You’ve all heard the standard anti-science bullshit argument, that explaining something destroys its beauty and mystery rather than enhancing it. This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone actually trying to do that, and it’s kind of disturbing.

Think about it – we are a collection of chemicals and connections, enormously complex, wired into an almost unbelievably complex set of cells, in an absurdly complex and strange world.  The seamlessness of our experience is miraculous.  

That apparent seamlessness only comes about by sometimes ignoring the areas where our senses break down, are missing, or are incapable.  It makes sense that we would have, at times, odd relationships to our own manufactured sense of experience.

I get that every once in a while too. He even mentions (and it’s even quoted in the BB article) that other people he talks to say it happens to them as well. This isn’t a spiritual experience. It’s pretty common, according to Wikipedia.

Really though, calling these mystical-type experiences is part of the problem. Call them hyper-aware experiences and people wouldnt start wars over them.

“The Out-of-Body Experience: Disturbed Self-Processing at the Temporo-Parietal Junction”
Olaf Blanke and Shahar Arzy
The Neuroscientist 11 (1): 16–24, 2005
http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/154867/files/2005_Blanke_TN_the%20obe%20-%20disturbed%20self-processing%20at%20the%20tpj.pdf

Of course, this does not solve the mystery only deepens it:)

I’ve heard from some neuroscientists who’ve studied them that DMT and some of its relatives in ayahuasca also trigger the circuitry your brain uses to decide what’s real or not, so those giant glowing lizards are Real, unlike LSD and mushrooms which don’t do that, but it’s not a class of substances I’ve tried.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/reality-check/201111/11-11-11-apophenia-and-the-meaning-life

And yet it seems to give an insight into where we fit in the universe, and solves the problems that living a life removed from ourselves, distracted and busy causes. Maybe it depends on the meaning you ascribe to it…

I felt a bit odd, out of sorts, so it must have been an event of universal import!

I think I experienced it for the first time when I moved from Barcelona (the sky is always half-covered by buildings, noise and pollutino) to the Northern Territory in Australia, when one day driving down the Stuart Highway I became aware of the immense ‘wall of sky’ all around me, the sheer size of the Never-Never and how small my fleshy body was in comparison.  And then, how tiny the grains of sand were in comparison with me.

So no, not an ‘entity’ or an ‘energy’, but a sudden understanding of the scale of things that are much, much bigger than myself. And smaller.

I had these experiences enough times (including once, quite intensely, walking around Black Rock City at night), and been in the right frame of mind that I have adopted them into my life and can bring them about at will. Maybe. Maybe they are not as intense as the original feeling; maybe they are the memory of it… but I consciously invoke it every day, and it brings me peace, calmness and a sense of perspective. This is my size; this is me, and this is the size of everything else around me.

He doesn’t like that.

Today I just imagine that I’m really one bacterium of billions on a contaminated surface  …and we’re all identical.  Hmm!  Drat, that one doesn’t work anymore either.

Guess I’ll fall back on spinning around outdoors while staring up into the blue sky.  Or run around and around the house while pretending that strange children are running just ahead, but they pass around the next corner just before I catch a glimpse.  RUN FASTER.

I’ve had several moments in my life that some might define as psychic, where information just appeared in my brain, information that with some research proved to be true. That we ascribe such things as mystical just means that it’s a phenomenon we don’t understand yet. The human species is still very, very young, and we have lots to learn about the universe we live in and how our systems are wired. 100 years ago, who could have known that there were frequencies we could tap into to send and receive messages instantly around the planet?

I reject religious explanations for natural phenomena, but I also recognize that there’s a lot I don’t know, and I enjoy having the sense that there are some things that just can’t be explained sometimes. I’m not saying that that’s the case here, but to label some experience as meaningless points to a scientific prejudice about what these experiences might add to a life. It doesn’t have to mean anything, but that isn’t cause to dismiss it. To be briefly, acutely aware of one’s own being might offer cause for reflection, and reflection itself is a valuable use of our brains.

(I mean, do the attached pics look _anything_ like a female?)

Realizing what was happening helped bleed me of any possible interest in “supernatural experiences”, considering all the people who ascribe SP with mystical qualities.