiritual revolt against a ritualistic/materialistic tradition.
I would recommend this text to anyone curious about the Rig Veda and its relationship to the rest of Hinduism as a religious tradition.
Most of the book consists of Aurobindo employing his philological method to explain the use of symbolism within the Rg Veda. We learn that the Cows of the Rg Veda represent the divine light and that the Pani's who steal them in the text represent it's concealing in an un-purified conciousness, the seven great rivers represent the metaphysical streams that flow to the Superconscient, and Surya himself represents not just the physical sun but the Superconscient truth itself.
I am not a philologist nor am I in anyway an expert on the Vedas but I found his interpretation compelling and illuminating and it is now easy to consider the Upanishads and Puranas as later developments within the same spiritual philosophy rather than as any kind of spiritual revolt against a ritualistic/materialistic tradition.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
4 Gram Magic Mushroom Trip Report
This is a report of an experience I had earlier in the year that I submitted to Erowid:
I want to begin this report of my Magic Mushroom trip from last night by saying that so much happened on it that I feel like it will be a real struggle to include all the details that I would like. I must also apologize in advance if my recounting of the timeline feels a bit confused. Nevertheless I will do the best as I feel a deep desire to give the reader some inkling as to what I experienced.
Having taken some time to acquire the amount of Cannabis necessary (My country is experiencing a dry patch) to make the trade with a friend in exchange for four grams of Psilocybe Subaeruginosa, I knew I would be in for an interesting evening. The next day would be my Birthday and so I knew that the majority of this trip would take part on on it. This would be my third trip with my first having involved a 1.7 gram dosage and the second a 2 gram one. I have also had some experiences with Salvia Divinorum including one in which I experienced total ego death. I had prepared for this trip by not eating since dinner which had been around 3 hours ago.
I felt a small amount of anxiety at the unpredictable aspect that always comes into play with the use of these substances but there was really no debate in my mind about whether I should go through with this experience or not. I began to grind the Shrooms up sometime just after 10pm and by 11:08pm I’d made the lemon tek. I allowed this to sit for 20 minutes and then consumed it. I was immediately hit with that interesting feeling of knowing that there was now no turning back...
Knowing that it would be difficult to predict how soon I would start to feel the Shrooms kicking in, I decided to turn off any music on my laptop and simply converse with a few people on Discord and read a few internet articles. I quickly began to feel that the silence was deafening and I’m not sure if that was the first sign of something changing or if it was just my anticipation making me feel that way.
Perhaps around 20-30 minutes in (I will try to do a somewhat better job of keeping track of time in future trips) I felt this feeling that I had felt on my first Shroom trip which was that this wooden cat statue I have on a bookshelf was aware of me and looking at me. This feeling caused me to laugh to myself just like it did on the first occasion I experienced it. Soon after that I felt that I was beginning to feel something of the body high that comes with Shrooms which to me is kind of like a numbing, relaxing sensation in which I feel the urge to lie down. I believe at this point I was still not really seeing anything when I shut my eyes.
As I mentioned in the first paragraph of this report, my recollection of the timeline for this trip is somewhat confused and this is the part where things begin to get muddled. I’ll do my best to reconstruct it as accurately as possible but I think some parts are probably going to be out of order. I think at some point I closed my eyes and began to see the earliest sign of fractal images, possibly some eyes and faces (which as you’ll see, I would see a huge number of later).
I believe at this point that I was starting to feel the nausea quite strongly and so I decided to go to the bathroom just just outside my room to throw up. I think at some point I closed my eyes and began to see the earliest sign of fractal images, possibly some eyes and faces (which as you’ll see, I would see a huge number of later). I quicky felt the presence of this peculiar feminine entity that I also felt was there on my last trip. I didn’t so much seem to directly see it this time but I felt like I caught glimpses of it through the mirror, it’s dark, quite elegant and I feel like it belongs to a different species. I cannot tell if it shows any signs of being aware of me but it’s interesting that I feel like it’s a female presence.
