Ships from and sold by Amazon. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion. An Anthology of Spiritual Memoirs. Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down. Oxford University Press June 29, Language: I'd like to read this book on Kindle Don't have a Kindle? Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Showing of 4 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. A good book introducing the concept of Emergence in both epistemic and religious terms.
Clayton breaks down the subject of Emergence and it's applicators to the Mind in several steps, all carefully outlined. If nothing else, it helps serve as a push back against the reductionist, physicalist takes that are so fashionable in some quarters. This is not a text to be tossed aside without careful examination, and it requires a considerable amount of careful reading. There are those who will, no doubt, chuck it aside as it will fail to meet the narrow dogmatism of their world views, but to do so is to risk missing the points it raises. It is dense, and not for someone who is not familiar with philosophy, quantum physics, the history of science, and trends in modern thought.
It's not really for "beginners" but is an excellent resource for those interested in the field. As usual, Clayton really treats us to TWO books in one: Highly recommended for anyone interested in the leading edge of the science and religion dialogue. This book is fine if you are a philosopher and interested in the concept of emergence. But if you are looking for a readable book, this is not for you.
Phillip Clayton can write in an understandable way, but in this book he uses a very hard to understand style. Each state of being and of consciousness has its characteristic frequency pattern. To expand the mind, to transcend a state of being, requires a sympathetic resonance, an attunement, to the corresponding vibrational pattern. This wisdom was encoded as a sacred geometry into the design of temples and art, language and music, ritual and social structure creating a sacred architecture in the fabric of human culture.
Through a Canon of number and geometry, proportion and measure, the man-made world was once a reflection of universal order and harmony…a microcosm. The application of the laws of form that relate mind in matter generated in symbolic, social and physical environments a formative field which conditioned evolving humanity to higher, more integrated states of being. Within it a transformation could be achieved, the mind expanded, the emotions balanced and the body healed and made whole.
A multi-disciplinary, holistic new science is emerging now that is validating that ancient wisdom. Springing from multi-dimensional theories of being, consciousness and reality, it again recognizes that fundamental unity. As it rediscovers universal principles and seeks to understand original cause, as it transcends the reductive materialism of the past technological age, a synthesis is created, a sacred science. This new synthesis provides a framework for understanding principles of a technology of transformation, an applied metaphysics. The purpose of a sacred science is simply the enlightenment of mankind.
There is only one unified force…which forms all things of one substance, light or consciousness. There is only one basic form, the sine wave-Fourier transform, whose summations and foldings create all complex forms. Even according to string theory the dimensions of reality are folded within it. It is All That Is. There is nothing more and nothing less. It is Beginning without time or space. Each moment, each point each quanta is total and complete.
All of Creation is the Absolute manifesting in various forms, densities and dimensions. The vast universes are the body of this Absolute Being…evolution is its method. All things are within It…It is within and conditions all things. Nothing is separate…all life is connected in this Oneness. You and I share this Supreme Identity…We are each identical with it. In essence we are one. The ancient tradition of sacred geometry provides the language in a modern context to express the sacred science.
It reveals the pattern and process of universal law…the principles applied in creating a sacred architecture. The codes of creation, are written in the sacred geometry of form, mapping the process of creation-evolution, the structure of cosmos and the relationship between Spirit or consciousness and matter. Sacred geometry is the language of archetypes…it encodes the science of creational formation , the patterns that order creative principles and energy into form manifestation in any dimension.
Spirit and the body, energy and substance are related through the laws of form. Sacred geometry then describes the form equations for the translation of energy into matter, the interface between spirit and matter. Only form was perceptible. What could not be symbolized could not be perceived and therefore did not exist. Consciousness, as all being…all manifestation, is essentially energy and thus vibration. It manifests in universal harmonic patterns, frequency defined form.
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The fundamental nature of reality is in the wave…it is vibrational. Every state of being from an atom, a flower, man, and star to a thought, feeling and dream occupies a characteristic frequency pattern. The secret of light is in the wave. In a vibrational universe, where all being is form created by the activity of light, there is no more separation between earth and air, between matter and consciousness, than there is between the colors of a rainbow.
A state of being or an expansion of consciousness is achieved simply as an attunement, or a phase coherence, to the corresponding frequency generated pattern through sympathetic resonance. Form, then, is the product of vibration in substance. It results from the act of the primal division of unity, of the separation of being out of the undifferentiated totality. Form springs from duality, from the nature of polarity, the primal cyclic oscillation of being and not-being, hence the vibrational nature of existence. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be Light: As nothing exists outside of the One, all the diversity and multiplicity of form manifestation results from this primal division, just as the ovum divides again and again to finally make a being after the geometry of the genetic codes that define its potential. In dynamic harmony the wave unites opposites…all duality is resolved in resonance.
