Literary Adventures

This page will take you into pieces of literature that are carefully selected for their great content at the literary, scientific, or philosophical level. A short selection will be presented in full. A long one will be divided into sections that will be refreshed regularly. Emphasis and highlights are mostly ours, not made by the original author.

Here is our current selection:

Supernature By Lyall Watson

Part Three - Mind

7 - Transcendence

Take a toad. Hold it flat between the palms of your hands; turn it over on its back and keep it there for a moment. Now remove your upper hand carefully and the toad will lie quite still with its webbed feet in the air.

This 'experimentum mirabile' was demonstrated in 1646 by a Jesuit priest as an example of man's dominion over the animal world, but in fact it illustrated a far more fundamental principle--the domination of the rest of the body by the brain. Many species react in the same way. A crayfish that is made to stand on its head with claws on the ground and tail up in the air, stays in that position of supplication until disturbed. A hare held tightly upside down adopts a similar sort of waxlike pliability, and its limbs can be arranged in any weird posture. The snake charmer's grip on the back of a cobra's neck reduces it to instant and sometimes rigid immobility, suggesting that Moses was perhaps a better biologist than we give him credit for. Many zoos use this principle of immobilisation for keeping small mammals and birds quiet while they are being weighed. In all cases, constriction seems to play an important role in producing the response, which may account for the comparative stillness of babies tightly wrapped in swaddling clothes.

Sudden immobility can be induced by a high level of fear. The Swiss psychiatrist Greppin tells of a campaign to eliminate the sparrows in his hospital grounds that ended after ten weeks in mass paralytic hysteria, with the birds dropping like stones into the bushes and then freezing into rigid postures as soon as they saw a man with a gun. (128) This sounds remarkably like the catatonic state that fear can produce in man.

The explorer David Livingstone was once attacked by a lion at Mabotsa, in southern Africa, and described his reaction to being grabbed by the shoulder and mauled. 'The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake of the cat. It caused a sort of dreaminess in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror, though quite conscious of all that was happening. It was like what patients partially under the influence of chloroform describe, who see all the operation, but feel not the knife. The singular condition was not the result of any mental process. The shake annihilated fear and allowed no sense of horror in looking round at the beast.' (201) When the lion let go for a moment, Livingstone recovered and managed to get away.

There can be little doubt that under certain circumstances immobility has high survival value. Many animals escape from predators in exactly this way. Some, like the bittern Botaurus stellaris, enhance the effect of their leaflike feather pattern by adopting an elongated pose and swaying in time with the reeds around them. When a predator gets too close they fly away, but others, such as the stick insect, rely so completely on their immobility that they can be dismembered before they will move. Some vertebrates use this same kind of self-induced catatonia in emergencies.

The Cameroon toad Bufo superciliaris and the hognosed snake Heterodon platyrhinos both sham dead, turning over and lying on their backs with their tongues hanging out when threatened. But the mechanism is not perfectly developed in them yet, because they make the hilarious mistake when put the right way up or moved in any way, of immediately turning upside down again. The most accomplished death feigner of all is certainly the American opossum Didelphis virginiana, which has a superb fixed-action pattern to call on. In normal sleep the opossum keeps its mouth and eyes closed and its feet out of sight, but when attacked it collapses with eyes open, lying on its side with the feet visible and claws grasping the ground. The fact that the animal is still wide awake has been demonstrated in tests that show that it responds to loud noises by twitching its ears and by retracting its lips when prodded.

There is no difference in body temperature, oxygen consumption, or blood chemistry, and EEG records show brain waves that are identical to those of a normal, highly alert animal. (107) 'Playing possum' appears as a complete behavior pattern in isolated young animals at an age of 120 days, which is when they would normally be weaned and begin to wander off on their own. (230) So this species has developed a stereotyped, instinctive way of coping with attack that just imitates the automatic paralysis that some other species have to rely on to avoid death. In all of them, immobility clearly works well, inhibiting further attack by a predator and perhaps giving them a chance to escape later comparatively unharmed.

Immobilisation can also be induced by disorientation. (122) At the Freiburg zoo they have built a mechanical device to supplement the effects of constriction. An animal is strapped tightly to the inside of the lid of a box, with its feet just touching the floor, and then the lid is spun on a swivel to bring the captive quickly up and onto its back, where it lies without struggling. The great French naturalist Fabre reported that most birds could be immobilised simply by swinging them to and fro or by tucking the head under a wing. (305) The degree of control varies with the amount of disorientation. Falcons are not paralysed but are certainly made more amenable by hooding, and blinkers serve the same function on a horse.

Some birds do not respond just to being held or disorientated, but require a different kind of stimulus. They can be treated like toads and placed flat on the ground with their necks stretched out in front, but to get them to 'freeze' effectively it is usually necessary to draw a sand pattern of long, steady lines radiating out from the beak. When released in this position, they lie there with eyes focused on the lines until they gradually recover or a puff of wind rouses them and sends them flying away. This concentration on a rhythmic pattern seems to be the basis of 'fascination' techniques used by some reptiles. Many zoologists scoff at the idea of snakes fixing their prey with some sort of visual display, but it happens. (145) The African tree snake Theletornis kirtlandii has a vivid red tongue with a black forked tip that protrudes several inches out of the snake's mouth and makes extraordinary rhythmic movements. These not only attract the interest of small birds, but seem to put them into a bemused state that makes them easy prey.

Two species of Langaha snakes in Madagascar do the same thing with a nose leaf and a comb on top of their head, and in Ceylon the pit viper Ancistrodon hypnale uses the colored tip of its tail to fascinate passing prey. The truly fascinating thing about all these displays is that the organs used by the snakes all move in the same way, vibrating at a regular three beats per second. Little is known of the brain waves of birds and small mammals, but this could be the frequency that is their equivalent of the alpha waves that occur during relaxed meditation in our brains. Vibrations of six or seven cycles a second make us irritable, but ten we find soothing. These are examples of immobilisation being produced across the species line, but there is at least one example of the technique being used by members of the same species on each other.

In certain spiders there is such a huge difference in size between the sexes that the male runs the risk of being mistaken for prey and attacked and eaten by his mate, so he approaches her only under the cover of a reassuring semaphore display that involves a sustained rhythmic movement of his palpi.