As I vomited into the toilet it began to transform into this dark hole as it had also done on the previous trip. I returned to my room and lay down on my bed again. At some point during the trip I began to feel as if I was being possessed by a being who, if they’d ever been a human person, would have probably been a warlord or tribal leader of some sort. I felt this aggressive confidence swinging through me and I began to reassess who I could be in life. This mindset receded relatively quickly and around this point I was sort of wondering if maybe I’d reached the peak of the trip. Perhaps this would be a disappointing experience compared to what I had expected. Boy, was I wrong...
I don’t recall noticing the fractals gradually increasing in power or anything but suddenly whenever I shut my eyes there would be endless pairs of eyes and faces staring back at me whilst constantly moving whenever I shut my eyes there would be endless pairs of eyes and faces staring back at me whilst constantly moving. I would see these side-on images of what I’ve decided to call alien-goddess type entities some of which had an almost Ancient Egyptian look to them, I saw plenty of the type of fractal like faces that I see in Alex Grey art that seem to proceed infinitely into the background. As I looked at them and they looked back at me I said out loud “I can talk to you...Can you talk to me? Should I talk to you?” I would see mechanical type fractals as well, the type that people do sometimes report seeing. I walked into the bathroom again briefly (as I would do many times this night) and I can’t recall if my eyes were shut but I saw what appeared to be a male being of light and when I looked into at his head there was nothing there except the light just seemed to recede back infinitely making me gasp and mutter “Oh my god...”
Every time I have tried shrooms they have made me cry and this occasion would be no different. Some of my personal demons quickly began to surface and I felt the need to acknowledge the lifetime of hurt they had occurred. This stage might have lasted about 20 minutes but it’s difficult for me to say with any certainty. I really believe that Shrooms force me to get real with myself in a way that can be very confronting.
The trip began to get progressively more unusual. Soon I began to feel that my brain, as my instrument of cognition, had been replaced by something alien resulting in me experiencing the world in a completely different way. I am not a scientist but I began to link physics and biological evolution in my mind in a way I never had before but made sense to me at the time. Just as we are always in freefall, evolution is always moving us forward into history (even if biological changes are something of a slow process). The biggest realization that came from this from a stronger conviction about something I’ve felt for a while which is that we can’t plan for and manage our species effectively on either a global or local level because we don’t understand ourselves and where we are meant to be going well enough to avoid all kinds of misfortune and the capacity for total catastrophe. I saw this in relation to both political events in the world and also in relation to individuals I know or have known in my life.
By this time I had reached what I would consider the peak of the trip and began to experience some pretty powerful things including what seemed like the birth of a planet, a small ball of light, within myself which then expanded outwards in all directions. Whenever I closed my eyes the fractals were simply incredible, I saw a neverending world of eyes and faces that I also seemed to see flashes of as I opened my eyes, some were beautiful, some looked like something out of a zombie movie. I saw cats with 6 pairs of eyes, I also managed to catch one or two glimpses of some beautiful natural scenes including a yellow field that I can only describe as enchanting. I saw beautiful floating 3D model structure that was made up of small balls that twisted and turned to reveal ever more elaborate aspects of itself.
Around this time I needed to vomit again and I can only describe the sensation of this second vomit for the evening as resembling what I imagine transforming from a human into some kind of insectoid species might feel like. I would liken what I experienced to a croaking feeling that seemed to spread itself through my entire body. Like so much of this experience, it saddens me that I can’t adequately put into words what it was that I experienced here. Whenever I would look in the bathroom mirror in the darkness my face would morph in ways that were very creepy or macabre. My face would resemble an insectoid type creature or look very skull like and evil (I have a shaved head). My arm would also look like something off an insectoid creature or would look totally black.
At this point I would look out my bedroom window to see the trees right outside of it full of these evil looking fleshy creatures. I’d almost say they looked a bit like the Flood from the Halo video game series, sort of a combination of the humanoid looking ones and the blobby ones that explode when they get close to you. I’d also see Africa and South America morph into the faces of these monstrosities on the world map on my wall. Eventually they morphed into Grey Aliens as well. I should add that none of this was particularly frightening to me, just intriguing more than anything.
Around sometime after 4am I decided to try and go to sleep but the images I would see every time I closed my eyes had other ideas about this plan and prevented me from doing so. I recall shutting my eyes and seeing this strange, almost giant-rat like creature posing on the ground, that was transparent in a way where I could see larvae (which I presume were its children) moving in and out of its body.