As the nature of matter or light is both particle and wave, the universe manifests in the interaction of two complimentary principles: Universal Law and Harmonics: Form is related to universal law, that which configures or templates energy into manifestation.
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Form giving is a means only of configuring substance as a vessel for the expression of being. The practice of geometry was to measure, to give meaning or dimension. The creative act arises out of the imposition of limits or boundaries. Form results from the limiting or defining the boundary of the infinite. Existence occurs in many frequencies or formats of energy, that is many dimensions at once. The nature of being is multi-dimensional, characterized not by space and time, spin and mass, the properties of matter, but by spectrums of energy, frequency bands…octaves of vibration unified in a fundamental field.
In a scared science dimensions are contexts for manifestation which give primal energy a particular character and impose limits or boundaries on the expression of the causative harmonics. Each dimension has its conformational constraints: Light is not by nature limited. It appears so, having a maximum velocity, due to the limitations imposed by the conditions of space and time. Light is also formless, without shape, yet is bounded by space and time.
Space and time also appear to be infinite but are themselves bounded, thus having form: The phase space of the universe, that is the space that defines all possible positions and energy states of matter, has the shape of a torus with an infinite number of holes or vortexes. The torus with its fractal vortex is the universal archetype of form conditioning all material expression from electron, egg, or star. Dimensions are energy states defined in frequency bands. Consciousness exists in all, hence they are called the planes of consciousness. They are separated only by frequency barriers.
The veil is essentially a frequency barrier. Man is a multi-dimensional being, not in the sense of physical space and time, but in terms of the dimensions in which he is conscious: He is not his body, his thoughts or feelings, which are all form manifestations for experience.
He is something beyond these, eternal and unlimited. All are empty, having no permanence, no intrinsic reality in themselves. The transcendence of form is the achievement again of a non-dualistic formless, thus unlimited, state from which being originates…the ultimate yoga. The Self is experienced in cycles of existence and dimensions of being. Individualized aspects of one essence, we are projected into existence by our desire to experience ourselves in some context, descending-involving in diversity, form and density…then ascending-evolving-integrating back into that one essence, complete again.
It is a law of the conservation of consciousness that no being, no thought is ever lost in the process of experience. Just as energy is always conserved in any interaction so is consciousness conserved…thought is energy. The expansion of consciousness is not an increase of light but an unfolding from a more dense state. Thus in any transformation of being, in any interaction between mind and substance, identity or the Self persists.
The total light is constant. Multi-dimensional man is a microcosm, a holographic reflection of the Infinite …of totality, a holon of the super-hologram. Within the human energy fields, the etheric and auric, are the complete codes and energetics, the laws and harmonics, of the entire universe. These are activated selectively to focus the self into a particular vehicle, the human body, and can be resonated into activity consciously to self-evolve. As co-creators, as sacred architects, man is drawing figures, imposing limits, in the infinite grains of sand of an endless shore, stretching at the boundary of the sea of all potentiality.
The Temple, sacred space, was a reflection of cosmic order in which transcendent awareness was possible in attunement to corresponding pattern…through the laws of resonance and correspondence. Essentially they were vessels of resonating energy fields, wave guides to entrain states of enlightenment.
The process of entering the mandala led one from the external material world through a sequence of geometries, circles, triangles and squares, to Absolute Being, the bindu in the center, resulting in an identification with the Infinite. Like a Navajo sand painting the mandala was often a potent psychic field, capable of effecting healings as well as altered states of consciousness.
I have quite a bit of personal experience with each of those endeavors, including many of the magic molecules that are the protagonists of this text. But all of my youthful excursions occurred in the opaque cognitive and cultural shadow cast by said boomer evangelists, and consequently, many of the conclusions I came to regarding the meaning and value of these experiences were heavily influenced by that particular set and setting. So he takes to the psychedelic venture rather late in life, with a fully developed critical facility, coupled with a beginners mind refreshingly free from the aforementioned hippy hyperbole.
Pollan somehow manages to render the quintessentially ineffable psychedelic experience into something rather sensible and perhaps even effable Harris, My previously mentioned personal experiences were a wonder to be sure.
