The Mystery

In the classic mythical or archetypal journey, Christopher Vogler explains, “The hero naturally encounters new Challenges and Tests, makes Allies and Enemies, and begins to learn the rules of the Special World.” So it is with lucid dreaming; dream figures, whether they take animal, human, or non-human form, often seem keen to initiate the lucid dreamer into the deeper possibilities of lucid dreaming. The feeling we have on waking up from a dream is often a big clue as to the importance of the dream. Dreams can leave us feeling depleted or energised, depressed or buoyant, sad or happy, and the stronger the emotion is, the more the dream calls to be worked on, thought about, honoured in some way, and integrated into our waking life. In initiation lucid dreams, if we feel we’ve been shown something of value, it’s good to write down the dream and spend time reliv­ing it. What is it really showing us? If we open our hearts to our lucid dream figures, we may find they have a great deal to te...

  A particularly intriguing presentation of biophotons in association with humans cannot be missed: The biophoton intensity seems to be modulated by intention or human interaction during healing or other various kinds of bioenergy practices. Links have also been suggested between biophotons and observations that are difficult to measure and quantify, including consciousness, mind–matter manipulation, and paranormal phenomena at the moment of death. One could argue that an experimental control that appears common to all these phenomena is the involvement of human factors, which at the physical level will reside in the engagement of neuronal activities, no matter whether autonomic or intentional. The variation in surface biophoton emission has been known to correlate with changes in metabolism. When living organisms become stressed, the ROS varies to subsequently change biophoton emission. Induced changes in photon emissions offer physiologically relevant explanations for some human ...

For nearly 50 years, a theory has lingered in the background of psychiatric research: that the human body might naturally produce a molecule capable of slowing down a brain enzyme linked to hallucinations. Now, researchers in the University of Florida College of Pharmacy are revisiting that forgotten science. Their goal is to identify and characterize a natural 'brake pedal' in the brain — one that could open the door to a new class of drugs for the production of endogenous DMT. The 'brake pedal' McCurdy’s team is investigating is a naturally occurring molecule that may slow the activity of an enzyme called indolethylamine N-methyltransferase, or INMT, which helps produce the powerful psychedelic compound dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, in the body. A 1977 study suggested tiny proteins in the body could block the enzyme, but the research stopped there. Nearly 50 years later, UF researchers are revisiting that early work in hopes of replicating it. “If we can characterize th...

The DMT world transcends archetypal form. So alien. So other. As such, the brain tries to make sense of the experience by translating the perception into some archetypal form: the Insectoid, the Elfish, the Reptilian, the Trickster. ‘The DMT state, at its deepest levels, is the apotheosis of the alien. It is a world that the brain should not know how to build. It is a world that should not exist and yet there it is, irresistible in its construction and undeniable in its presence. To smoke DMT means to confront not merely a different world, but one that is, frankly, impossible.’ So it’s not a dream. It’s not a hallucination. It’s not an 'Archetype of the Collective Unconscious'. It’s not even a drug. It’s a reality switch. How best to express this notion of sudden reality switching – instantaneous journeying – than by the metaphor of the radio first used by Henri Bergson over a century ago, and updated by Andrew (and many others) to the television. The radio and the television d...

Your brain is very good at building a world. In fact, your brain builds your world, your consensus model of reality, as a default. Think about it: we inhabit a functional model of reality constructed by the fantastically complex machinery of the brain. Whatever state of consciousness – whether driving a car, climbing a mountain, reading a book, drinking beer, hallucinating monsters or asleep and dreaming – our brains construct the realities we experience. We think we inhabit the real world, but we know nothing of this real world that is not mediated through the neural processing function. As such we cannot really talk of external reality at all, but only of the internal construction of external reality; and from an evolutionary perspective the model needs to be functional, coherent and consensus or we would face challenges of survivability. The implications are huge. Alter brain chemistry and alter perception. Perturb the reality-building mechanism and perturb reality. Andrew developed...

Animism, the belief that all things possess a spirit or consciousness, has been a part of human culture for millennia. Joscha Bach’s cyber animism takes this ancient concept and reframes it through the lens of modern computational theory. In this view, the 'spirit' or 'consciousness' of things is reimagined as their inherent capacity for information processing. At the heart of Bach’s theory is the radical proposition that the entire universe can be understood as a vast computational process. This idea aligns with concepts in digital physics, which suggests that the fundamental nature of reality is information-based rather than material. In this framework, everything from subatomic particles to galaxies can be seen as participating in an ongoing, universal computation. A key aspect of cyber animism is the concept of emergence. Bach proposes that consciousness and intelligence are emergent properties that arise from sufficiently complex information processing systems. Thi...