Sat Mar 23, 2024 11:33 pm by globalturbo
Psychic Abilities | Psi and Psychedelics: Psychedelics, Parapsychology and Exceptional Human Experiences
[Justin] I recently had an experience with LSD and experienced some psi abilities. Many of the people I have talked to whom have taken psychedelic substances report similar experiences. Julian had an OBE during one of his early trips which matches the work shared below.
[Julian] I took LSD two other occasions previous to the experience I am speaking of now. What made this trip different from other ones was the amount of people involved. I had tripped with one or two people before but never a total of four.
The four of us all worked at the same job and spent countless hours together, some of us even went to school together and so at this point we were all very much connected in our personal lives.
As we all began to peak on the LSD I started to experience a difficulty with perceiving who exactly I was. As I had my internal thoughts I began to hear them vocalized through my friends who were sitting around me in a circle like fashion. My own inner dialogue was no longer just in my head it was literally being played out through the people around me. At this point I realized that I wasn’t the only one experiencing this but that we were all doing it. To better describe I will give an example. Generally when you have thoughts you may form sentences in your head like “I wonder what so and so is thinking about” “I would really like to touch the water”. These same kind of internal dialogues were now being vocally expressed by each person. Instead of the sentence running through my head, each word was vocalized by a different individual as if the people themselves were part of a larger mind. When I realized this I Immediately felt a disassociation with my body. In a sense I was floating around my friends and was more so experiencing being the IDEAS than I was experiencing being a body. Within a few moments the regular first person perspective we experience switched to a third person perspective where I was now watching my body floating upwards in a black background. At that point my memory is lost but what I do remember next is when I realized I was conscious, some type of being, I began to notice my surroundings.
Though I felt confusion it did not feel as if this was a bad thing. I started to remember what objects and shapes were, what they represented in our daily lives and how I was connected to them.
I came to consciousness standing and holding on to a street lamp. I then realized there were other beings around me, I started to recognize them. Who they were, how got here, what they were doing, and most profoundly how everything in life had brought that moment into existence; the millions of connections. I realized how important these beings were to me in my life and in my growth. These were my friends but they were so much more, they are magnificent beings choosing out of infinite possibilities to be here and now in that moment with me. To show care, love, and compassion in the ways the only know how. A truly profound revelation. It was only after this that I remembered who I was, that I was Julian. I only realized that after I had seen how all my friends were connected, that they were connected through me.
I have taken LSD hundreds of times and did not consciously recognize any abilities (despite having many profound experiences and revelations), but after reading Dewey Larson, the Daniel Papers, and understanding the Mind more, it appears that we are getting Psi data all the time, we just normally filter it out or dismiss it.
For example, after our latest experience, I began notice my thought streams were readily presenting me with precognitive data. I experience this most when I’m in a Theta-state (clear mind) and emotionally connected to my present. The greater the emotional charge of bliss and openness with my data stream (the now) the more aware I am of the precognitive data. Julian and I often watch TV shows and Movies to decode them for allegorical meaning and after the recent LSD experience I started to notice my random thoughts were feeding me clues about the end results of the shows and what the characters where going to do. I always suspected the random thoughts and ideas we experience were in fact suggestive of cognition, but due to our belief systems and knowledge base we cannot decypher the data and apply it to understand it as anything more than random.
After reading the following post, and the aforementioned work of Dewey Larson and Daniel, as well as Dan Winter, the science behind our Human Technology, or Psi abilities, is becoming obvious in my mind; and we’re actually learning how to do it.
If we take pause to consider ALL the data we are receiving and how that relates to events and happenings in our lives, it will become obvious to us we are constantly receiving data which would be considered paranormal or Psi. We are both receivers and transmitters.
- Justin
Source – Nexus Illuminati
by David Luke
At the beginning of the 1950s the developed world began in earnest its psychedelic research era. Since then these profoundly mind-altering substances have been inextricably associated with paranormal experiences—such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and out-of-body experiences—by many of the researchers who have studied their effects.
Currently however, virtually no research is being conducted in this area despite the recent revival of research into the potential therapeutic benefit of psychedelics in humans. This paper briefly discusses some of the author’s research to date in this field: a review of the literature on parapsychology (the psychological study of apparently paranormal processes) and psychedelics, a survey of paranormal experiences associated with different psychoactive substances, and correlation of self-reports of the number of consumed psychedelics with performance on a precognition task.