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Absolutely enriching without a doubt. But I have labored as an adult to put their lasting value into precise language. My sense was that these were immensely valuable and formative introductions to the expanded mind, but beyond that, the experiences remain rather implicit, as opposed to explicitly understood and usefully integrated. In yet another autobiographical example of youth wasted on the young, I was more enamored with the splashy perceptual effects of the drugs than the subtle lessons they can facilitate regarding self transcendence.
But my interest in introspection was sparked, and this ultimately led me to meditation. Like many of my boomer predecessors, I began my serious meditation practice working in a Hindu tradition, with the psychedelic experience as my most proximal frame of reference. The catharsis was valuable, but again, not explicitly or clearly useful in any practical sense.
My later life meditation practice occurred in the Buddhist context, and this is when all of the introspective practice really took hold and provided traction in life. I entered the field of psychotherapy in order to share this fantastically liberating way of being with anyone who cared.
The Transcendence of Form: Sacred Geometry and the New Science | The Mind Matrix
Maybe people just need a little thunder and lighting in order for the rain to come and soften the ground for new growth. This book helped me realize how helpful those early psychedelic experiences were. They captured my youthful imagination, and slaked my thirst for the numinous, while concurrently providing the foundation for more subtle work later on.
Plus they we just plain giggly wiggly fun. At this stage of life, my fundamental concerns are: My current relative rigidity was something I developed, rather late in life, out of sheer necessity. But if someone is languishing in a state of icy, turgid, spiritual paralysis many many good examples come to mind , than I can absolutely see how a little molecular magic, in the proper set and setting, could defrost and ignite the engine of enlightenment. This book really helped me warm up to this exciting frontier of therapy. Thank you Michael Pollan: Aug 23, Liza Fireman rated it liked it Shelves: This is probably the most boring book of someone telling about his experience of smoking toads and using psychedelics in general.
It got a little bit better towards the end, and it was interesting to read about psychedelics therapy, but I can't say that I would be reading it again or that it was a revelation. There was a lot of history in the book, and actually not enough science. The main thing is that were some stories, that I am sure could be told in a more engaging way. I also felt that it w This is probably the most boring book of someone telling about his experience of smoking toads and using psychedelics in general.
I also felt that it was very repetitive and the two words that I remember the most is psychedelics and Aldous Huxley. I did like the spotlight vs lantern consciousness allegory, which is actually not a Pollan thing, but that's the first time I encounter that. The first mode gives adults the ability to narrowly focus attention on a goal. In the second mode—lantern consciousness—attention is more widely diffused, allowing the child to take in information from virtually anywhere in her field of awareness, which is quite wide, wider than that of most adults.
By this measure, children are more conscious than adults, rather than less. So overall, too much anecdotal 'evidence', and not enough engagement on my side. They can wipe out carpenter ant colonies, clean up pollution and industrial waste, and act as agents to fight bioterrorism. I came of age after LSD was banned by the government thanks in no small part to Timothy Leary so my knowledge of it was primarily negative and I was definitely too scared to try it despite hanging out with people who used it freely.
Come to think of it, they are probably why I was scared to try it. All these decades later there is renewed scientific and personal interest. What if we could: I have nothing but praise and respect for his efforts. Fabulously researched, fascinating, and worth my reading time—and convincing? My mind has definitely been opened and changed and all I did was read the book. You might be curious how many tabs I used writing this review—a lot let me tell you! Would I like to sign up for a session?
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View all 5 comments. Libby Fab review Cathrine! Jun 04, Elizabeth Theiss rated it it was amazing. Prepare to change your mind about the role of psychedelic drugs in western culture. Or, if you have experience as a psychonaut, get ready for a broad, expansive review of history, research, and the possibilities for public policy.
When LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, and other psychedelic drugs first became known in the s and s, academic and medical researchers explored their potential for relieving depression, addiction, and other mental problems. The promising research results were abandone Prepare to change your mind about the role of psychedelic drugs in western culture. In the late s, research on psilocybin and other mind-expanding drugs resumed and the results are rather stunning. The vast majority of subjects reported experiencing ego-shattering, transcendent trips that resulted in a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of themselves with the universe and a new openness to experience.
Guided psychedelic experiences lead subjects to deep insights. For example, in a tobacco cessation program, participants describe feeling a deep realization of the destructive nature of tobacco and a powerful connection to the universe. Why would one disturb the life force that empowers them with the destructive force of tobacco?