Immobilisation can therefore be induced by constriction, disorientation, fear, a fixed behavior pattern, or rhythmic stimulation. In man all these techniques have been used, but in 1843 the Scots physician James Braid showed that a trance state could also be induced by suggestion, and he called the process hypnosis, from the Greek for sleep. (37)

Hypnosis

The process of animal hypnosis has been called catatonia, catalepsy, thanatosis, akinesis, and action inhibition; in man it has been known as mesmerism, animal magnetism, somnambulism, reverie, and druidic sleep. In neither case is there any evidence that hypnosis has anything at all to do with normal sleep, but there is widespread disagreement about exactly what hypnosis is.

Leon Chertok, Director of the Paris Institute of Psychiatry, believes that it is a fourth organismic state, which can be added to waking, sleeping, and dreaming. (72) It certainly differs in several respects from each of these three states of being, but the difficulty is that although hypnosis is held to be a genuine condition, nobody has yet come up with a satisfactory definition of it. Ivan Pavlov, the celebrated Soviet psychologist, thought that it was a defense mechanism that is similar in many ways to sleep. (241) He induced it in dogs by delaying the presentation of food for a long time after the sounding of the signal that the animals had come to associate with food.

The dogs' tense expectation often led to catatonic states so severe that they could not move even when food was finally presented. Anatol Milechnin, a Uruguayan physician, uses this and other evidence to support his theory that hypnosis is an emotional reaction that can be produced either by shock techniques, such as the sudden firing of a gun, or by tranquilising stimuli, such as stroking or soft singing. (211) The British psychiatrist Stephen Black combines both these ideas into the notion that hypnosis could be a reflex conditioned in very early life. (26) He suggests that during development in the egg or the uterus an animal is physically restricted and must remain relatively immobile, and that forcible restriction in later life produces a return to this condition of inaction. It is certainly true that most animals, when put into a trance state or feigning death, do adopt a fetal posture.

This theory could also explain why rhythmic stimuli produce hypnosis. The dominant sound and sensation throughout an embryo's life is the continuous rhythmic beat of its mother's heart, and after birth it is most easily tranquilised either by being held close to its mother's left breast, where it can hear the heart, or by a metronome or a cradle that moves at seventy-two cycles per minute--the same rate as the pulse. (218) The hypnotic effect of solid-beat music and the trancelike state of some dancers can be explained in the same way.

In this climate of uncertainty the best way to examine hypnosis is to look at what little is known about the physiology of the condition. Hypnosis-like states occur in people that are clearly awake. A person lost in thought may read page after page of a book without any comprehension and listen to a whole conversation without hearing any of it; or an injured boxer may complete a bout without any realisation of having done so. This narrowing of attention is very characteristic of the hypnotic state.

Sleeping and dreaming can both be differentiated from waking by the differences of the patterns that show up on an EEG, but the brain waves of a hypnotised person are identical with the waking state. (81) A subject wired to an EEG machine shows, when resting with eyes closed, exactly the same pattern of waves as when hypnotised a moment later by means of a code word. (93) There seems to be no change either in cortical potential, pulse rate, skin resistance, or palmar electric potentials. (187) There is a slight rise in body temperature brought about by vasodilation during the trance state, and there seem to be small changes in the voltage of the life field. (265) But both these measurements are very subtle, and changes of this kind can also be recorded as a response to purely emotional reactions, so we are left with no known physiological indication of hypnosis.

The only way one can tell if someone is hypnotised is if he either responds to test suggestions or actually says afterward that he entered a hypnotic state. This is obviously very unsatisfactory and leads to the suspicion that a large part of the hypnotic phenomenon is self-determined, like the behavior adopted by a frightened opossum. Seymour Fisher, in an ingenious experiment, suggested to deeply hypnotised subjects that every time they heard the word 'psychology' they would scratch their right ear. (101) After waking them, he tested the suggestion by using the word, and all of them dutifully scratched their ear.

At this point one of his associates came into the room and they carried on a prearranged, apparently informal discussion about everyday topics in which the word 'psychology' came up several times, but the subjects failed to respond to it. After some minutes of conversation, the associate left and Fisher turned back to his class, and when he next used the key word, all of them again produced the appropriate response. It seems that some hypnotic suggestions work only because the subjects do what they think is expected of them. When, by implication, the experiment was abandoned during the casual conversation, the suggestion was ignored as well.

Similar results are recorded for an experiment on pain in which all subjects were given exactly the same stimulus but showed a marked difference in their response. (195) Those who were being paid most to take part in the research also suffered the greatest amount of pain, apparently because they felt that they ought to suffer more. There is some reason to believe that hypnosis is governed in this way by psychological controls, but whatever causes the hypnotic state, there is absolutely no doubt about its effects.

One of the characteristics of pain is that it produces an increase in blood pressure. At Stanford University they compared the responses of hypnotised subjects, who had been told that they would feel no pain, with non-hypnotised subjects, who were asked to pretend that they were feeling no pain. (149) Observers could not tell the difference between the two groups by watching their reactions, but the blood pressure of all those feeling pain soared while that of the hypnotised subjects remained steady. Hypnotism seems to be a real painkiller and is now being used as the sole anesthetic in childbirth, dental work, and some major surgery.

A chemical anesthetic works by blocking painful nerve impulses before they reach the brain, but hypnosis apparently acts by getting the brain to ignore the impulses. (314) In several surgical reports of hypnoanesthesia, the patients showed no overt signs of pain, but their pulse rate and blood pressure fluctuated considerably during the operations. They were feeling something. It looks as though the mind, under the influence of suggestion, is exerting considerable control over the body. Part of the explanation may be that many of the reactions to pain are produced by anxiety, and if there is no worry regarding the source of the pain, we can tolerate surprisingly large amounts of discomfort. Injuries that would ordinarily be painful often escape notice altogether during important occasions, when our attention is fixed elsewhere. Afterward we notice the bruise and wonder where it came from.

There seems to be almost no limit to the things that we can make our body do if we put our mind to it. Stephen Black gave subjects under hypnosis a direct suggestion that they would not be able to hear a tone with the particular frequency of 575 cycles per second, and in subsequent testing they showed no physiological startle reactions to the tone when it was suddenly played very loudly. They were also unable to feel the vibration of a tuning fork of the same frequency when it was placed against their ankle bones. (28) Several attempts have been made to induce color blindness or even total blindness by suggestion, and in one subject it was found that the brain no longer reacted normally to a bright light. (202) This is a sort of negative hallucination--not seeing something that was there--but positive hallucination of bright colors had also occurred complete with afterimages in the appropriate complementary colors. (97)

Of all skin diseases, warts seem to be most closely associated with psychological factors. Wart 'charmers' ply their trade, apparently successfully, in most countries of the world, so it is not surprising to find that hypnosis work equally well. In one well-controlled study, fourteen patients with long-standing warts all over their bodies were given suggestions that those on only one side of the body would disappear. (305) In five weeks they did. Allergies seem to be similarly responsive to suggestion. An elegant test in Japan involved blindfolded subjects, all of whom were known to be allergic to a certain tree. (159) When the leaves of chestnut were placed on their left arms and they were told that these were from the allergy tree, all developed the usual dermatitis; but when the real leaves were placed on their right arms and said to be harmless, no reaction took place.