The word psychedelic, meaning ‘mind-manifesting,’ was created by Dr. Humphry Osmond in correspondence with Aldous Huxley in 1956. Four years earlier Osmond had published an article in the Hibbert Journal with his colleague John Smythies in which they proposed that a new theory of mind was needed that could account for both mescaline experiences and what they considered to be the scientifically-proven fact of extra-sensory perception (ESP). Huxley read this article and requested that Osmond, who like Huxley hailed from Surrey in England but lived in North America, should visit Huxley and give him mescaline.
Huxley then catalysed the popularisation of psychedelics with the publication of The Doors of Perception in 1954. In the book, not only did Huxley eloquently describe his experience of mescaline, disappearing beautifully into the mystical folds in his trousers, but he also proposed a nascent neurochemical model of ESP. He suggested that the French philosopher Henri Bergson was right to propose that the brain’s primary function was to filter out all the excess sensory data that we do not attend to. Otherwise, this information would overwhelm the conscious mind with a mass of information that was ordinarily irrelevant for the organism’s survival.
However, building on Bergson’s notion, Huxley added that substances such as mescaline serve to override the brain’s ‘reducing valve’ that filters out this sensory data. Under such psychedelic disinhibition of the brain’s inhibiting function, the mind is thereby capable of potentially remembering anything it has ever experienced and sensing everything within its immediate environment. Furthermore, it is also able to access the entirety of information available in the universe, even forwards and backwards in time. Such mystical or paranormal feats are known as clairvoyance, precognition and telepathy, and are collectively termed extra- sensory perception (ESP), or, more recently, ‘psi.’
To illustrate this psychic psychedelic process, Huxley took the title of his book from a quote by the English mystic, William Blake—“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Elsewhere in the USA, just prior to the publication of The Doors of Perception in 1954, Gordon Wasson was recently back from his first trip to Mexico where he discovered both an active mushroom cult and the identity of their sacrament as Psilocybe mexicana.
The Mazatec shaman, Don Aurelio, (who Wasson worked with before meeting the more famous Maria Sabina) held a mushroom ceremony for him and told him two important facts about his son in the US that neither of them could otherwise have known. Both were ultimately true, although one was still yet to happen, thereby demonstrating Don Aurelio’s accurate clairvoyance and precognition under the influence of psilocybin. Yet, as far as scientific evidence goes, this is far from conclusive.
Similarly, it was in the mid-1950’s that LSD began doing the rounds. About 10 years earlier Albert Hofmann had discovered the exceptional psychological effects of LSD and had the first-ever LSD-induced out-of-body experience when he found himself hovering above his body and assumed that he had died. But these two tales of exceptional human experience from our foremost psychedelic pioneers are just the opening of the rabbit hole.
Anthropology, particularly from the New World, has long informed us that the people who traditionally use psychedelic plants and potions do so specifically for ‘magical’ purposes, such as ESP, psychic diagnosis and healing.
More compelling yet, there is an abundance of stories of anthropologists either witnessing or experiencing first-hand the occurrence of apparently paranormal phenomena with the use of psychoactive plants and fungi: peyote among the Huichol indians, psilocybin-containing mushrooms with the Mazatec, fly agaric mushrooms with the Ojibwa, datura in India, pituri in Australia, and practically all known psychedelic plants in all regions of the world.
Of particular importance in this equation is ayahuasca, which is so often accompanied by reports of psychic ability that when one of its psychoactive constituents, harmine, was isolated at the beginning of the 20th century it was named ‘telepathine.’ It is also interesting to note that, conversely, there is a serious lack of similar paranormal reports with the non-visionary psychoactive plants that have also been in use for centuries, such as coffee, coca, and cacao.
These numerous reports collected by anthropologists and from the early psychedelic explorers soon began surfacing among psychotherapists as well once these substances started seeping out of the labs and into the clinics. As just one
example, Stan Grof, who we can probably credit as being the leading expert on psychedelic psychotherapy, reported observing past-life recall, out-of-body experiences, and ESP on a daily basis.