In research on the impact of LSD on existential anxiety in cancer patients was especially impressive. It allowed subjects to let go of narrow conceptions of materialistic death and embrace a more holistic sense of death as a transition to another state of being. I am a child of the 60s who experimented with mescaline and LSD. I count these experiences as among the most formative of my life. I am a more creative, happy person because of them. I learned that humans are entirely intertwined among ourselves and every other animal, plant, and mineral on the earth.
Everything counts and yet nothing really matters in the context of the millennia. The potential of psychedelic drugs to change the world for people suffering from depression, existential anxiety attendant to life-threatening disease, and addiction seems settled. What stands in the way is Nixon-era prejudice and fear. The scientific community seems to have developed some consensus that psychedelics can play an important role in healing several resistant diseases of western civilization. Where public policy goes from here will depend on the policy community paying more attention to data and less to prejudice.
Jul 11, Jason Pettus added it Shelves: To make my biases clear right away, back in my early twenties I did LSD in college a handful of times, mostly in a mindful and deliberate way although admittedly a couple of times at raves for fun too , thus making it natural that I would be interested in what Pollan had to say; and he essentially takes this mindful, medicine-type approach too, presenting not just an exhaustive history of the subject as it first became known in the US in the s and '30s, blooming into national mainstream popularity and then just as quickly burning out in the s, but also concentrating just as much on the quiet, more sober research that's being done in our current age, where contemporary doctors and scientists are looking at the ways that LSD and psychedelic mushrooms might in fact be a "magic cure" of sorts for such mental conditions as depression, anxiety and addiction.
It all boils down to a term that's suddenly been gaining a lot of mainstream traction recently, called the "Default Mode Network;" as we're learning with more and more certainty, this is the part of the brain that essentially acts as the "CEO" or "orchestra leader" of all the other parts of your brain, the section of the brain that's most active precisely when you're doing nothing particular at all, and the section that allows you to think about the past, to anticipate the future, to project a sense of "self" to yourself, and basically all the other activities that we've typically associated over the centuries with what is conveniently called the human "soul.
And since it's the default mode network that directly causes mental disorders like depression obsessive worrying about the past and anxiety obsessive worrying about the future , research is showing more and more that psychedelic drugs can act as essentially a way to "reformat a corrupted hard drive," and to let people with unhealthy behaviors towards the past and future basically reset and permanently change their behaviors. And, incidentally, it turns out that this is the same exact process the brain goes through during mindfulness-based meditation, which is why it's no coincidence that Buddhism and psychedelic drugs are so closely associated with each other in our society, and why Buddhist-style meditation has been shown in recent years to work even better than anti-anxiety drugs on PTSD-suffering veteran soldiers.
Pollan's book is about all kinds of other things too, including his own first-person forays into psychedelics and what exactly occurred to him during his "trips;" and as always, it's written in his engaging if not often opinionated conversational style, which I love but I learned during The Omnivore's Dilemma drives other people crazy, so be warned. An illuminating and fascinating book that will here we go again permanently change the way you think about psychedelic drugs, meditation, and mental illness, it is so far the one book in that I most recommend general audience members picking up.
Destined to make my top-ten list at the end of the year, if not come in at the number-one spot altogether. Nov 26, Michael Perkins rated it it was ok. On the path to the Murti-Bing Pollan was born the same year I was, which makes us what I call mid-Boomers.
But I had two older siblings who were on the front end of the Boomer generation and experienced it all.
I paid close attention to what happened to their cohort. My older brother was destroyed by drugs, including psychedelics, and died at age There's a kind of evangelistic fervor in th On the path to the Murti-Bing There's a kind of evangelistic fervor in this book that I found rather slanted. Instead of taking a realistic look at the 60's, for example, he hammers Timothy Leary page after page.
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Oddly, the author's hero is one Al Hubbard, a huckster who dresses in military fatigues and packs a sidearm. To me, these rants against Leary prove nothing and are pretty weird. But this seems to be the author's way of dismissing what actually happened back then, which can't be ignored. Meanwhile, Hubbard ended up broke, living in a trailer park in the Arizona desert. I feel I have read some version of this book several times before written by different people. As people in my Boomer generation moved away from, or out and out rejected, traditional religious structures they began searching for alternatives that continued into the 70's.
This New Age quest led to distorted versions of Eastern religion and even cults. Now that Boomers are older, and staring death in the face, it's not surprising that they're returning to these questions no matter how successful or wealthy they've become. The author is a self-described "scientific materialist," looking for more, including a kind of safe passage to death under the influence of psychedelics.