All allergic reaction is produced by a foreign substance, such as pollen, that enters the body and combines with a protein to form a specific antibody that sometimes produces distressing side effects or allergic reactions. It is a relatively straightforward biochemical reaction that apparently has nothing to do with the brain, but there is now a wealth of evidence to show beyond doubt that the whole process is governed by mental factors. The classic test for tuberculosis, a bacterial infection, is the Mantoux skin test, which produces red allergic weal on the skin if the patient has TB antibodies in his blood, but it has been shown that a hypnotic suggestion not to react can produce a negative response to the test even in someone riddled with TB. (27) This nicely demonstrates the dominance of emotion over the wasting disease, which has long associations with depression and unrequited lovers 'alone and palely loitering'.

Other physiological mechanisms are also amenable to suggestion. (26) In deep hypnosis even the tendon reflex that makes a leg jump when tapped on the knee can be eliminated. (13) The heart can be speeded up or slowed down and the amount of blood circulating in any one limb can be increased. (298) Nearsighted people can be made to change the shape of their eyeballs and improve their distance vision for short periods. (173) And perhaps most impressive of all, the contractions of the stomach due to great hunger can be eliminated altogether by nothing more than the suggestion of eating a large meal. (196)

Many of these studies have been strongly criticised, most effectively by Theodore Barber, who hates the whole idea of hypnosis. (14) In some instances the criticism is justified--the effects listed might not have been produced by hypnosis; but the arguments are rather pointless and tend to conceal something very important. Whether produced by what is called 'hypnosis' or by what others prefer to see as simple 'suggestion', the fact remains that all these bodily functions, which are normally operated by the autonomic nervous system, over which we have no conscious control, are amenable to outside influence. Whatever the process may be, it has enormous biological significance and gives us our first direct contact with the elusive unconscious.

Autosuggestion

The whole problem of consciousness is full of pitfalls, many of them purely semantic, and it is a long way from satisfactory solution, but for our purposes it is enough to say that man has something the amoeba does not have. We have an individuality that seems to be based on our experience. The brain of a newborn child is in effect a blank sheet, which quickly becomes covered by records of experiences that have been useful to him.

At first the child depends completely on others, and his most urgent need is therefore to get these others to do what he wants. Right from the very beginning, he starts to build up a system of communication based on information he slowly collects. This is stored in what amounts to a theoretical model of the world as he sees it. Our brains continue to build this structure throughout life, modifying and adding to it as necessary, but always comparing the input of daily events with the record of past experience of events of the same kind. At the highest levels, the brain calls on stored information to make judgments about things even in the absence of the normal stimuli--it can 'think' for itself.

This ability is roughly what is meant by consciousness. We know that we have it, and we can recognise it in many other mammals and birds that seem to respond to us or to each other in the same way. We have reason to doubt its existence in reptiles, amphibians, and fish, and arguments go on continually about the possibility of consciousness, perhaps a sort of collective version, in the social insects. Few people think that worms or jellyfish have it, and it would be hard to find anyone who believed in conscious sponges or seaweed. It is very difficult to know where to draw the line and quite unnecessary to even try; all we need do is recognise the fact that the possibility of consciousness gets more and more remote as we look back along the line of evolutionary development. It is a comparatively new thing and best developed in the more advanced organisms.

Those processes we recognise as conscious are governed almost entirely by the central nervous system--the brain and the spinal cord--and these, too, are relatively new developments. So the remainder of the nerve network, the autonomic system supplying the gut, blood vessels, and glands, must be more primitive. This system governs the processes we call unconscious; its origins seem to lie a very long way back in organic history. Going all the way back to a time before the development of any kind of nervous system, early protoplasm must have been faced with one major problem--that of keeping itself intact in the struggle against disruption from outside. To do this it would at least have to be able to distinguish 'self' from 'non-self'; it would have to be able to recognise foreign matter and reject it if necessary. Immune and allergic reactions do exactly this by recognising the shapes of intruding substances, and the fact that these reactions respond to unconscious suggestion could mean that the unconscious is a process common to all life no matter how simple it may be.

This could go a long way to explaining patterns of behavior and response that now seem supernatural.

The discovery of the double-helix shape of the DNA molecule highlighted the importance of form at a molecular level. We now know that an enzyme depends almost entirely on its form, and the ability of an organism to recognise an antigen is based solely on the shape of the foreign body. (5) Even the sense of smell is a product of shape: round molecules smell like camphor, disks smell like flowers, and wedges smell like peppermint. So the ability to distinguish between apparently similar smells can be explained quite simply by the fact that they probably have quite distinct shapes, and telling these apart is something even a blood cell can do. This makes responses of animals such as the parasitic wasps look a lot less uncanny.

The large American species Mergarhyssa lunator runs up and down tree trunks until it locates the larva of the horntail moth hidden three inches below the bark. It does this partly with 'ear' cells in each of its feet that are sensitive to vibration and can listen to the sound of the larva chewing, but the larva keeps dead still as soon as it hears movement on the bark. (143) And yet the wasps manage not only to locate the larva precisely, but to tell by the smell through three inches of tree whether it is the right species of larva and whether any other wasp has already laid her eggs on it. This highly sophisticated response to a subtle stimulus is made possible by reliance on an old and basically simple ability to recognise shape.

The ability of salmon to return across thousands of miles of ocean to the same rivers and streams in which they hatched, has now been shown to be due to sensitivity to the smell of that body of water as distinct from all others. (139) Eels are able to recognise a thimbleful of rose scent diluted in a lake covering fourteen thousand square miles. (317) Male moths can detect the presence of a female of their species as much as thirty miles away by the presence of only one molecule of her specific scent in the air. (186) This kind of sensitivity is completely foreign to us, who have such a poor sense of smell, but we can get some idea of the implications from a new mechanical nose invented by Andrew Dravniek of Chicago. This is capable of detecting the traces of smell left behind in a room by a burglar some hours previously and of matching these up with samples from suspects.