Thinking there might be something magical about these medicines that has been largely overlooked I conducted a comparison of spontaneous ESP phenomena occurring, with good supporting evidence in the therapy room, either with or without psychedelics. Reports of spontaneous ESP occurring within ordinary psychotherapy were fairly rare, although definitely evident, but they were seemingly more frequently reported by psychedelic psychotherapists during the 1960s.
Substantiating these anecdotal reports a number of surveys have been conducted that have consistently found a positive relationship between the reporting of having had a paranormal experience and the use of psychedelics, with heavier users having more experiences. What the surveys also show is that between 18–83% (depending on the type of experience) of those using cannabis and/or psychedelics also reported ESP experiences occurring whilst actually under the influence. There is very good reason to believe that these substances can induce paranormal experiences, regardless of whether these experiences are genuine or not.
A survey conducted by myself and my colleague, Dr. Marios Kittenis, extended this research and explored the taxonomy of these phenomena to try and identify which drugs related to which experiences in particular. While psychedelics in general were as- sociated with a range of phenomena, we found that particular substances were more readily associated with certain experiences than others. For instance, entity encounter experiences were very common under DMT, telepathy was common under cannabis and DXM, out-of-body experiences typified ketamine, and plant spirit encounters occurred particularly with psilocybin but also with a host of other psychedelic flora.
Since the prohibition of psychedelics in the late 1960s most of this field of research, which I like to call ‘parapsychopharmacology,’ has been conducted through surveys. Yet these provide very little evidential value for the genuine occurrence of psi. Fortunately, the notion of using psychedelics to investigate parapsychology was considered a viable method just prior to prohibition and about a dozen or more controlled experiments were conducted. Walter Pahnke, for instance, who conducted the original Good Friday experiment some 50 years ago and published his findings in the International Journal of Parapsychology, also conducted an ESP experiment with LSD. The results of this experiment were not significant overall. However, Stanislav Grof was one of the participants and had a string of increasingly improbable direct hits on the target symbol, determining a randomly selected target beyond the expectation of chance probability. Grof, explained that:
When I got the third correct answer in a row, the feelings [of a universe where no laws of time and space exist] were so powerful that I could not continue. The reason for discontinuation of the ESP experiment was a strange mixture of a conviction that it was absurd to test the obvious and, on the other hand, a metaphysical fear of confusion that would follow if I had to give up the usual concept of time and space and with it all the related reference points we feel so secure with.
Overall, the catalogue of ‘pharma-psi’ experiments from the sixties had some promising findings, which were in direct proportion to the sophistication of the methodology. Studies that used boring experimental procedures (such as massively iterative card-guessing tasks, sometimes for hours on end) and psychedelically-inexperienced participants returned poor results, while those that used engaging tasks and experienced trippers got the best outcomes. However, most of these experiments lacked the stringent degree of control expected by today’s standards and so also have limited evidential value.
What is needed is a series of well-controlled and methodologically-advanced experiments to more fully explore the capability of psychedelics to induce psi. I suggest that this research is now both timely, given the growing renaissance in psychedelic research, and extremely worthwhile. For instance, my own research into precognition, using a methodologically-rigorous design with 100 participants, found that precognitive ability correlated positively with the reported number of psychedelics consumed by the individuals in the sample (rs =.27, p =.008, two-tailed). Although indirect, this adds further support for the notion of psi-inducing psychedelics.
Given the enormous difficulties still evident in attempting to get funding and approval to conduct research administrating psychedelics directly, let alone when parapsychology is involved, researchers in the past have considered various alternatives. One proposal is to conduct basic ESP research, inviting participants who have just partaken of mind-expanding substances, along with those who haven’t, and testing their abilities. The parapsychologist Charles Tart proposed conducting such ‘drop-out drop-in’ experiments shortly after prohibition to circumvent the difficulties in getting legal and ethical approval for such work.
Such research techniques are now evident in non-parapsychological psychedelic research, but have yet to be used in parapsychology. Alternatively, it would be preferable to conduct direct psi experimentation through the administration of psychedelic substances, although probably with those substances which are still legal and have been reported to induce ESP, such as dextromethorphine.
Yet there still remain many obstacles to such work. Perhaps the greatest opportunity to conduct research at the present time would be to hitch an ESP experiment on the back of an existing psychedelic research program. We would be very happy to hear from any researcher interested in collaborating on this. As another alternative the use of hypnosis to re-induce psychedelic states could offer a novel drug-free methodology.