In my experience, flexible intelligence, openness to change, willingness to take risks, and to forgive others, do not require mind-bending drugs, but humility and an open heart. View all 3 comments. May 26, Benjamin Siegel rated it really liked it. I feel lucky to live in a world where Michael Pollan has now written, sometimes quite beautifully, about tripping. Oct 12, Charles rated it liked it.
Similarly, I have never had any type of mystical experience whatsoever, though I am certainly open to such a thing and have total confidence that many other people have. But here, as in many matters, others go where I have not tread. Pollan, famous mostly for books on food, decided to explore drug-induced alterations of consciousness, and this book is the measured result of his spelunking in the caverns of the mind.
I suppose that psychedelics might be interesting for me. So all this is abstract to me, and will remain so. In other words, Pollan is not an evangelist or proselytizer for drug use; his advice is thoughtful, rather than enthusiastic. The first two hundred pages are history. In any case, Pollan starts by talking about recent revived interest in using psychedelics, primarily psilocybin, derived from mushrooms, to treat conditions such as depression and anxiety among terminal cancer patients, as well as more mundane problems like nicotine addiction.
Then we are taken backward, to the original synthesis of LSD and its use, and misuse, over subsequent decades, as well as the history of other psychedelics. The focus is on psychedelics as a class, not on the many varieties thereof, few of which are specifically delineated. Pollan mostly talks to various figures, ranging from scientists now carefully studying psychedelics in accordance with strict regulations, to elderly hippies and their younger disciples still flogging LSD as a miracle that will bring mankind together.
He took, at separate times, three drugs: He details the run-up to each use in excruciating detail, and also narrates the actual experiences, which are pretty disappointing, both to the reader and, for the most part, to Pollan. He did not have any earthshattering mystical experiences, and the Toad was terrifying.
He did have various experiences revolving around dissolution of the ego, the most common characteristic of all psychedelics, something that he, a mostly no-nonsense, goal-oriented person, found quite interesting and valuable. He saw and interacted with dead relatives. But all in all, this is pretty pedestrian, and most of what is interesting about drug trip descriptions in this book comes from quotes from people other than Pollan. Certainly, if I suffered from untreatable depression, or someone close to me did, I would consider psychedelic therapies.
Still, we can pick out of this several interesting facts, or at least facts I found interesting. Adults develop useful mental shortcuts that cut out the sense of open-ended wonder, and the drugs seem to, in some instances, restore it, or a facsimile of it. There is also a side-mention, not explored further, that Europeans have far fewer mystical experiences under the influence of psychedelics than do Americans, which seems like it would bear further exploring, but the topic never recurs.
More broadly, all the discussion in the book offers an obvious question—what does the use of psychedelics, and what they appear reveal to the user, say about the nature of reality and of consciousness? Despite the desperate flailing of materialists like Steven Pinker, there is no evidence whatsoever that consciousness is the product of the brain, rather than an external phenomenon mediated by the brain, as Henri Bergson, among others, would have it. Of course, there is little evidence of the latter, either. Pollan, certainly, is sympathetic to the idea that psychedelics reveal evidence for the latter, though he is very cautious in his approach.
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On the other hand, I think that one single fact, that neither Pollan nor anyone else that I know of discusses, strongly suggests that all psychedelic experiences are merely internal manifestations of the mind. This is that no new substantive knowledge is ever gained. If the individual consciousness were actually being exposed to, or subsumed into, or enfolded with, some universal or greater consciousness, some set of until-then unknown truths would seem certain to emerge. That could be anything—a scientific fact, the existence of aliens with specific verifiable facts about themselves, or merely exposure to another consciousness merging with yours as exposed to the interactions with internally generated avatars of others that seem common, separately from the merging phenomenon, which Pollan himself experienced , or some kind of telepathy.
But not once is such a thing ever mentioned, which strongly suggests that psychedelic experiences are purely internal, though I suppose they might be revealing underlying structural truths, even if they do not reveal identifiable higher level or new knowledge. The most interesting elements of the book, though, concern the intersection of religious belief and what is perceived under the influence of these drugs. This is probably why the Orthodox, in repetitious prayer regimens, strongly caution against the untutored engaging simultaneously in the breathing exercises sometimes done by monks.
