The Mystery

Every night you go insane. You enter a world where the laws of physics do not apply. Where the dead are alive. Where you can fly but cannot run. Where buildings rearrange themselves as you walk through them. Where time collapses and expands without warning. and where the most bizarre, the most terrifying, and the most profoundly beautiful experiences unfold with a vividness and an emotional intensity that often exceeds anything you experience while awake. You inhabit this world for approximately 2 hours every night. You have spent approximately 6 years of your life in it. And when you wake, the world dissolves, leaving behind fragments, traces, and the lingering sense that something important happened that you cannot quite remember. Dreams are the most universal, the most frequent, and the most poorly understood altered state of consciousness that human beings experience. Every person dreams, every mammal dreams, every bird dreams. And the dreams are not random noise, not the meaningle...

Arguably, for science to progress in a way that allows scientists to tackle the complex problems that are the reality these days, researchers need to transcend ordinary understanding. Thus, scientific understanding comes through a melding of different explanations from many disciplines. Individuals who transcend the ordinary understand many different things, not just one, implying something has to be added into the equation for scientific discovery to move forward. The mind as a fundamental entity without beginning or end with infinite potential is not entirely conceivable. Nevertheless, through infinite potential existing, the mind causes change to occur as the potential energies: dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter. These are potential energies because of their relationship to the mind. Arguably, the mind can be explained in part by an abstract idea, the law of conservation of energy: the mind cannot be created or destroyed, but potential energies convert or transform from on...

It’s like if we had some two dimensional creatures that were living on this piece of paper right here on the table, and one of those creatures figured out that he can smoke some DMT and that somehow enabled us to peel this two dimensional creature to where it could see in three dimensions and see everything in this room. That’s DMT. You’re getting peeled out of reality into some other realm. And the weird thing is, every scientist that I know that’s studying DMT, not one of them thinks it’s a hallucination. I think the more familiar someone is with DMT, the less certain they are about what the hell’s going on. But everyone, literally everyone who uses DMT pretty much goes to the same exact places and they all meet the same entities, the same seven or eight different types of entities. And it’s been the same for 4,500 years of recorded history with DMT. And DMT is something we make in our own body. It’s an endogenous chemical. It’s so much more real than this reality. It’s so ineffable,...

It’s common knowledge that our brains—and, specifically, our brain cells—store memories. But a team of scientists has discovered that cells from other parts of the body also perform a memory function, opening new pathways for understanding how memory works and creating the potential to enhance learning.  “Learning and memory are generally associated with brains and brain cells alone, but our study shows that other cells in the body can learn and form memories, too,” explains New York University’s Nikolay V. Kukushkin, the lead author of the study , which appears in the journal Nature Communications.  The research sought to better understand if non-brain cells help with memory by borrowing from a long-established neurological property—the massed-spaced effect—which shows that we tend to retain information better when studied in spaced intervals rather than in a single, intensive session—better known as cramming for a test. The scientists replicated learning over time by studyin...

Neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin reveals how consciousness evolved out of the natural world, from the birth of the cell to the majesty of our modern minds. Science says that you are nothing but a chemical reaction—a collection of atoms and molecules, like rocks, paperclips, and everything else in the physical universe. But if that’s so, where is the place in this world for your consciousness? In a word, why does it feel so special to be you? Like the Zen Buddhist riddle pondering the imponderable—the sound of a single hand clapping— 'One Hand Clapping' asks the seemingly unanswerable question of how the human mind came to exist within the material world. In search of an answer, neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin takes readers on a billion-year journey through time from the roots of our existence to the advent of Homo sapiens, reimagining the story of our evolution. The result is an exhilarating book that embeds our consciousness within a single, unified story of life on Earth. Il...

Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup's 'Analytic Idealism' is 'a consciousness-only ontology' that has refocused attention, within the philosophical community and more broadly, on metaphysical idealism, that is, an idealism that is grounded in philosophical argument as opposed to promoted by religious tradition or spiritual belief. How to explain, under idealism, the correlation between inner experience and brain states? According to Kastrup, the brain and its patterns of neuronal activity are not the cause of inner experience, but the image, the extrinsic appearance of inner experience. In other words, brain activity is what inner experience looks like when observed from the outside. As such, he says, the correlations ordinarily observed between patterns of brain activity and inner experience are due to the trivial fact that the appearance of a phenomenon correlates with the phenomenon. And when this correlation is broken, as observed in the psychedelic state, the reason i...

Psychedelics and dreams share a profound neurological overlap, with states induced by substances like psilocybin often described as 'waking dreams'. Both states are characterized by unconstrained mental imagery, heightened emotional processing, and decreased activity in the brain's Default Mode Network. The Neurological Connection Shared Brain Activity : Neuroimaging studies show that the brain regions processing memory and emotion are highly active during both REM sleep and psychedelic trips. The Predictive Brain : Recent research on psychedelics indicates that the brain begins to override external reality and 'fills in' sensory information using its own internal memory banks, a process remarkably similar to partial dreaming. Lucid Dreaming Parallel : Psychedelic states most closely mirror lucid dreaming—a mixed state of wakefulness and sleep where you experience vivid, dream-like consciousness but retain a level of self-agency. Therapeutic Implications Fear Extinc...