Psychedelic researchers since the time of Huxley and Osmond have been fascinated by exploring the apparently parapsychological affects of these drugs. Rightly so, because the implications of such research for understanding our capabilities as a species and for understanding reality itself are deeply profound. Huxley’s nascent notion of psychic abilities becoming available through the psychedelic inhibition of the brain’s reducing valve, which opens up awareness to an infinite field of information, is now quietly gaining some credibility.
Recent human experiments show that the serotonergic effect of psychedelic tryptamines can inhibit the ‘sensory gating’ function of the brain thereby opening up the flood gates of information to the mind and expanding one’s sensory awareness. Parapsychopharmacological research of this nature could tell us a great deal about the neurochemistry of apparently psychic abilities, the experience of which has probably been observed with these substances for millennia.
It is an exceptional shame that since prohibition psychedelic researchers have veered away from parapsychological research and, vice versa, parapsychologists have shied away from psychedelic research. Most likely this is because of the position of both of these fields at the fringes of mainstream science and the fear of jeopardising one’s insecure but legitimate positions by dabbling in an even more taboo field of research to one’s own.
Given the widening acceptance of parapsychology within mainstream academia, in the UK at least, and with the new renaissance dawning in psychedelic research globally, such an interest shouldn’t have to be considered as double career suicide anymore. Rather, the kind of ontological questions being asked through the research of parapsychopharmacology appear to be fundamental to our very sense of reality and should deserve special attention. And if philosophical prejudice appears to be in danger of keeping us from investigating such a topic it would seem wise to remember the words of Haldane, “my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
From Breaking Convention edited by Cameron Adams, David Luke, Anna Waldstein, Ben Sessa and David King, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2014.
Via Reality Sandwich @ http://realitysandwich.com/220900/psychedelics-parapsychology-and-exceptional-human-experiences/
For more information about psychedelics seehttp://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/entheogens
For more information about psychic abilities seehttp://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/psi
– Scroll down through ‘Older Posts’ at the end of each section
Source:
http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/2014/10/psi-and-psychedelics-psychedelics.html
http://sitsshow.blogspot.com/2014/10/psychic-abilities-psi-and-psychedelics.html
Thanks to: http://ascendingstarseed.wordpress.com
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[Julian] I took LSD two other occasions previous to the experience I am speaking of now. What made this trip different from other ones was the amount of people involved. I had tripped with one or two people before but never a total of four.
The four of us all worked at the same job and spent countless hours together, some of us even went to school together and so at this point we were all very much connected in our personal lives.
As we all began to peak on the LSD I started to experience a difficulty with perceiving who exactly I was. As I had my internal thoughts I began to hear them vocalized through my friends who were sitting around me in a circle like fashion. My own inner dialogue was no longer just in my head it was literally being played out through the people around me. At this point I realized that I wasn’t the only one experiencing this but that we were all doing it. To better describe I will give an example. Generally when you have thoughts you may form sentences in your head like “I wonder what so and so is thinking about” “I would really like to touch the water”. These same kind of internal dialogues were now being vocally expressed by each person. Instead of the sentence running through my head, each word was vocalized by a different individual as if the people themselves were part of a larger mind. When I realized this I Immediately felt a disassociation with my body. In a sense I was floating around my friends and was more so experiencing being the IDEAS than I was experiencing being a body. Within a few moments the regular first person perspective we experience switched to a third person perspective where I was now watching my body floating upwards in a black background. At that point my memory is lost but what I do remember next is when I realized I was conscious, some type of being, I began to notice my surroundings.
Though I felt confusion it did not feel as if this was a bad thing. I started to remember what objects and shapes were, what they represented in our daily lives and how I was connected to them.
I came to consciousness standing and holding on to a street lamp. I then realized there were other beings around me, I started to recognize them. Who they were, how got here, what they were doing, and most profoundly how everything in life had brought that moment into existence; the millions of connections. I realized how important these beings were to me in my life and in my growth. These were my friends but they were so much more, they are magnificent beings choosing out of infinite possibilities to be here and now in that moment with me. To show care, love, and compassion in the ways the only know how. A truly profound revelation. It was only after this that I remembered who I was, that I was Julian. I only realized that after I had seen how all my friends were connected, that they were connected through me.
