Peace is Within

    Our, 'How are you?' is often answered with, 'Not bad' or 'No use complaining.' Most of us generally feel EITHER "Normal! - Just our usual 'ordinary unhappiness,'" OR Bad! - Stressed, contracted & pessimistic. This is NOT caused by terrible external circumstances, BUT by our negative internal conversations (self-talk) continuously droning on in your heads. 

    Ongoing self-talk is a product of the brain's left hemisphere, activated by greed (neediness, sense of lack, not enough, not good enough - low self-esteem is very common even among mental-health professionals.) AND aversion (anxiety, fear, anger, hostility, disgust, etc). So self-talk is a constant, anxious motivator to escape the present moment. We hope that by escaping and / or acquiring something, we might be happier, if only briefly. This drive to escape the present to possess happiness later is so strong & pervasive that a 2014 study conducted by psychologists at the University of Virginia found that when left alone in a room with nothing to do for 15 minutes, 67% of men & 25% of women chose to administer mild electric shocks to themselves rather than sit quietly with their own thoughts. https://www.science.org/content/article/people-would-rather-be-electrically-shocked-left-alone-their-thoughts 

    YET OCCASIONALLY, BRIEFLY, we find ourselves wonderfully alive, energized & engaged, even awed & grateful by what the present moment holds! It can actually be even something we've come across & ignored many times before, BUT now remarkably, we perceive it as a dramatically spectacular, never-to-be-forgotten experience. Instead of our usual anxious chase for relief, we actually feel peaceful, pleasant, awed, timeless, spacious, wonderfully optimistic & ever so grateful. We might even remark how it seems to make no sense to feel this wonderful when nothing in our outer world has changed at all! "Everything changed, yet nothing changed," is a common statement.

    "To be enlightened is to be intimate with all things." Zen Master Dogen   

    "And as far as we know, this intuition that we’re part of something greater than ourselves is very ancient. All these cave paintings from 20, 30, 40 thousand years ago, the practice of burying the dead, dealing with the dead in a ritual way, and so on, all these things suggest that this has been part of human consciousness for a very, very long time. No doubt the forms have changed, and the development of the great religions has put a more unifying aspect on these insights, but it seems to me that it’s been foundational to human life throughout almost all human history, with the brief anomaly of Western Europe and parts of North America, in the last 150 years.” 
    "Dr Iain McGilchrist & Dr Rupert Sheldrake - Intersection of Consciousness and Matter."  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAvwy2LTLMM  

    This makes no sense at all to our left hemisphere, the narrow role of which is to quickly grab what we need to survive & to solve simple practical problems - basically, the materialist reductionist perspective. 
    However, when the right hemisphere is given the opportunity (ie some peace, quiet & relaxation) to balance the left hemisphere, we're allowed to appreciate the right hemisphere's far broader perspective which includes intimate connection with all that gives our life meaning & value: love, gratitude, music, humor, the arts, ritual, dreams, awe, mystery, the divine, mysticism, spirituality, mythology, religion, metaphor, paradox, symbolism, etc.
    "Why the West is Losing Meaning - Iain McGilchrist interview." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C85Vyq-yQtk

 

    “Although we all have a fundamentally pure nature, it is not easy to get in touch with it. The gross way our mind ordinarily functions drowns out this deeper more subtle vibration to such an extent that we generally remain unaware of its existence. If we truly want to connect with this subtle essence, we need to quiet all distractions and loosen the hold our ordinary appearances & conceptions have on us. In other words we need to create space, space in which our essentially pure nature can function uninterruptedly. Then. . . we will be bringing to the surface the inner, divine qualities that have always existed within the depths of our being.” Lama Thubten Yeshe

    So we might say & actually believe that our self-concepts & worldviews are mature & even spiritual. BUT if most of our self-talk is negative ("broken"), this will make us feel miserable, which in turn indicates that our actual self-concept & worldview are darker than we imagined. 
    A negative / dark / pessimistic self-concept & worldview, according to wisdom traditions, the experience of serious meditators, the opinions of all the current experts I respect, and my own lived experience, is sadly distorted! 