We will explore the astonishing discovery that the human brain produces light; biophotons, measurable and real, and that this light may be the physical substrate of conscious experience. The bridge between the photon in the physics laboratory and the light that every mystical tradition describes as the essence of awareness. Your brain glows, not metaphorically, not symbolically, physically. Your neurons emit photons, particles of light at a rate of roughly 1 to 100 photons per second per square cm of neural tissue. These photons are not visible to the naked eye. They are ultra weak, a billion times fainter than the light you can see. But they are real. They are measurable. They are produced by every neuron in your brain. And a growing body of research suggests that these photons called biophotons may be the physical basis of consciousness itself. If this is true, then the ancient claim that consciousness is light, a claim made by Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and mystics of e...

Does space actually exist in your lucid dreams? Many of you may find this question strange. Once lucid, you fly around cities, go through walls and explore the dreamscape. In fact, some lucid dreams involve almost constant exploring. Space certainly seems to exist, since you perceive yourself moving through it. Yet as a lucid dreamer, you may notice that you could announce, “Let me see the Eifel Tower in Paris when I turn around!” And with a sense of positive expectation when you turn around, you now find yourself looking at the Eifel Tower. What does that say about the ‘space’ behind you? Or as a lucid dreamer, you may have ignored the dream figures and called out a request to the non-visible awareness behind the dream, “Show me something important for me to see!” Suddenly, the previous dreamscape vanishes, and you find yourself looking at an entirely new environment. What does that say about the ‘space’ in front of you? Or as an experienced lucid dreamer, you could stop in the lucid ...

Have you ever had a lucid dream about floating in a black space? If so, you've discovered the lucid void. Once you find yourself in the lucid void, all you need is the right mindset. This is one of calm lucidity, meditative alertness, peaceful stillness. The lucid void is a wonderous state, one of infinite creative potential. Instead of fearing it and doing all we can to escape from it, it makes so much more sense to learn how to navigate it and explore its marvelous gifts. This requires the same calm awareness you'd bring to stabilizing a lucid dream.     Practice calming breathing techniques or recall a moment in your life when you felt totally safe and loved. Allow this feeling of wellbeing to envelop you. Chant 'OM' in the void to create a sensation of calm.     Welcome the void. It's a place of contemplation, painlessness, and infinite creativity. If it bothers you that you can only see blackness, create some light! There is light everywhere in the void, just l...

The unconscious can be transformed only through awareness. It is difficult, but there is no other way. There are many methods for being aware, but awareness is necessary. You can use methods to be aware, but you will have to be aware.  Buddha has said, "Even in sleep try to be aware of breathing." It will be difficult in the beginning, but if you can be aware in the day, then by and by this will penetrate into your sleep. Anything penetrates into sleep if it has gone deep in the mind in the day. If you have been worried about a certain thing in the day, it gets into the sleep. If you were thinking continuously about sex, it gets into the sleep. If you were angry the whole day, anger gets into the sleep. So Buddha says there is no difficulty. If a person is continuously concerned with breathing and awareness of the breathing, ultimately it penetrates into the sleep. You cannot dream then. If your awareness is there of incoming breath and outgoing breath, then in sleep you cann...

A final synthesis is presented: syncretic idealism. This is a philosophical proposition that combines reoccurring aspects found in different formulations of idealism with elements from other philosophical systems of thought and insights from the evolving information-theoretic paradigm of physics. The aim is a novel worldview integrating concepts formerly only expressed in isolation. This emerging unified tapestry woven from the threads of ideas proposed over time by many keen thinkers offers a radical recontextualization of our notion of existence, a fresh understanding of being and the nature of reality, specifically related to information, complexity, consciousness, and meaning. Syncretic idealism presents a multi-tiered ontology, describing the transition from abstract quantum potentiality to the manifestation of complex actuality, outlining the assembly of physicality from the ontological fields of information fueling the computational engine at the core of reality, unveiling a tel...

The main focus of the book 'The Sapient Cosmos' is to assess the viability of a consciousness-only view of reality. In other words, how can we understand the recent renaissance of metaphysical idealism in the philosophy of mind? To this aim, the doctrine of physicalism, idealism’s antithesis, is scrutinized. Physicalism posits that everything in the universe can be reduced to and explained by physical entities, their properties, and interactions. It is a metaphysical proposition, assuming a materialist-reductionist ontology. Interestingly, physicalism has unwittingly been adopted by most scientifically-minded people who believe it to be a scientific claim. This, however, is a category mistake, as it conflates the descriptive scope of science with a metaphysical claim about the ultimate nature of reality. By definition, metaphysics begins where physics ends. So, while the latter inquires about the 'how', the former contemplates the 'what'. As a result, most acade...