I have taken LSD hundreds of times and did not consciously recognize any abilities (despite having many profound experiences and revelations), but after reading Dewey Larson, the Daniel Papers, and understanding the Mind more, it appears that we are getting Psi data all the time, we just normally filter it out or dismiss it.
For example, after our latest experience, I began notice my thought streams were readily presenting me with precognitive data. I experience this most when I’m in a Theta-state (clear mind) and emotionally connected to my present. The greater the emotional charge of bliss and openness with my data stream (the now) the more aware I am of the precognitive data. Julian and I often watch TV shows and Movies to decode them for allegorical meaning and after the recent LSD experience I started to notice my random thoughts were feeding me clues about the end results of the shows and what the characters where going to do. I always suspected the random thoughts and ideas we experience were in fact suggestive of cognition, but due to our belief systems and knowledge base we cannot decypher the data and apply it to understand it as anything more than random.
After reading the following post, and the aforementioned work of Dewey Larson and Daniel, as well as Dan Winter, the science behind our Human Technology, or Psi abilities, is becoming obvious in my mind; and we’re actually learning how to do it.
If we take pause to consider ALL the data we are receiving and how that relates to events and happenings in our lives, it will become obvious to us we are constantly receiving data which would be considered paranormal or Psi. We are both receivers and transmitters.
- Justin
Source – Nexus Illuminati
by David Luke
At the beginning of the 1950s the developed world began in earnest its psychedelic research era. Since then these profoundly mind-altering substances have been inextricably associated with paranormal experiences—such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and out-of-body experiences—by many of the researchers who have studied their effects.
Currently however, virtually no research is being conducted in this area despite the recent revival of research into the potential therapeutic benefit of psychedelics in humans. This paper briefly discusses some of the author’s research to date in this field: a review of the literature on parapsychology (the psychological study of apparently paranormal processes) and psychedelics, a survey of paranormal experiences associated with different psychoactive substances, and correlation of self-reports of the number of consumed psychedelics with performance on a precognition task.
The word psychedelic, meaning ‘mind-manifesting,’ was created by Dr. Humphry Osmond in correspondence with Aldous Huxley in 1956. Four years earlier Osmond had published an article in the Hibbert Journal with his colleague John Smythies in which they proposed that a new theory of mind was needed that could account for both mescaline experiences and what they considered to be the scientifically-proven fact of extra-sensory perception (ESP). Huxley read this article and requested that Osmond, who like Huxley hailed from Surrey in England but lived in North America, should visit Huxley and give him mescaline.Huxley then catalysed the popularisation of psychedelics with the publication of The Doors of Perception in 1954. In the book, not only did Huxley eloquently describe his experience of mescaline, disappearing beautifully into the mystical folds in his trousers, but he also proposed a nascent neurochemical model of ESP. He suggested that the French philosopher Henri Bergson was right to propose that the brain’s primary function was to filter out all the excess sensory data that we do not attend to. Otherwise, this information would overwhelm the conscious mind with a mass of information that was ordinarily irrelevant for the organism’s survival.
However, building on Bergson’s notion, Huxley added that substances such as mescaline serve to override the brain’s ‘reducing valve’ that filters out this sensory data. Under such psychedelic disinhibition of the brain’s inhibiting function, the mind is thereby capable of potentially remembering anything it has ever experienced and sensing everything within its immediate environment. Furthermore, it is also able to access the entirety of information available in the universe, even forwards and backwards in time. Such mystical or paranormal feats are known as clairvoyance, precognition and telepathy, and are collectively termed extra- sensory perception (ESP), or, more recently, ‘psi.’
To illustrate this psychic psychedelic process, Huxley took the title of his book from a quote by the English mystic, William Blake—“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Elsewhere in the USA, just prior to the publication of The Doors of Perception in 1954, Gordon Wasson was recently back from his first trip to Mexico where he discovered both an active mushroom cult and the identity of their sacrament as Psilocybe mexicana.
The Mazatec shaman, Don Aurelio, (who Wasson worked with before meeting the more famous Maria Sabina) held a mushroom ceremony for him and told him two important facts about his son in the US that neither of them could otherwise have known. Both were ultimately true, although one was still yet to happen, thereby demonstrating Don Aurelio’s accurate clairvoyance and precognition under the influence of psilocybin. Yet, as far as scientific evidence goes, this is far from conclusive.