    Mindfulness practice is very much about acceptance of what is real, seeing clearly & engaging fully with whatever the present moment holds. 
    Research findings are encouraging: 
        • we feel authentic & truly happy only when we're fully present; 
        • it’s the quality of our presence, not external environment, that brings happiness. 
    Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind.” Science 2010; 330(6006): 932.

 
     “Your consciousness, your heart matters enormously, and in a way, it is the only thing you’re asked to look after. 
    You’re not asked to solve all the problems of the world. That of course would be overfacing. Nobody could ask you to do that. But there is something that you can easily neglect that you are asked to do, which is to take responsibility for yourself. 
    We don’t know what this gift of life is, but my view is that it is something that we can either waste or we can use for good. And what it is there for is for us to respond to the ground of being - another way of talking about the God that created all of this. That is why we exist. Life is improbably hard to imagine occurring as a random event for all sorts of reasons, some of which I’ve expressed in my writings, particularly in “The Matter with Things.’ (also in: Alan Lightman. “The Ordinary Miracle of Existing. Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck any of us will ever experience.” The Atlantic, June 2, 2026.)
    But that aside, life involves quite extraordinary expense of energy, in a way which doesn’t deny the second law of thermodynamics but acts, for a while, very steeply against its tendency. In other words, the tendency of the universe overall is we are told, although it may only apply to the bit of the universe that we know of after all, is for energy to deplete – increase in entropy. But life involves kicking that trend extraordinarily powerfully, and the carrying on of the development of more and more sophisticated life is extraordinary. How do you account for this? Because already with very simple early organisms – actinobacteria at the base of the ocean, some single examples are a million years old. If the purpose of this game of life is to increase your life expectancy, then we’ve gone in the wrong direction. Something has put an incredible amount of energy into developing sophisticated beings that are relatively short-lived. What does this mean? 
    Well, to me it means that the things that we are capable of responding to, which are the great values that I think form the purpose of the cosmos, the expression of goodness, beauty and truth, and I would say also the sacred. The expression of these values requires a kind of reciprocation. 
    So I see God - the ground of being - and his creation as being in an ongoing reciprocal process whereby that ground of being is discovering about itself what its potential can unfold, as what is infolded is unfolded all the time into myriad complex and beautiful entities. And we are the creatures that can respond, reverberate, resonate, be responsible in a relationship, the primary relationship of all relationships that we have with God who is described as love. And love is nothing if not relationship. 
    And that’s not unusual. I mean around the world there are ideas of a divine essence which has different names – Dao, Logos, Yahweh, - it doesn’t really matter, but these ideas are foundational in all cultures that there is something there that has produced this lifegiving creative universe, and we play an important part in what that is. And that is not self-aggrandisement. In fact there is something self-aggrandizing and rather ungrateful in the notion that we should diminish ourselves, and indeed the tendencies in our culture towards lacking self-respect for the human species. 
    I think it’s very good to appreciate the things that we have done wrong, and the havoc we have wrought in the world in the last few hundred years. But I think it’s very, very wrong to vilify & debase humanity. The fact that humanity can do bad things is the flip side of the fact that humanity is capable of the most extraordinary, beautiful and good, and to me holy acts of creation that reciprocate whatever it is that gave us life. 
    And it’s this dance, this back and forwards, this magnifying, this ever creative, ever growing process in which the good and the beautiful and the true can find expression that is the gamble that that creative source of being took on in creating life and creating complex life such as human life.”
    "Why the West is losing meaning - Iain McGilchrist interview." 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C85Vyq-yQtk

 

    “The real question is: Are you willing, whether your experience is tranquil, turbulent, ecstatic, tragic, opulent, or austere, to give yourself wholeheartedly to what is truly alive in you?”
    Amoda Maa. “Embodied Enlightenment. Living Your Awakening in Every Moment.” Reveal Press, 2017.

"Don't judge each day
by the harvest you reap
but by the seeds
that you plant."

Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Aimee Carty - "Painter" 

Unknown Depths of Anger

    I once knew a man who dearly loved his wife & sons, and loved to take them skiing, hiking, canoeing, fishing, camping. My family and I gladly did all of these with them. He was a very honest, hard-working, sincere, 'straight-as-an-arrow,' 'by-the-book' fellow. He'd happily chat except about anything to do with religion or spirituality. These were strictly off limits, and we never learned why. All his hard work seemed to pay off when he landed a strikingly lucrative job as one of six in-house lawyers for a multinational lumber company. But within a month or so, his boss asked him to sign off on a document that our friend knew was shady, so he refused to sign. This immediately got him fired.
    His whole world collapsed. He abandoned his family, changed his name, joined a religious cult, and moved to Europe. When his existing worldview crumbled, he 'flipped' to its opposite.  

 

David Whyte’s poem “Anger”:

    "ANGER is the deepest form of care, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger points toward the purest form of compassion, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.
    What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.
    Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability; anger too often finds its voice strangely, through our incoherence and through our inability to speak, but anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics: a daughter, a house, a family, an enterprise, a land or a colleague. 
    Anger turns to violence and violent speech when the mind refuses to countenance the vulnerability of the body in its love for all these outer things - we are often abused or have been abused by those who love us but have no vehicle to carry its understanding, who have no outer emblems of their inner care or even their own wanting to be wanted. Lacking any outer vehicle for the expression of this inner rawness they are simply overwhelmed by the elemental nature of love’s vulnerability. In their helplessness they turn their violence on the very people who are the outer representation of this inner lack of control.
    But anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here, it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be understood fully at the very spring of its birth: it is an invitation to find a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete and absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence."

 

      I emailed Whyte's poem above, as well as the link to his imho wonderful interview (bottom of this page) to a relative who is on a spiritual path, as well as an old friend whose dogmatic belief is that we live in a cruel meaningless mechanical Cosmos, and who has, on a couple of previous occasions, become very angry when I suggested otherwise. I had (naively) hoped that Whyte's nuanced, compassionate understanding of anger might soften my friend's rigid armor.

    My relative's response started like this:
    "I watched 5 minutes of Whyte and stopped.
     Not because it's useless but because it resonates so well and connects with so many thinking points that I had to put some down before resuming. ..."

    My friend's response started like this: 
    "I have read the "poem". This guy, Whyte, has trouble with language. For example, when is a poem, a poem? And when is anger, anger? He keeps ..." 
    My friend made no mention of the interview - probably too angry to notice the link, or the mention of it in the subject heading of the email. Coincidentally, David Whyte is a well-known, highly-respected poet, with multiple published books, so the "trouble" may not be in Whyte's use of "language."

    Whyte's interview skillfully addresses anger about aspects of life we cannot control, and much more:

    Interviewer: “… the intersection between powerlessness and anger. When we’re made to make contact with that sense of helplessness or powerlessness, our immediate response is rage, anger. Can you unpack that?”

    David Whyte (DW): “Well you can immediately see its actual practical physical evolutionary necessity, in rage and physical defense in people you love. So the inability to actually be able to do something about something that doesn’t involve physical defense (invokes frustration & anger). What's actually needed involves another kind of deeper cradling, or holding, which our physical bodies are unable to do. We have to be able to hold another person in our heart and our mind. And that heart energy is often what we feel lies below the horizon of our inner line of resistance. So opening the heart is always a very powerful path for a human being to take. 
    Albert Camus, the great French writer & philosopher, had a beautiful invitation. It was just one simple line, ‘live to the point of tears.’ This is not an invitation to maudlin sentimentality. This is asking you to feel things, right to their Essence. If you just have an edge of dread about something, then feel that dread more, don’t resist it. Get to the center of it until it starts to change into something else. 
    The Greeks had this beautiful word, which we don’t have in modern English, which is, ‘enantiodromia,’ and it means the ability of something, once it becomes its absolute essential self, to start changing into something completely different, and quite often its complete opposite. Which is why immovability always changes into incredible fluidity, once you’ve got through that. So to be able to feel things until they actually start to have a life of their own, and start to mature … 
    This is a received understanding in psychology, that parts of us when they’re traumatized, stay stone-like inside you for good reason, and refuse to grow older, until that trauma has been resolved. The traumatized part doesn’t want to move on until it’s healed. And maybe it would be very destructive if it moved on prematurely. So finding the parts of you that are stuck – is a wonderful thing actually. It’s not a pejorative thing. And to feel the stuckness even more, to get right to the heart of your stuckness, your inability to say it, and then you start saying it, it’s quite remarkable really.”