As people who are related by blood have similar smells, it can also be used to assist blood-group analysis in proving paternity, and because the invasion of pathological organisms produces changes in the chemical balance of the body, it can detect disease long before the symptoms become apparent. (90) The machine performs these functions by the purely mechanical process of comparing chemical properties that depend on physical shapes. The man working the machine has to make decisions based on the information it gives him; he is the conscious mind controlling the unconscious mechanism. In this case the human is supplemented by a machine, but it is a reasonable model of the sort of relationship we enjoy with our own unconscious. We are only now just beginning to realise how much direct influence one has on the other.

At the Harvard Medical School, David Shapiro has just completed an experiment in which he trained a number of students to alter their own blood pressure. (304) They were wired up to a sensitive gauge, and every time the pressure showed a momentary fall, the men were rewarded by being shown an enlargement of a nude pinup from the center pages of Playboy magazine. They had no idea what the experiment was about, but the fact that their conscious attention was attracted at the same time as an unconscious process was going on, forged a link between them and made it possible for the men to control the usually random fluctuations of blood pressure at will. In another, similar experiment, business executives with dangerously high blood pressure were taught the same useful skill. (71)

It has long been known that individuals with vivid visual imagination have few alpha rhythms in their brain waves, whereas non-visuals, who prefer to verbalise things, have persistent alpha activity. These characteristic rhythms are pparently partly hereditary, but they depend also on environmental factors and experience. Identical twins start life with identical EEG records, but these differ later to show even slight variations in character that would normally be noticeable only by close friends. In most people alpha rhythms appear best when the eyes are closed and the person is relaxed and thinking about nothing in particular.

If they persist strongly when the eyes are open, this is usually a sign of mental illness of the sort that produces isolation from reality. Such complete dissociation can be harmful, but alpha is so relaxing that it performs a valuable biological function and it would be useful if we were able to summon it up at will. An inexpensive machine is being marketed to do just this. This 'alphaphone' is a simple instrument that monitors the brain waves and, by lighting a bulb or ringing a bell, lets a user know exactly when he is producing the alpha rhythms. This simple reinforcement acts in the same way as nudes on blood pressure, and after a few hours of use anyone can learn to exert conscious control over alpha and produce it on demand--a sort of instant version of the meditation techniques that normally take years of practice and self-denial to learn.

At Boston City Hospital the physiology of true meditation is being investigated with a number of adepts skilled in the transcendental techniques of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. All show a sharp increase in alpha rhythm, a decrease in the breathing rate and oxygen consumption, a decrease in heart rate and blood pressure, and an increase in the electrical resistance of the skin. (22) There is also a dramatic drop in the level of lactate in the blood, which persists for some time after the end of meditation. High lactate levels are associated with stress, so the total effect of the self-induced changes is a sudden and significant release from tension. Those who practice these techniques report that they find them an effective and often preferable substitute for drug-induced experiences.

In Japan some fascinating work has been done on the patterns that occur during Zen contemplation. (172) The priests produce sensory deprivation by sitting in the 'lotus position' for long periods of time with their eyes wide open and fixed on some object. At the beginning there is no alpha activity, but soon alpha rhythms appear and become very strong, diffusing all over the scalp. In the Zen masters, the waves may persist for half an hour or more without change. In normal people, alpha seldom lasts more than a minute or two. (6) Similar work on yoga meditation shows that there is prolonged alpha activity<, but in one study made on a Bengali sect, the alpha broke down when the adepts entered the state of ecstasy they call 'samadhi'. (83)

The conscious control of involuntary functions is commonplace in yoga, Zen, and some African cults. Pulse rate, breathing, digestion, sexual function, metabolism, and kidney activity can all be influenced by and at will. Skilled practitioners, after years spent perfecting what amounts to a system of conditioned reflexes, can slow the heartbeat almost to the vanishing point, reduce the body temperature to what would normally be lethal levels, and reduce their respiration to no more than one breath every few minutes. In this state the whole organism is reduced to a condition similar to that of a hibernating animal and can be buried alive for days without ill effects. (335) The reflexes that normally make us shy away from intense pain can be diverted so that nails are driven through the limbs and spikes through the cheeks or tongue. And while this is being done, the sympathetic nervous system can be locally suppressed or stimulated so that bleeding is prevented or encouraged.

The pupils, which normally respond to light and emotion, can similarly be controlled. There is nothing supernatural about any of these talents; many of them have been objectively studied and imitated in the laboratory. It takes time and practice to cultivate the right paths of control, but physiologists have succeeded in doing such unlikely things as making their hair stand on end or their pancreas secrete more than the normal amount of insulin.

Some of these skills are developed purely as a means of livelihood, but in many instances they are simply by-products of the process of self-realisation. In parts of the world where life is difficult they may also serve some very practical function. The art of lung-gom in Tibet produces the ability to travel very rapidly across some of the inhospitable upland wastes of that country. The training consists of living in complete darkness and seclusion for thirty-nine months of deep-breathing exercises. Alexandra David-Neel tells of seeing a monk, from the monastery in Tsang renowned for training in swiftness, in full flight.

'I could clearly see his perfectly calm impasssive face and wide open eyes with their gaze fixed on some invisible far distant object situated somewhere nigh up in space. The man did not run. He seemed to lift himself from the ground, proceeding by leaps. It looked as if he had been endowed with the elasticity of a ball and rebounded each time his feet touched the ground.' (84) It is said that one of these skilled walkers covered a distance of over three hundred miles in about thirty hours--between sunrise on one day and midday of the next. That is an average of about ten miles an hour across all kinds of country by day and by night. Marathon runners, by comparison, travel at an average of twelve miles an hour, but only for just over two hours at a time on good roads.

Another useful Tibetan custom is tumo. This accomplishment is aimed at combating cold, and in a country that is almost entirely above ten thousand feet altitude, it is a talent greatly respected. Initiates learn a complex set of breathing and meditational exercises and retire to a remote area to train. Each day they bathe in icy streams and sit naked in the snow thinking of internal fires. When the training is complete, a test is made on a windy winter night by wrapping the student in a sheet that has been dipped into the river through a hole in the ice and has to be completely dried just by body heat at least three times during the night. After qualification, the adept never again wears anything more than a single cotton garment in all seasons and at any height. Several Everest expeditions have even reported seeing completely naked hermits living well up among the permanent snows.