Similarly, it was in the mid-1950’s that LSD began doing the rounds. About 10 years earlier Albert Hofmann had discovered the exceptional psychological effects of LSD and had the first-ever LSD-induced out-of-body experience when he found himself hovering above his body and assumed that he had died. But these two tales of exceptional human experience from our foremost psychedelic pioneers are just the opening of the rabbit hole.
Anthropology, particularly from the New World, has long informed us that the people who traditionally use psychedelic plants and potions do so specifically for ‘magical’ purposes, such as ESP, psychic diagnosis and healing.
More compelling yet, there is an abundance of stories of anthropologists either witnessing or experiencing first-hand the occurrence of apparently paranormal phenomena with the use of psychoactive plants and fungi: peyote among the Huichol indians, psilocybin-containing mushrooms with the Mazatec, fly agaric mushrooms with the Ojibwa, datura in India, pituri in Australia, and practically all known psychedelic plants in all regions of the world.
Of particular importance in this equation is ayahuasca, which is so often accompanied by reports of psychic ability that when one of its psychoactive constituents, harmine, was isolated at the beginning of the 20th century it was named ‘telepathine.’ It is also interesting to note that, conversely, there is a serious lack of similar paranormal reports with the non-visionary psychoactive plants that have also been in use for centuries, such as coffee, coca, and cacao.
These numerous reports collected by anthropologists and from the early psychedelic explorers soon began surfacing among psychotherapists as well once these substances started seeping out of the labs and into the clinics. As just one
example, Stan Grof, who we can probably credit as being the leading expert on psychedelic psychotherapy, reported observing past-life recall, out-of-body experiences, and ESP on a daily basis.Thinking there might be something magical about these medicines that has been largely overlooked I conducted a comparison of spontaneous ESP phenomena occurring, with good supporting evidence in the therapy room, either with or without psychedelics. Reports of spontaneous ESP occurring within ordinary psychotherapy were fairly rare, although definitely evident, but they were seemingly more frequently reported by psychedelic psychotherapists during the 1960s.
Substantiating these anecdotal reports a number of surveys have been conducted that have consistently found a positive relationship between the reporting of having had a paranormal experience and the use of psychedelics, with heavier users having more experiences. What the surveys also show is that between 18–83% (depending on the type of experience) of those using cannabis and/or psychedelics also reported ESP experiences occurring whilst actually under the influence. There is very good reason to believe that these substances can induce paranormal experiences, regardless of whether these experiences are genuine or not.
A survey conducted by myself and my colleague, Dr. Marios Kittenis, extended this research and explored the taxonomy of these phenomena to try and identify which drugs related to which experiences in particular. While psychedelics in general were as- sociated with a range of phenomena, we found that particular substances were more readily associated with certain experiences than others. For instance, entity encounter experiences were very common under DMT, telepathy was common under cannabis and DXM, out-of-body experiences typified ketamine, and plant spirit encounters occurred particularly with psilocybin but also with a host of other psychedelic flora.
Since the prohibition of psychedelics in the late 1960s most of this field of research, which I like to call ‘parapsychopharmacology,’ has been conducted through surveys. Yet these provide very little evidential value for the genuine occurrence of psi. Fortunately, the notion of using psychedelics to investigate parapsychology was considered a viable method just prior to prohibition and about a dozen or more controlled experiments were conducted. Walter Pahnke, for instance, who conducted the original Good Friday experiment some 50 years ago and published his findings in the International Journal of Parapsychology, also conducted an ESP experiment with LSD. The results of this experiment were not significant overall. However, Stanislav Grof was one of the participants and had a string of increasingly improbable direct hits on the target symbol, determining a randomly selected target beyond the expectation of chance probability. Grof, explained that:
When I got the third correct answer in a row, the feelings [of a universe where no laws of time and space exist] were so powerful that I could not continue. The reason for discontinuation of the ESP experiment was a strange mixture of a conviction that it was absurd to test the obvious and, on the other hand, a metaphysical fear of confusion that would follow if I had to give up the usual concept of time and space and with it all the related reference points we feel so secure with.