It was not until around 5:00am at the earliest that I was finally able to get some sleep. All in all this was a fascinating experience and the varied and eventful psychedelic experience I have ever had in my life. Mushroom hunting season is coming soon in my country and I hope to do stronger doses in the not too distant future.
I want to begin this report of my Magic Mushroom trip from last night by saying that so much happened on it that I feel like it will be a real struggle to include all the details that I would like. I must also apologize in advance if my recounting of the timeline feels a bit confused. Nevertheless I will do the best as I feel a deep desire to give the reader some inkling as to what I experienced.
Having taken some time to acquire the amount of Cannabis necessary (My country is experiencing a dry patch) to make the trade with a friend in exchange for four grams of Psilocybe Subaeruginosa, I knew I would be in for an interesting evening. The next day would be my Birthday and so I knew that the majority of this trip would take part on on it. This would be my third trip with my first having involved a 1.7 gram dosage and the second a 2 gram one. I have also had some experiences with Salvia Divinorum including one in which I experienced total ego death. I had prepared for this trip by not eating since dinner which had been around 3 hours ago.
I felt a small amount of anxiety at the unpredictable aspect that always comes into play with the use of these substances but there was really no debate in my mind about whether I should go through with this experience or not. I began to grind the Shrooms up sometime just after 10pm and by 11:08pm I’d made the lemon tek. I allowed this to sit for 20 minutes and then consumed it. I was immediately hit with that interesting feeling of knowing that there was now no turning back...
Knowing that it would be difficult to predict how soon I would start to feel the Shrooms kicking in, I decided to turn off any music on my laptop and simply converse with a few people on Discord and read a few internet articles. I quickly began to feel that the silence was deafening and I’m not sure if that was the first sign of something changing or if it was just my anticipation making me feel that way.
Perhaps around 20-30 minutes in (I will try to do a somewhat better job of keeping track of time in future trips) I felt this feeling that I had felt on my first Shroom trip which was that this wooden cat statue I have on a bookshelf was aware of me and looking at me. This feeling caused me to laugh to myself just like it did on the first occasion I experienced it. Soon after that I felt that I was beginning to feel something of the body high that comes with Shrooms which to me is kind of like a numbing, relaxing sensation in which I feel the urge to lie down. I believe at this point I was still not really seeing anything when I shut my eyes.
As I mentioned in the first paragraph of this report, my recollection of the timeline for this trip is somewhat confused and this is the part where things begin to get muddled. I’ll do my best to reconstruct it as accurately as possible but I think some parts are probably going to be out of order. I think at some point I closed my eyes and began to see the earliest sign of fractal images, possibly some eyes and faces (which as you’ll see, I would see a huge number of later).
I believe at this point that I was starting to feel the nausea quite strongly and so I decided to go to the bathroom just just outside my room to throw up. I think at some point I closed my eyes and began to see the earliest sign of fractal images, possibly some eyes and faces (which as you’ll see, I would see a huge number of later). I quicky felt the presence of this peculiar feminine entity that I also felt was there on my last trip. I didn’t so much seem to directly see it this time but I felt like I caught glimpses of it through the mirror, it’s dark, quite elegant and I feel like it belongs to a different species. I cannot tell if it shows any signs of being aware of me but it’s interesting that I feel like it’s a female presence.
As I vomited into the toilet it began to transform into this dark hole as it had also done on the previous trip. I returned to my room and lay down on my bed again. At some point during the trip I began to feel as if I was being possessed by a being who, if they’d ever been a human person, would have probably been a warlord or tribal leader of some sort. I felt this aggressive confidence swinging through me and I began to reassess who I could be in life. This mindset receded relatively quickly and around this point I was sort of wondering if maybe I’d reached the peak of the trip. Perhaps this would be a disappointing experience compared to what I had expected. Boy, was I wrong...