    Interviewer: “It’s brutal though. I find that there’s something beautiful and brutal about it.”

    DW: “This is why in all real Warrior Traditions, there’s always been a parallel discipline of poetry. You look at Samurai, the Japanese tradition, Chinese tradition, Indian tradition, and in the West we have the first World War poets like Sassoon. Poetry is the way in for anyone at all, man or woman or anything in between. But for men, it’s a real doorway. We all instinctively understand what poetry represents. Even people who’ve hardly read a line of poetry in their life, will come away from a football game saying, ‘it was sheer poetry, that touchdown!’ We instinctively understand about the verve and vitality and mutability and movability and tidal forces of the world, if you can capture these in speech (poetry). And if you can capture these in movement on a football field, why couldn’t you catch it in your own voice? So I would say, besides the practical activity of something that concerns all heterosexual young men, which is getting into real conversations with young women, I would recommend poetry rather than a Maserati.

    It can be comforting for a young man to know that under this inability to speak my emotions, underneath this inability to feel what I feel, underneath this inability to bring those two poles together, feelings, emotions and articulation, there’s something really quite astonishing waiting for me. The great German speaking-poet Rilke said, ‘Stretch your well-disciplined strength between two opposing poles, because inside human beings, is where God learns.’” 
    David Whyte "Facing The Unknown And Finding Meaning" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or44UlIKQuE SUPERB interview imho - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

David Whyte - "Facing The Unknown And Finding Meaning"

Small separate self and Big Mind

     There are many ways of expressing "separate self": small self, narrative-self, ordinary mind, personal mind, pain body, egocentricity, noisy ego, fearful hurt child, etc. All of these reveal aspects of the common, and for many, the default self-concept / worldview. This worldview is fear-based; conflates survival of the ego with survival of the body; assumes we're all "alone in a competitive, hostile world" where one's external circumstances rigidly, mechanically determine quality of life; where perfect control of one's external environment means everything to the left-hemisphere-dominant mind. But since perfect control is never achievable, "ordinary unhappiness" is as good as it gets. Nevertheless, when anxiety, fear & unhappiness dominate, this ordinary mind rules - much like how during emergencies, the fight, flight, freeze instinct kicks in; and also like how during times of war, right-wing dictators find it easiest to cling to power.

    “No one can tell you what awakening is. I could use a lot of words to describe what it’s like. I could say it’s kind of like wakening from a dream. Suddenly you’re not who you think you are. You are not the dream character, the person or personality that you’ve been playing all your life.” Dan Schmidt

    Nevertheless, "Big Mind" has been experienced & pointed towards in many ways & words, such as: Awakening, Awareness, true self, Self, Universal Consciousness, Source, Buddha nature, the Divine, high-plateau experience, enlightenment, Christ consciousness, God, Fundamental Wellbeing, Ongoing Non-Symbolic Experience, Juingong, etc. One of the better books describing how people - whom Martin calls "Finders"- from around the world have experienced this is: Dr. Jeffery A. Martin. “The Finders.” Integration Press, 2019. 

    “Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.” Anthony de Mello SJ

    "Another name for God is Surprise!" Brother David Steindl-Rast

    “As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. … That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.” Anthony de Mello SJ

    Those who experience higher states of consciousness for sustained periods report extraordinary levels of wellbeing. Regardless of geographic location, ethnicity, spirituality / religiosity, education etc, there is remarkable similarity in "Finders'" descriptions. More & more such people are sharing their experiences in serious, in-depth interviews: https://batgap.com/ and http://conscious.tv/ and https://cac.org/podcast/turning-to-the-mystics/ and https://www.guruviking.com/ etc. 