The question is, what does that mean, or show? We have to clear out some underbrush first. Pollan, a genial atheist, seems completely unaware, no doubt because everyone who touched this book before publication was equally unaware, that many of the supposedly novel thoughts that come to him under the influence of psychedelics are commonplaces about reality in Christian theology. Rather than being necessarily the case, this now seemed quite the miracle. What I wanted to hear was if anyone under the influence of psychedelics ever had direct, specifically Christian revelation, such as regarding the Trinity, or Christ saying something not banal, or even an inkling of the Communion of Saints.
I suspect not, or we would have heard of it. Which, again, suggests all this is internal, or at least it suggests that to a Christian. No, on balance, these are things to be avoided. To me, opening the possibility of a broader reality in this gray, de-magicked age is a feature, not a bug, regardless of whether there is any underlying reality to what drug users are shown under the influence.
Now that I'm using audible. And, he also completely won me over with this book. There was a time when psychedelics were a serious medicine under serious study, especially for alcoholics. Then Timothy Leary came Now that I'm using audible. Then Timothy Leary came in, decided everybody needed to experience these drugs, acted as if he had discovered the whole field and promoted them in such an attention-grabbing way to where everyone knows something about LSD Of course, Leary got his message across and these drugs saw wide illegal usage especially in the 's LSD is a powerful drug, but, in a surprise at least to me, it turns out it creates no health issues.
The only danger with LSD is what someone might do while they are using it like Charles Mason's group, maybe. But it doesn't have any impact on anything in our body except for it's temporary impact on the brain. And it's non-addictive, maybe anti-addictive. But it does have surprising benefits when used the right way. To frame this kind of the way Pollan does, research in NYU on terminally ill patients found spectacular results with patients using a psychedelic. Many said they had mystical experiences, and many lost their fear of the coming deaths and made peace with it.
In some examples, people had the best parts of their lives, terminally ill, after their experience with psychedelics. It didn't work for everyone, of course. So, what's going on? This is where the book gets especially fascinating. Recent study of brain activity has determined what is our default node network - that is, your brain activity when you're not doing anything.
You're just day dreaming and filling in time. This activity is actually a big deal, it's your basic thought process, your default mindset. And you can't really change it very easily. Pollan uses a ski slope as an example. Imagine your brain as slope with a fresh cover of snow. Someone skis down and leaves tracks. As more people ski down, some tracks harden, and soon everyone has to ski down the same track, you can't get out of it.
That's your brain, and track is the default node netwark - all your thoughts funnel down the well worn path.
This is actually an issue with everyone. Our brain tries to make things easier on us, and it forms these networks so we can focus on other things, but we lose some touch with reality, if you like. Instead of seeing things as they actually are, our brains make all sort of assumptions and we accept these as real without really knowing. We lose that childhood sense of exploring everything because everything is new. This breaks down when, say, we travel to a new country and all these assumptions start to fail. But, it becomes a serious problem for certain states of mind.
Our brain has a structuring and the more structured we are, the most separated we from reality and more prone we are to various obsessive problems, like addiction of course, and OCD, but also depression and anxiety and other things. Essentially the brain becomes too rigid. So, the big thing with psychedelics is that they shut down our default node network, our background brain, or ego. In the ski slope analogy, they provide, for short period, a fresh coat of new snow.
Our brains are freed up to re-investigate the world around us with new eyes, like a child. And, the connections in our brain are free to follow new paths, and new connections, leading to some strange stuff, but also, apparently, to a completely new view of consciousness, or maybe even other consciousnesses. And, with the drugs, you don't lose the experience, but you remember everything. And anything you learn stays with you. I know I'm getting wordy and maybe it's better to just read the book then read my review with all its oversimplifications, but this stuff has got me thinking so much.
So, I'll add here that Pollan points out the experience doesn't work for everyone, that it's very dependent on the mindset and setting you are in when you take the drug, and whose around to guide you and help you if you get into trouble. And the affect wears off. And while the terminally ill tended to have inspirational life changing experiences, and nicotine and alcohol addicts had good rates of positive results much better than, say, with AA , there were also those oddball experiences.
There was the smoker who had such a powerful important insight, she made the guide with her write it down. When she came out of the high and checked on the message, it was Nov 15 - Dec 6 rating: View all 6 comments. The history of research up to Leary was too long for my taste. His own controlled experiments were interesting, partic I felt it was all over the map. His own controlled experiments were interesting, particularly the variety of personalities he discovered when selecting a guide. I wasn't sure about how trustworthy or valuable his own memories of the "trips" were.
I loved the section when he went out with the eccentric sunroom hunter. That was my favorite part after the neuroscience.