The insistence of both Tibetan and Indian cults of mind and body on the importance of breathing is an interesting one. Ancient yoga texts proclaim that 'Life is in the breath' and that the body absorbs 'life force' or 'prana' from the air. (152) Deep breathing, of course, causes hyperventilation and can produce hallucination and even unconsciousness, but there is more to it than that. The biologists working at the Kazakh State University on the Kirlian process have discovered that the flares in the skin glow more brightly when the lungs of the subject are filled with pure oxygen--and the effect is even more impressive with ionised air. (233) So it looks as though surplus electrons from oxygen may actually provide fuel for the energy in the life field.

If it is possible to exert conscious control over unconscious processes, then the reverse is also bound to occur. It shows up in fact in all the psychosomatic disorders that surround us. At least half of all the ills of mankind can be diagnosed as originating in the mind. Witch doctors always treat all diseases by magic as well as by herbal cures, and their success rate with skin complaints, blood-pressure difficulties, peptic ulcer, incipient coronary thrombosis, and hysterical blindness is as high as, if not higher than, that of specially trained and magnificently equipped Harley Street surgeons. Even 'accidental' injuries such as broken limbs can often be attributed to psychological causes. Recent research shows that the statements 'It happened by accident' and 'It happened by chance' are not synonymous, and that some people at certain times really are accident prone. (212) Personality traits, psychological conditions, and even physiological patterns can be identified in individuals who are nothing more than 'accidents looking for a place to happen'.

Taken to its limit, autosuggestion can even kill. Every year thousands of people die simply because they believe that it is inevitable. Witchcraft may have powers that are truly supernatural, but it does not need them while people are capable of wishing themselves to death. It is not even necessary to consciously believe in forces of evil; the unconscious can manage very well on its own. There are vivid and graphic descriptions of otherwise rational people in New York and London wasting away when they have been told that someone is abusing a doll constructed in their image--and of these same people making rapid and complete recoveries when they knew, or even thought, that the doll had been destroyed. (302)

Witches and witch doctors often depend upon crowd reactions to work their magic, because if a number of people are involved they reinforce each other's suggestibility by a process of social facilitation. All farmers know that a solitary pig never gets fat and that several pigs together each eat far more than they would alone. The same is true of many aspects of behavior. The emotional tension of a magic session or a political meeting or a revivalist gathering quickly communicates itself to all present and allows a leader to put across ideas that individually and under normal circumstances few of the audience would accept.

Much has been written about 'mass hypnotism' and the ability of certain people to create widespread hysteria or common hallucinations. While it is entirely possible to hypnotise a small group of carefully selected suggestible subjects simultaneously, only about one in twenty people fall into this category, and the odds against a crowd being composed entirely of such people are overwhelming. So there has never been an authenticated demonstration of the Indian rope trick in public. (69) But the fact remains that in the infectious frenzy that can be produced by facilitation in a large crowd, the barriers of reason and conscious free will are lowered and simple ideas spread rapidly and take root wherever they fall. Contagious activity of this kind is equally common in other species.

The adoption of a ritual posture by one bird in a dense colony of gulls often spreads in ripples throughout the entire area. If one penguin on a beach raises its beak, stiffens up in an 'ecstasy display', and gives the rallying call of its species, the whole seething mass all the way around the bay take up the cry. The spacing of individual fish in a shoal is determined by the vortexes that each fish sets up in the water around him and that are appreciated by the lateral-line sense organs of his immediate neighbors. (39) Part of the communication of intentions is certainly carried out through these organs as well, but the cohesion within a school is too good for this to be the only explanation.

It may be that all dynamic groups of this kind, including wheeling flocks of starlings and vast floods of lemmings, are in a state of mild hysteria that enables them to act almost as a single organism. In a sense, all instinctive social communication is similar to hypnosis in that it depends on an unconscious response being made to a special stimulus. When the system was being set up, the stimulus must have been repeated insistently, like the light flashes or the repeated instructions of the hypnotist, before the appropriate response became almost automatic. Familiarity with this kind of conditioning may well account for the predisposition of all animals to immobilisation techniques and for man's susceptibility to hypnosis and suggestion.

In man the unconscious has become very much more than that part of the brain which looks after mundane domestic physiology. The greater part of all Western psychiatry is based on the existence of the 'unconscious' of the Freudians or the 'collective unconscious' of Jung. From being only a control mechanism intent on recognising shape, it has become a real alternative to conscious thought processes, with its own special capabilities. There is evidence that much real creativity is based on the unconscious and that many writers, artists, and composers gain access to it by self-induced hypnosis. Goethe said that many of his best poems were written in a condition that bordered on somnambulism. Coleridge is supposed to have composed Kubla Khan in his sleep, and Mozart described his musical inspirations as rising like dreams, quite independent of his will. Newton even resorted to solving his most troublesome mathematical problems by sleeping on them.

Dreams

Since all life depends in one way or another on the energy of the sun, the most insistent beat in the metabolism of every species is the circadian rhythm--the alternation of light and dark. At first, when the early life forms were directly dependent not only on the energy but also on the heat of the sun, activity must have been confined to the hours of light. This is certainly true of land-living animals, and even today most cold-blooded species become inactive during the cool of the night, when their body temperature falls almost as fast as the temperature of the air. Birds and mammals have developed a vital independence from this system by controlling their internal temperature, so that many of them can be active in the dark, but even these emancipated species still take a break during part of each 24-hour period.

Invertebrate animals, with the possible exception of octopus and squid, simply seem to become inactive: they just stop moving; but, for most warm-blooded animals, sleep is an active process. Niko Tinbergen points out that sleep is a true instinctive pattern, because it is preceded by appetitive, or preliminary behavior such as looking for or traveling to a special place, and involves the assumption of a particular posture. (321) Some fish, such as the carp Cyprinus carpio, lie flat on the bottom of their pools after dark, and the giant golden sunfish Mola mola floats on its side like a huge disk on the surface of the sea. They seem to be sleeping and can even be captured if cautiously approached. Birds certainly sleep, most of them with their eyes closed and their head tucked underneath a wing.

Those which sleep on perches cannot afford to relax completely, and those which sleep on water often make continuous paddling movements with one leg so as not to drift in to shore, within range of predators. Aquatic mammals have to develop the same kind of reflex, floating up to the surface every now and then to breathe. Dolphins appear to sleep with first one eye open and then the other, changing every few hours. Cows and many other ruminants sleep with both eyes wide open and carry on chewing their cuds regardless. The peculiar arrangement of their digestive system relies on gravity, so they have to keep their heads up, too. Even those animals such as elephants and giraffes that are traditionally supposed never to sleep, do in fact do so, often even lying out flat on the ground to sleep.