     Finders “have moved past their moments of doubt & frustration. They have found exactly what everyone else has been seeking their entire life. For them, each moment feels perfectly okay at a deep & fundamental level, regardless of actual life circumstances. There individuals do not dwell on past regrets or glories, nor worries about future hopes & dreams. They live peacefully in the present, while everyone else around them seems intent on trying to escape it. They’ve not only found fulfillment but a deep & fundamental sense of wellbeing.” Dr. Jeffery A. Martin. “The Finders.” Integration Press, 2019.

    As soon as we notice that we're confused & suffering, as if we were alone, struggling to survive in a hostile world, Zen advises that we "take the backward step" and ask ourselves, "Who is confused? Who is suffering? Who is struggling?" This "self-inquiry" practice will increasingly serve to snap us out of the illusion of being this small "separate self" - the pawn in some cruel cosmic game, and back to our true self, ONE with everyone & everything, the Source, Universal Consciousness. 

    Gradually, as wellbeing becomes stabilized, Finders can opt to shift into a "quiet ego" ("doing mode") to perform certain practical tasks, then effortlessly return to Awareness ("being mode") again. As an aside, Iain McGilchrist's right-hemisphere dominance accommodates both of these (while left-hemisphere dominance is equivalent to "noisy ego" - much higher levels of self-centeredness). Martin's book is quite detailed, providing insight into Finders' profound qualitative change in perspective, self-concept & worldview after which they (other serious meditators, mystics & saints) say / write seemingly opaque, confusing & even paradoxical statements, such as this well-known unequivocal declaration:

    "All shall be well,
     and all shall be well,
     and all manner of things shall be well." Julian of Norwich (1342 – 1416) English Christian mystic

    Just as Bessel Van Der Kolk's excellent book, “The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma” helps us look back and understand self-compassionately, the effects of past traumas on our lives, Jeffery Martin's valuable book, "The Finders" helps us roughly locate where we are now on our spiritual journey and provides an important map for the joyful trails awaiting us.

        “But by my love and hope I beseech thee:
         cast not away the hero in thy soul!
         Keep sacred thy highest hope!”            Friedrich Nietzsche “Thus spoke Zarathustra”

 

Molly Hahn buddhadoodles.com

Where Science and Sacred Meet

    As individuals & as groups, we cling to habitual opinions, beliefs & behaviors for decades past the time we became aware of irrefutable evidence in favor of far better alternatives. There are many reasons for this, perhaps most commonly, we're far more interested & invested in our comfort / status quo & our personal / group identity / ego than in truth eg 'my country - right or wrong.'
    And yet we look back and laugh at surgeons who in 1846 vigorously & effectively opposed the science proposed by Dr. Semmelweis that they must wash their hands before delivering babies & performing surgery. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/375663920/the-doctor-who-championed-hand-washing-and-saved-women-s-lives
    Winston Churchill quipped, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” Most of us are fiercely proud, quick to rationalize our behavior, despite all evidence to the contrary, AND desperately slow to change!
    But we CAN always CHOOSE to learn & evolve!

    Below is a short transcript of an excellent lecture by William A. Richards PhD, whose 2015 book, “Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences” was described as: "An inspiring testament to half a century of scientific research and personal exploration into the responsible, beneficial use of psychedelic substances. William A. Richards's work is visionary, personal, and transpersonal, instilled with kindness, deep humanity, and quiet wisdom."