Overall, the catalogue of ‘pharma-psi’ experiments from the sixties had some promising findings, which were in direct proportion to the sophistication of the methodology. Studies that used boring experimental procedures (such as massively iterative card-guessing tasks, sometimes for hours on end) and psychedelically-inexperienced participants returned poor results, while those that used engaging tasks and experienced trippers got the best outcomes. However, most of these experiments lacked the stringent degree of control expected by today’s standards and so also have limited evidential value.
What is needed is a series of well-controlled and methodologically-advanced experiments to more fully explore the capability of psychedelics to induce psi. I suggest that this research is now both timely, given the growing renaissance in psychedelic research, and extremely worthwhile. For instance, my own research into precognition, using a methodologically-rigorous design with 100 participants, found that precognitive ability correlated positively with the reported number of psychedelics consumed by the individuals in the sample (rs =.27, p =.008, two-tailed). Although indirect, this adds further support for the notion of psi-inducing psychedelics.
Given the enormous difficulties still evident in attempting to get funding and approval to conduct research administrating psychedelics directly, let alone when parapsychology is involved, researchers in the past have considered various alternatives. One proposal is to conduct basic ESP research, inviting participants who have just partaken of mind-expanding substances, along with those who haven’t, and testing their abilities. The parapsychologist Charles Tart proposed conducting such ‘drop-out drop-in’ experiments shortly after prohibition to circumvent the difficulties in getting legal and ethical approval for such work.
Such research techniques are now evident in non-parapsychological psychedelic research, but have yet to be used in parapsychology. Alternatively, it would be preferable to conduct direct psi experimentation through the administration of psychedelic substances, although probably with those substances which are still legal and have been reported to induce ESP, such as dextromethorphine.Yet there still remain many obstacles to such work. Perhaps the greatest opportunity to conduct research at the present time would be to hitch an ESP experiment on the back of an existing psychedelic research program. We would be very happy to hear from any researcher interested in collaborating on this. As another alternative the use of hypnosis to re-induce psychedelic states could offer a novel drug-free methodology.
Psychedelic researchers since the time of Huxley and Osmond have been fascinated by exploring the apparently parapsychological affects of these drugs. Rightly so, because the implications of such research for understanding our capabilities as a species and for understanding reality itself are deeply profound. Huxley’s nascent notion of psychic abilities becoming available through the psychedelic inhibition of the brain’s reducing valve, which opens up awareness to an infinite field of information, is now quietly gaining some credibility.
Recent human experiments show that the serotonergic effect of psychedelic tryptamines can inhibit the ‘sensory gating’ function of the brain thereby opening up the flood gates of information to the mind and expanding one’s sensory awareness. Parapsychopharmacological research of this nature could tell us a great deal about the neurochemistry of apparently psychic abilities, the experience of which has probably been observed with these substances for millennia.
It is an exceptional shame that since prohibition psychedelic researchers have veered away from parapsychological research and, vice versa, parapsychologists have shied away from psychedelic research. Most likely this is because of the position of both of these fields at the fringes of mainstream science and the fear of jeopardising one’s insecure but legitimate positions by dabbling in an even more taboo field of research to one’s own.
Given the widening acceptance of parapsychology within mainstream academia, in the UK at least, and with the new renaissance dawning in psychedelic research globally, such an interest shouldn’t have to be considered as double career suicide anymore. Rather, the kind of ontological questions being asked through the research of parapsychopharmacology appear to be fundamental to our very sense of reality and should deserve special attention. And if philosophical prejudice appears to be in danger of keeping us from investigating such a topic it would seem wise to remember the words of Haldane, “my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
From Breaking Convention edited by Cameron Adams, David Luke, Anna Waldstein, Ben Sessa and David King, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2014.
Via Reality Sandwich @ http://realitysandwich.com/220900/psychedelics-parapsychology-and-exceptional-human-experiences/
For more information about psychedelics seehttp://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/entheogens
For more information about psychic abilities seehttp://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/psi
– Scroll down through ‘Older Posts’ at the end of each section
Source:
http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/2014/10/psi-and-psychedelics-psychedelics.html
http://sitsshow.blogspot.com/2014/10/psychic-abilities-psi-and-psychedelics.html
Thanks to: http://ascendingstarseed.wordpress.com