I don’t recall noticing the fractals gradually increasing in power or anything but suddenly whenever I shut my eyes there would be endless pairs of eyes and faces staring back at me whilst constantly moving whenever I shut my eyes there would be endless pairs of eyes and faces staring back at me whilst constantly moving. I would see these side-on images of what I’ve decided to call alien-goddess type entities some of which had an almost Ancient Egyptian look to them, I saw plenty of the type of fractal like faces that I see in Alex Grey art that seem to proceed infinitely into the background. As I looked at them and they looked back at me I said out loud “I can talk to you...Can you talk to me? Should I talk to you?” I would see mechanical type fractals as well, the type that people do sometimes report seeing. I walked into the bathroom again briefly (as I would do many times this night) and I can’t recall if my eyes were shut but I saw what appeared to be a male being of light and when I looked into at his head there was nothing there except the light just seemed to recede back infinitely making me gasp and mutter “Oh my god...”
Every time I have tried shrooms they have made me cry and this occasion would be no different. Some of my personal demons quickly began to surface and I felt the need to acknowledge the lifetime of hurt they had occurred. This stage might have lasted about 20 minutes but it’s difficult for me to say with any certainty. I really believe that Shrooms force me to get real with myself in a way that can be very confronting.
The trip began to get progressively more unusual. Soon I began to feel that my brain, as my instrument of cognition, had been replaced by something alien resulting in me experiencing the world in a completely different way. I am not a scientist but I began to link physics and biological evolution in my mind in a way I never had before but made sense to me at the time. Just as we are always in freefall, evolution is always moving us forward into history (even if biological changes are something of a slow process). The biggest realization that came from this from a stronger conviction about something I’ve felt for a while which is that we can’t plan for and manage our species effectively on either a global or local level because we don’t understand ourselves and where we are meant to be going well enough to avoid all kinds of misfortune and the capacity for total catastrophe. I saw this in relation to both political events in the world and also in relation to individuals I know or have known in my life.
By this time I had reached what I would consider the peak of the trip and began to experience some pretty powerful things including what seemed like the birth of a planet, a small ball of light, within myself which then expanded outwards in all directions. Whenever I closed my eyes the fractals were simply incredible, I saw a neverending world of eyes and faces that I also seemed to see flashes of as I opened my eyes, some were beautiful, some looked like something out of a zombie movie. I saw cats with 6 pairs of eyes, I also managed to catch one or two glimpses of some beautiful natural scenes including a yellow field that I can only describe as enchanting. I saw beautiful floating 3D model structure that was made up of small balls that twisted and turned to reveal ever more elaborate aspects of itself.
Around this time I needed to vomit again and I can only describe the sensation of this second vomit for the evening as resembling what I imagine transforming from a human into some kind of insectoid species might feel like. I would liken what I experienced to a croaking feeling that seemed to spread itself through my entire body. Like so much of this experience, it saddens me that I can’t adequately put into words what it was that I experienced here. Whenever I would look in the bathroom mirror in the darkness my face would morph in ways that were very creepy or macabre. My face would resemble an insectoid type creature or look very skull like and evil (I have a shaved head). My arm would also look like something off an insectoid creature or would look totally black.
At this point I would look out my bedroom window to see the trees right outside of it full of these evil looking fleshy creatures. I’d almost say they looked a bit like the Flood from the Halo video game series, sort of a combination of the humanoid looking ones and the blobby ones that explode when they get close to you. I’d also see Africa and South America morph into the faces of these monstrosities on the world map on my wall. Eventually they morphed into Grey Aliens as well. I should add that none of this was particularly frightening to me, just intriguing more than anything.
Around sometime after 4am I decided to try and go to sleep but the images I would see every time I closed my eyes had other ideas about this plan and prevented me from doing so. I recall shutting my eyes and seeing this strange, almost giant-rat like creature posing on the ground, that was transparent in a way where I could see larvae (which I presume were its children) moving in and out of its body.
It was not until around 5:00am at the earliest that I was finally able to get some sleep. All in all this was a fascinating experience and the varied and eventful psychedelic experience I have ever had in my life. Mushroom hunting season is coming soon in my country and I hope to do stronger doses in the not too distant future.
Documenting a life
I have created this blog with the hope of sharing and documenting my experiences of life along with anything that interests me significantly. Here's hoping it will do the job well :)
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