    “Psychedelics, wisely and responsibly employed, really are valuable tools in the exploration of consciousness, akin to the telescope in astronomy, or the microscope in biology. Sometimes I have felt like Columbus, having just landed in the West Indies with his primitive maps, and then having somehow been placed in a supersonic jet and shown the vistas of the entire new world, stretching far beyond the wildest fantasies of his imagination, and leaving him almost speechless, with a profound sense of awe. Sometimes, when sitting silently beside research volunteers, when their everyday consciousness has been transcended, and mystical experiences are occurring, it is no exaggeration to say that I humbly feel as though I am sitting beside the Buddha under the Bodhi tree as enlightenment is dawning, or sitting beside St. Paul on the road to Damascus, or beside Isaiah during his temple vision.
    What we are beginning to study here, on this frontier where science & sacred are meeting, truly is profound in its magnitude, its vivid intensity, and its potential relevance. With the best experimental designs we can devise, as we begin to probe this multifaceted field, we are at best novices with very limited conceptual tools and linguistic frameworks.
    I think of Alan Watts’ suggestion: that one reason we have tended to avoid this field of inquiry arises out of the taboo of knowing who you are. That we tend to fear too much knowledge about the mysteries of our own being.
    As I know many of you appreciate, it is common for volunteers, under the action of psychedelics in relatively high dosage, to report phenomena that do not appear to arise from their personal life histories, and that entail different perspectives on time & space. Experiences that call into question some of the most basic assumptions that undergird our normative consensual definition of reality, and the manner in which we customarily define ourselves [self-concepts], and orient ourselves in the world [worldviews]. As expressed by Thomas Kuhn, whether as scientists or philosophers, we really are in the midst of a major paradigm shift at this point in history.
    It is clear that there indeed is a multidimensional cartography of inner space, with many discrete alternate forms of consciousness, and they seem to form a continuum that is influenced by dosage, by personality structure, and the capacity to relinquish ego control, and by the growing edge of a person’s unique personal & spiritual development. Simply expressed, the continuum begins with mild alterations of perception; may deepen to unravel the psychodynamics of personal life; may deepen further to invite participation in visionary or archetypal dramas – the realm of mythology, as presented by Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung; and may deepen even further, into transcendental realms of awareness, in which the everyday self or ego is encompassed into unitive mystical dimensions of mind that usually are experienced as profoundly sacred & eternal. In addition to these stages, there are many unique states of consciousness, about which we know very, very little.
    Although we like to think spatially, and attempt to speak a language that may correlate to phenomena encountered in consciousness, with neuronal structures and biochemical activity, to some extent, it continues to make sense, at least to me, to stress that the experiential content of a particular foray into the world of alternate states is to be found not within the drug, but within the human mind itself. What the human mind is continues to remain a tantalizing mystery, especially as there is good reason to question the reductionistic philosophical assumptions that have tended to prevail in the community of Western scientists, in spite of quantum physics. It is time to take a fresh look at the writings of philosophers such as Henry Bergson, who viewed the human brain more like a television set that receives processes, limits, works with the information, than as a primary source of mental phenomena. Perhaps psychedelic drugs still may be understood simply as skeleton keys that provide access to other realms of human consciousness. The experiences reported, therefore, are not ‘in the drug,’ but rather in and through the mind of the person who is experiencing.
    Now there is a lot of ignorance & lore here, even among those who possess a reasonable personal cache of psychedelic experience. All too often, a person has taken a particular dose of a particular substance, had a particular experience, and then concluded that whatever occurred is ‘what that substance does.’ It is highly probable that even if the person took the same dose of the same substance at another time, there would be a different experience to report, even if it further revealed and extended the themes encountered earlier. The major substances with which I have worked appear to differ from one another not in terms of the experiential content they reveal, but in terms of factors such as required dosage, rapidity of onset and termination, and duration of action. If any particular molecule has a higher probability of facilitating a particular state of consciousness, that only will be established in time, as well-designed, double-blinded research projects are implemented. Does Mescaline produce more vivid colors? Does the DMT in Ayahuasca really produce more images of anacondas? Is the onset of Psilocybin more gentle than LSD? Only patient research will provide the answers we seek."
    Psychedelic Psychotherapy: Insights from 25 Years of Research - William Richards : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhbjKizniOU - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED 56 minute lecture

 

 Neil Young, performing John Lennon's "Imagine"

 