So sleep is widespread among higher animals, many of which spend one third of their lives doing it, but despite its prevalence we still know very little about the process. In man we can describe it reasonably accurately as a condition in which the eyelids close, the pupils become very small, the secretion of digestive juice and urine and saliva all fall sharply, the flow of air into the lungs diminishes, the heart slows down, and the brain waves change with loss of consciousness. As we fall asleep, the alpha waves gradually disappear as the rhythm slows down to the long, quiet delta waves, at one to three cycles per second, that are characteristic of deep sleep. Brief bursts of faster waves, or 'spindles', are usually mixed in with the slower ones.

All these patterns can be artificially induced by electrical stimulation of certain areas of the brain; in one study a shock in the upper part of the brain stem induced a cat to groom itself, curl up, and settle down to sleep. (148) But most evidence points to the fact that there are areas of 'wakefulness' in the brain and that it is when these cease to be stimulated that we feel sleepy. The area primarily responsible for keeping us awake is the reticular formation, a sort of master control at the base of the brain for activating the entire central nervous system. Chemical anesthetics inhibit this area and produce sleep for as long as the effect of the drug lasts, but any mechanical interference with the reticular activating system abolishes wakefulness altogether and produces prolonged coma and death. Consciousness is lost during sleep, but it does not always return with wakening. (108)

Animals from which the whole cortex of the brain has been removed still sleep and wake and move around, eating and excreting, but without the vital gray matter they can never learn or show any of the awareness of true consciousness. Sleepwalkers are not so much asleep as unconscious. They move around with their eyes open and perform quite complex acts before eventually returning to bed, but remember nothing of it in the morning. It is quite possible that the dreaded 'zombies' of the Caribbean, who are said to have returned from the grave, are people with congenitally or accidentally damaged cortex areas, or people whose brains have been affected by drugs so that they seem to be walking dead--awake but still unconscious.

It is very difficult to keep a normal person awake for long periods, but many experiments have been done to study the effect of sleep deprivation. After several days without sleep, the grip is still as strong as ever, so muscle action has not been impaired; subjects can still perform complex arithmetical problems, so the conscious activities of the brain have not been affected; they can still respond immediately to a light flash by pressing a buzzer, so reaction time is apparently not prolonged. But the sleepless people cannot sustain long periods of concentration; they make numerous errors and have to keep on going back to correct them. (341) After longer periods without sleep, these small lapses into momentary unconsciousness grow until the subjects begin to see things that are not there: they begin to dream with their eyes wide open.

Proper dreaming occurs during sleep, but it is not just a part of ordinary sleep. Orthodox sleep alternates several times during the night with periods of a very different, almost paradoxical, kind of sleep. It is during these times that dreams take place. In orthodox sleep the brain produces big, slow waves of delta rhythm, the eyes are still, and the heartbeat is regular, but some of the muscles, and particularly those of the throat, are still tense. In paradoxical sleep the brain produces more rapid waves, almost like those of wakefulness, the eyes move rapidly to and fro, and the heartbeat becomes irregular, but despite all this mental activity going on, the muscles of the body, including those of the throat, are more relaxed and the sleeper is much more difficult to wake (235) The relaxation of the muscles amounts almost to paralysis, with even reflex twitches being eliminated, so the nightmares in which we struggle to escape but are unable to move are a true reflection of our physical condition.

When we first fall asleep, most of us start with the orthodox variety and only change to paradoxical sleep after about two hours. If an experimenter monitors a subject constantly and wakes him every time he start to show rapid eye movements, then a state of deprivation builds up and the subject tends to start right away with paradoxical sleep as though determined to make good the deficit. It seems that both kinds of sleep are equally important, but for different reasons.

We tend to think of bodies as relatively permanent structures, but individual cells have a very short life and are continually being replaced, not just on the skin and in the gut lining, where they are rubbed away by friction, but even in the bones. Friends may look unchanged to you after long absences, but if several years have elapsed there will not be a single cell present that was there last time you met. Regeneration and replacement depend on the synthesis of new protein, and most of this seems to take place during sleep. In orthodox sleep it seems that the body tissues are most affected; after strenuous athletic days, people spend more than the usual amount of time in orthodox sleep. Human growth hormones are manufactured during this time, and the rate of cell division increases soon after falling asleep.

The tissues of the brain differ from those of the rest of the body in that they stop growing after a certain age and concentrate largely on repair and maintenance. Most of brain growth occurs during the two months just before birth and the month after it. In this time the cortex of gray matter is produced, and the baby not only sleeps twice as long each day as the normal adult, but it also spends proportionally twice as much time in paradoxical sleep. It seems that, while the body is repaired in orthodox sleep, the brain receives attention in the alternate periods, when more blood flows to the head and more heat is generated there.

As soon as it was discovered that the rapid eye movements of paradoxical sleep were a sign of dreaming, the idea grew that there might be some correspondence between these and body movements and the content of the dream. (234) Active dreams seem to involve more movement, but it is unlikely that the eyes are actually moving to look at dream pictures, because men who have been blind from birth show exactly the same behavior in their dreams. Recordings of heart and breathing rate, body temperature, pulse wave, and skin potential show that these vary directly with the emotional content of the dream, so it is nevertheless a very real experience.

Analysis of dream content shows that they do not necessarily form a continuing story that runs in episodes throughout the night, but they do tend to start off with a subject related to the experiences of the previous day before shifting to earlier periods of life. This has given rise to the theory that dreams help a person assimilate the events of the day by rerunning some of them and comparing them with previous experience before filing the lot away in the memory banks. It fits in with the fact of dream debt building up, presumably because of the pressure of unsorted experience accumulating in the cortex. There is in fact strong electrical activity during paradoxical sleep in the very area just below the cortex that is thought to be the site of the memory.

The symbols in dreams seem to be the direct action of the unconscious, censoring and shaping images to suit its own purpose. Freud based his system of psychoanalysis largely on dreams. His interpretations were sometimes a little simplistic and are not followed rigidly today, but he seems to have been right in assuming that the unconscious was not amenable to direct investigation and could only be examined at second hand by inference. His emphasis on the sex drive is sometimes criticised as an exaggeration based on the minds of the frustrated young women of nineteenth-century Vienna, but it has been vindicated somewhat by Calvin Hall in a recent study. (234)

Hall made lists of all the dream objects that psychoanalysts took to be symbolic of the male sex organ and came up with 102 symbols for penis, including stick, gun, pen, rod, dirk, etc. Then he went through Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and found that all of these, plus another ninety-eight the analysts had never thought of, had been in use as coarse English descriptions of the phallus for hundreds of years.