Modern physics has revealed that the common-sense world we perceive through our rational consciousness is not a true reflection of fundamental reality — a realm that appears to be a ghostlike, incoherent, intangible, contradictory, constrained, but fundamentally interconnected substrate beneath the veneer of the seemingly physical. Finally, consciousness is unleashed. The many accounts of shamans, mystics, meditators, and psychonauts — all daring navigators of otherworldly realms accessible to consciousness — are investigated. A transcendental multiverse of pure experience is uncovered by these masters of consciousness, just waiting to be explored by anyone brave enough to go beyond the comforting familiarity of consensus reality. Moreover, a formidable blind spot in the modern Western mind’s understanding is revealed. This is reflected in pervasive psychedelic illiteracy and hostility towards altered states of consciousness, ignoring the long and rich role psychedelics have played in ...

The new sciences of biophotons and torsion fields provide a bridge between two views of life: the old twentieth century view of an organism as a chemical machine and the emerging view of life as communication and energetic flows. In the new paradigm, DNA is the source of biophotons, governing cellular machinery, communications and behavior. It governs growth and metabolism, with high energetic efficiency. The coherent biophoton field forms a hologram throughout the body, telling each DNA molecule where it fits in the overall blueprint, and governing cell differentiation and specialization. With the creation of each biophoton there is also a torsion wave. Torsion is a widespread and important form of radiation which couples particle spins together, and propagates through space as a twisting wave in the metric. It results in a variety of new phenomena. These effects have been studied extensively for the past forty years, at multiple research centers in Russia. Their most important conclu...

Most people think dreams are private, just figments of their own subconscious. Flickering images, leftover thoughts, bizarre narratives made up by a brain trying to organize its day. But that's a shallow interpretation of something far more profound. Because sometimes, what you dream wasn't yours to begin with. And sometimes, you're not the only one dreaming it. All over the world, from Indigenous tribes to ancient mystery schools, there have been whispers of what are now called 'shared dreams'. Two people, sometimes strangers, waking up with the same memory of the same place, the same events, the same conversation. They weren't dreaming alone. They were meeting, somewhere beyond the limits of the physical, in what Thoth and others described as the astral commons. A realm where minds untethered from bodies can converge. You might brush it off as coincidence, but science is slowly catching up. Studies in consciousness research including work by pioneers like Dr. ...

Every night as your body sinks into sleep, something extraordinary begins. Your breath slows, your muscles relax, and your mind drifts into what science calls the REM stage. But what they don't fully explain, what they can't explain with electrodes and graphs, is that in this moment, your consciousness slips through the cracks of physical perception and begins to move. Where it goes depends on one thing, vibration. And this is the part they've hidden, not just from textbooks, but from your entire culture. You've been taught to believe that dreams are random firings in a resting brain, leftovers from the day, useless imagery. But ancient knowledge, especially the teachings of Thoth, tells a different story entirely. Dreams are not noise. They're records. They're snapshots of the places your consciousness visits when your physical senses go offline. And when you begin to remember them, not just the content, but the feeling behind them, you realize something earths...

The development of a prolonged N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) experience would be an important step towards allowing for a closer study of its phenomenology and neurobiological effects, and would make it possible to control the length, intensity, and dynamics of the DMT experience, with the potential for real-time adjustment. This could make extended DMT a valuable tool in conjunction with therapy, to tailor the psychedelic effects to the individual needs of each patient and their clinical condition, as well as for consciousness research, whereby the intensity of the DMT experience can be adjusted according to specific hypotheses and research questions. Continuous infusions of DMT were safely administered for up to 90 min and the infusion rates were reported to be determined via a previous pilot study with six subjects. However, this report lacked information on how strong and sustained these effects were over time. Another approach was proposed, aiming to generate stable subjective effe...

When ingested orally, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is rapidly metabolized in the gastrointestinal system by monoamine oxidase (MAO) which renders it psychologically inactive. In both recreational and ritual settings, DMT is commonly given in the form of ayahuasca, a brew containing DMT and harmala alkaloids that inhibit MAO, which upon oral ingestion, leads to alterations in consciousness lasting for 4–6 h. Alternatively, DMT can be inhaled (vaping/smoking), or administered parenterally (e.g., intramuscularly, or intravenously as a bolus). These forms of administration result in a very short duration of subjective effects: when administered via bolus intravenous (IV) injection, DMT’s subjective effects begin within seconds, reaching their peak intensity within 2–3 min and subsiding thereafter, with negligible effects felt after about 30 min. IV DMT administration allows for precise control over dosing, which makes it the preferred route of administration for investigating its effects i...

N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a naturally occurring psychedelic with a mechanism of action linked to agonism at the 5-HT2A receptor. It can induce a transient and immersive altered state of consciousness, characterized by complex and vivid visual imagery, as well as somatosensory, affective and cognitive effects. Perhaps most distinctive to the experience is the frequently reported sense of immersion into what is perceived to be another world or dimension. This experience is twinned with reports of encountering ‘entities’ or ‘sentient presences’ in about half of cases. The DMT experience shares similarities with the near-death experience and is frequently deemed profound, at times leading to lasting revisions of beliefs about the nature of reality and consciousness. DMT is therefore a powerful tool for the study of consciousness. The subjective experience of immersion into a richly content-full experience, while feeling decoupled from the immediate environmental sensorium, makes DMT ...