All That Is

     Our brain, according to an increasing number of experts, acts as a "reducing valve" to prevent us from being overwhelmed by the infinite amount of information that surrounds us. The efficiency of this reducing function differs for each individual, resulting in very different perspectives.
    An extremely inefficient reducing valve can result in data overload, making navigating the world impossible. However, an extremely efficient reducing valve can give a false sense of certainty that one's extremely narrow worldview is accurate & all encompassing - that nothing outside of it can possibly exist. There are very popular secular ("scientism") and religious versions of such dogmatism. Simplified, easy-to-understand models of reality, to which everyone must conform, provides a temporary hiding place from reality - which is awe-inspiringly complex & ever-changing!
     Between these two extremes, is an infinite range of possibilities: markedly increased perceptual awareness, amazing creativity, & incredible skills in every arena: communication, visual arts, music, math, etc.
     Some instantly shut down & walk away when faced with above-average skills & capacities. Their narrow, rigid, mechanical worldview & identity would be shattered if they were to admit that extra-ordinary things can & do occur. No amount of data, evidence, or reasoning can cure this fearful emotional reaction, any more than it's possible to reason people out of a phobia.
    All of us have a (mostly unexamined) small box with walls or 'boundaries' - whatever's inside, we accept as 'real' & safe; everything outside, 'can't be real' & is terrifying. I've noticed that those who seem to have the most rigid boundaries, around the smallest 'box' are the most susceptible to having their boundaries / box blown wide apart by trauma eg a good friend & devoted family-man, who was rigidly anti-religious, unexpectedly lost his prestigious, high-paying job. He then suddenly abandoned his wife & children, joined a religious cult, changed his name, and moved to another continent.
     Many events can & will rock our world, both mundane (eg accidents) and "out of the ordinary" (eg NDEs) : http://www.johnlovas.com/2021/03/fascinating-overlap.html What's critical is learning to respond to shocks to our system in a way that transforms us into wise elders, instead of shrinking & hardening us into bitter victims!
    Wise maturation involves progressively expanding our horizons, opening up our mind & hearts, and exploring the ever-expanding, wondrous universe - our 'box' endlessly enlarging, its 'walls' / 'boundaries' becoming more & more porous to all that is.
      “People have accessed the higher realms through near death experiences, through mystical encounters, or through meditation. Others have had a sudden insight or ‘aha’ moment. All doors lead to the same place: a transcendent recognition that our true nature is spiritual, not physical. There often is a simultaneous awareness that we are all interconnected and that we are somehow manifestations of one energy.”
     Brian L. Weiss, Amy E. Weiss. ”Miracles Happen. The Transformational Healing Power of Past-Life Memories.” HarperOne, 2012.

     Natalie Sudman's near death experience (NDE) carries a wonderfully liberating, uplifting message for those of us with the 'bandwidth' to hear it:

      "I’ll try to describe some of the qualities & perspectives that were present in all the environments that I experienced (in my NDE). …
      In this non-physical state of being, there’s a profound sense of belonging. Everything about everyone that exists is not only accepted, but admired, respected, recognized & celebrated. There’s a cooperative co-passion for being that permeates everything that I experienced.
      Everything there is effortless. It is just so easy. It’s blissful, and it’s filled with a joy that is so fundamental, it’s only really remarkable from outside of that state of being.
     So imagine that everything you have ever thought, imagined, experienced, dreamed or created, was recognized to be valuable to you yourself and everyone else, to all that exists. Imagine that no matter what you do or how you express yourself, you belong and are valued. This is true. What was known to me, what was so basic as to be assumed was just that. That we are each intrinsically valuable, and everything we experience matters, not just to ourselves but to each other, and to all that is.
     I use the phrase ‘all that is’ instead of God, Source, Universe, whatever – a lot of those words have just personal connotations that limit my ideas. And so when I say ‘all that is,’ it includes all that is. That’s the term that I’ll be using.
     My experience is that we are always within and expressions of all that is, which is a beautiful force of infinitely curious and creative energy & awareness. How can we be anything but perfect. We are all that is, just as much as it is us. We are created by it; it creates us. We participate in it; it participates in us. We extend it; and it extends us. We are each individual expressions of the single infinite awareness. We are one. And we are each perfect, exactly as we are.”
     My Near Death Experience in Iraq - Natalie Sudman : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8lQs1MccoU&t=225s

     Natalie Sudman. "Amplification of Impossible Things. My Near Death Experience in Iraq." Ozark Mountain Publishing, 2012. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!