There is constant argument about whether animals dream. Many of them go through movements that look like patterns of hunting and feeding while they sleep, but these usually take place during orthodox sleep even in those animals that also have paradoxical periods. Cats, dogs, chimps, and horses all have alternating periods of both kinds of sleep, but it will probably never be possible to say for certain whether they actually dream in one or the other. It seems likely, though, that the two sleep patterns serve the same restorative functions for these species as they do in man.

In cats paradoxical sleep occurs throughout life, but in many apparently less intelligent animals it can be found only in very young individuals. Sheep and cows show signs of both states of sleep before weaning, when their brains are still growing, but later the paradoxical patterns disappear altogether. In species such as raccoons and monkeys, which are much more inventive and aware, there are strong indications of paradoxical, rapid-eye-movement sleep at all ages. There seems to be a direct correlation between this kind of sleep, which is closely associated with dreaming, and a high level of consciousness. A survey of the animal kingdom therefore shows a gradation of awareness.

At the lowest levels organisms are either active or inactive, but in more advanced species and particularly among birds and mammals, the <period of inactivity takes on special active functions of its own. In the most complex animals it is even divided into two different kinds of sleep, associated with separate physiological and psychological processes. And now, in man, it seems that there is an extra step, one that has given rise to a new kind of awareness.

This new development is highlighted by chemicals that produce changes in behavior. Drugs can be divided into several broad categories on the basis of the kind of change they make. The first group are those, such as the amphetamines, cocaine, and caffeine, which stimulate metabolism; in biological terms we must consider these as being similar in action to the reticular system of the brain, which produces wakefulness. The second group have the opposite effect; these are the barbiturates and tranquilisers, which act as sedatives and are biologically equivalent to the process producing sleepiness, but the interesting thing is that they result only in orthodox sleep.

After a long period on sleeping pills, people show symptoms similar to those which occur in subjects that have been deprived of paradoxical sleep and the chance to dream. When taken off these drugs, all experience a tremendous rebound of paradoxical sleep, which looks as though it is trying to make up for lost time. Some dream sleep occurs under the influence of the opiates, heroin and morphine, which of course also produce delirium and euphoria and act as painkillers. Biologically their action is much like strong autosuggestion or hypnosis, which produces the same kind of dissociation and anesthesia. But beyond these three categories, which simulate the basic life states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming, is one more group of chemicals: the hallucinogens.

Hallucination

Hallucinogenic drugs and practices reveal something that seems to be peculiar to man. They illuminate the fringes of an expanse of mind and experience so vast that it is difficult to comprehend. Sidney Cohen, Director of the Institute of Mental Health, in Maryland, describes the brain as 'an underpowered self-scrutinising symbol factory whose main job is body management. Its side line consists of reflecting on what it is, where it is going and what it all means. Its unique capacities for wonder and self-awareness are quite unnecessary for purposes of physical survival.' (76) The glimpses we are beginning to get of the scope of the brain do indeed raise some unprecedented evolutionary questions. No biologist would say that the brain's extracurricular activities were unnecessary for survival: the brain is part of us and we are as much a part of the ecology as every other species.

What we have done to our environment is as natural as thunder or lightning. Our brains have made us a major evolutionary force, and it is going to take a great deal of imagination and creativity on their part to think us out of present dilemmas. But I must agree with Cohen that the extent of man's potential is awe-inspiring; we seem to have acquired abilities so far beyond even our present dramatic needs that we look top-heavy. Nature seldom does things without good reasons, and yet she has gone to some trouble over the past ten million years--a very short time by her usual standards--to equip us with an enormous cerebral cortex of seemingly unlimited capacity.

We have acquired this incredible organ at the expense of several others, and yet we use only a minute part of it. What was the hurry? Why have we raced along this line of development so fast? We could certainly have got by with much less. At the moment, we are like a small family of squatters who have taken over a vast palace but find no need to move beyond the comfortable, serviced apartment in one corner of the basement.

An almost subliminal awareness of the rest of the structure has always tantalised us. Brief glimpses into other rooms have led a few adventurous individuals to make more determined efforts to explore, but traditional methods have been only partially successful. Some have tried rhythmic techniques, such as Christian chants or the swaying movements of Hindu prayer or the whirling dances of the dervishes, to induce a trance state that would get them across the barrier. Some have tried altering their body chemistry by deep breathing or fasting or going without sleep. Some have sought dissociation in physical pain by self-flagellation or mutilation or hanging from the ceiling.

The Sioux Indians used heat and thirst in their sun ritual to produce a sort of crude delirium; the Egyptians tried social isolation in their temple rituals. The one thing all these methods have in common is that they cut down on the usual flow of information with which the environment threatens to swamp us; they either eliminate the sensory input or make it monotonous and meaningless. When this is done, some of the doors in the mind open up a little.

The technique of sensory deprivation has been refined in several recent investigations. At McGill University subjects were confined to a small soundproof room and wore goggles that admitted only diffuse light. At Princeton they were kept in a tiny, lightproof, soundproof, constant-temperature cubicle. And at Oklahoma and Utah they were immersed in a dark tank of water kept at blood temperature so that they received no light, sound, or touch sensations from their environment. The immediate response in all studies was to retreat from this monotony into sleep, but once this avenue of escape was closed and they could sleep no longer, the volunteers began to experience other difficulties.

All subjects lost track of time and underestimated its passing; some slept for more than twenty-four hours and claimed that it was only an hour or two. Disorientation and lack of feedback from the environment made it difficult for them to think seriously and to make normal judgments. Dreams began to appear more frequently, sometimes with frightening intensity, and sooner or later the total unreality of the situation led most of the subjects to the experience of hallucinations. These were not just simply sensory 'ghosts' such as flashes of light or the sound of bells, but fully fledged happenings, complex and entirely convincing. (329) What seems to take place is that in normal circumstances the vast amount of information we receive is monitored by the reticular formation, which sorts it out and passes along only what we need and can handle at any one time.

Under conditions of sensory deprivation very little is coming in, so each small piece of information receives far more than the usual amount of attention and becomes enormously magnified. Our vision is restricted, so we blow up what we can perceive to fill the whole screen, like a film taken through a microscope. So part of the hallucination is simply an improved close-up view of reality, but there is more to it than that. Left without its normal barrage of stimuli, the brain embellishes and elaborates on reality, drawing on its store of unconscious paraphernalia to fill the time and space available. And yet not even this goes far enough, for there are some qualities to hallucination that seem to lie outside both the conscious and the unconscious capabilities of the brain.

Almost every subculture has at some time sought out a root, herb, or berry to further the process of dissociation. The Persians had a potion called soma, which, according to the Sanskrit chronicle, 'made one like a God'. Helen of Troy had nepenthe. In India and Egypt they have always had hashish or marijuana. In Europe and Asia there was the beautiful crimson-spotted mushroom Amanita, which killed flies but only drove Norsemen berserk. Mexico is favored with the morning glory, the peyote cactus, and several 'divine mushrooms'. All these plants contain chemicals that produce transcendent states, and most have been used as adjuncts to religious and magical ceremonies, but the most shattering and significant of all psychedelic substances does not occur naturally in the wild, and had to be extracted from ergot fungus, which grows on grain. This is lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.

LSD has been tested on a wide variety of animals, but it seems to have little effect on any of them except perhaps the spider, who builds a rather more fancy web. It seems to be specific in its action on the highest levels of thought, and even a minute amount, about one three-hundred-thousandth of an ounce, produces profound effects on man. Depending on how it is taken, these begin within about half an hour, reach a peak after an hour and a half, and end six or even twelve hours later. Most of the action on the brain seems to be confined to the reticular system and to the limbic system, which modulates emotional experiences. So it is working directly on those areas responsible for filtering and comparing sensory information and on those which determine an individual's feelings about this material. Speech, walking ability, and most physical activities are completely unaffected. Blood pressure and pulse are normal, reflexes are acute, and there are no unpleasant side effects. It seems that LSD acts only on the area of higher consciousness in the human brain--on the area that we believe controls our personality.

The most noticeable psychological effect is, as in sensory deprivation, one of the slowing down of time: second hands on clocks seem hardly to move. This sort of 'eternal present' is very much like a prolonged version of the way time can stand still in moments of great personal danger. We have in our own physiology the capacity for producing this effect in emergencies, and LSD seems to carry that on a stage further, but it is no longer concerned with personal survival. The separation between self and non-self, the old, primeval haunt of the unconscious, very soon disappears, and ego boundaries dissolve. Cohen says, The thin overlay of reason gives way to reverie, identity is submerged by oceanic feelings of unity, and seeing loses the conventional meanings imposed upon the object seen.' (76)

It is important in this respect to realise that we normally perceive only what we can conceive. We fit sensations into our own view of the way things ought to be. The classic experiment of fitting people with glasses that invert everything proves this conclusively. Within a day or two the brain makes corrections to the visual field and these people see everything the 'right' way up again, but when the glasses are removed, the whole world is once again inverted. Thus the world is seen not as it is but as it ought to be. Part of the problem is that we receive so many sensations, that we are forced to pick and choose and soon end up with a carefully selected and very narrow view of reality. LSD has the capacity to take the blinkers off and allow us to see things afresh, as though it were for the first time. In this condition we can begin to reappreciate the sounds of colors, the scent of music, and the texture of mood. Bees and bats and deep-sea squid, without our range of competing sensitivities and interests, do these things all the time.

Children commonly see things with enormous clarity. It is possible that what we call hallucinations are a normal part of every child's psychic experience (their paintings seem to show this), but as we grow older our visions are dimmed and eventually suppressed altogether, because they come to have a negative social value. Each society lays down certain guidelines of what constitutes sanity, and by a combination of these cultural pressures and our own needs for acceptance and conformity, most of us end up inside these prescribed limits. A few break out and are classified insane and deprived of their freedom on the ground that they need to be taken care of, but in fact their confinement is designed far more to protect society than to save these individuals from themselves.

The Soviet Union makes no bones about this and regularly certifies troublesome dissenters on the grounds that they must be mad if they don't agree with the State. A few individuals manage to shake off the restrictions of sanity and get away with it, because they do so within the sphere of a religion in which such revolutionary activities are permissible because they have been labeled 'divinely inspired'. Far from being confined, many of the people who have had this kind of transcendental experience return to society with a new view of things and proceed to change their way of life and ours--not always for the best.

Some saints and prophets have undoubtedly been truly mad, but it makes no sense to classify all of them as insane. Their experiences are not unique. Almost everyone, at some time in his life, has a moment of rapture, bliss, or ecstasy brought on by a flash of beauty, love, sexual experience, or insight. These momentary visions of perfection and aesthetic delight are glimpses of a state that Christians known as 'divine love', Zen Buddhists as 'satori', the Hindus as 'moksha', and the Vedanta as 'samadhi'. Such experiences are so little understood that they have come to be shrouded in mysticism and regarded as supernatural. In the sense that they do not fit into the formula of cultural 'sanity', these states are 'insane', but it helps a little to understand them if we avoid such a loaded label and refer to them instead as states of unsanity.

There is nothing supernatural about them, and the importance of chemicals such as LSD is that they show this very clearly and simply by peeling away the artificial layers of 'sanity' and letting us once again be natural. One of the most common effects of psychedelic substances is that they heighten suggestibility and enable us to pick up environmental cues with exquisite sensitivity. In laboratory test situations the LSD subjects often seem to be reading the experimenter's mind, but it is clear from analysis that they are simply responding, in the way that most animals do, to the most minute changes in tone, facial expression, and posture. We are capable all the time of this kind of subliminal perception, which is indeed supernatural when compared to our normal levels of response, but in the broader biological arena these talents are commonplace and altogether very natural.

Our usual waking 'sane' state is one of inhibition. Part of this is necessary to prevent overloading with incoming sensations, but the barriers erected by the reticular system also deprive us of so much that is full of magic and inspiration. This is absurd when we have now grown a brain that is for the first time capable of appreciating these wonders. I am not making a plea for mass dissociation and a world-wide escape into these areas of unsanity. Blake, Van Gogh, Verlaine, Coleridge, and Baudelaire all lived and worked a lot of the time in a state of transcendental awareness, and they suffered terribly in their efforts to break back through the barriers of reason and reality.

Now, perhaps more than at any other time in our evolution, we need to be clear and aware of the problems that beset us, but our endeavors become pointless unless we appreciate that we have become masters of our own destiny. We need to know where we are going and how we are going to get there. Already we have begun to make use of our conscious talents, but we have completely neglected those available on the other side of the mind. Nature has given us all the necessary equipment for our task in the space between our ears, and the techniques of hypnosis, autosuggestion, dreaming, and hallucination give us some idea of the powers we possess. All that remains is for us to use them wisely.

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