Psychedelic Parapsychology and the Science of Shamanism
so
i have a confession i’m an academic
that’s bad enough i know um i wasn’t
always obviously
but i’ve always had a creative approach
to studying into research
as an errant teenager i spent a lot of
time in school
skiving off and bunking off down to the
local second-hand bookshop
where i’d read everything i can get my
hands on on the esoteric
and left field science i developed a
kind of passion
for what we might call exceptional human
experience
altered states of consciousness and
psychedelics later on as well
i wanted to extend that interest in
study and went off to university
to try and understand these experiences
through the lens of psychology
i did a degree i’d spent three years and
i learned a lot about western psychology
but i learned almost nothing
about altered states of consciousness
and exceptional experience
then something unprecedented happened
one of my university lecturers from my
degree asked me back to teach
i was terrified suddenly i found myself
on the pointy end of the classroom
and that went well for a while as i was
commuting into central london one day on
the train
i had what you might call an epiphany
this kind of aha moment
and it suddenly dawned on me what i
needed to do and that was to give up my
job
and go to mexico and study shamanism
so i told this to my colleague who’d
give me the job and of course she was
horrified
she said if you go to mexico and study
shamanism you’ll go
mad and you won’t come back that was 20
years ago
i’ve been at the university of greenwich
for 11 years so i came back
i’m just not sure about the other bit so
i set off to mexico and i knew
virtually nothing about the country and
even less about shamanism
i’ve managed to learn a little bit i’m
going to tell you about what i think i
know about it now
so shamans are people who go into an
altered state of consciousness at will
in the name of their community to
communicate with the spirits of nature
and to transcend time and space and
bring back useful information
for their community it’s quite a big job
they do this through various techniques
be it through dreaming
or drumming or diet or dancing or
through drugs
but they don’t call them drugs they call
them medicines
or they call them plant teachers or
plant allies
in our parliaments the drugs they’re
referring to or we’re referring to
we call psychedelics so had a long
interest
in the use of these psychedelics in a
shamanic context and the use of these
substances goes back thousands of years
on all parts
of the planet on every continent of the
globe we find
shamans who make use of certain
psychoactive plants
such as the wicholis in mexico who use
the peyote cactus containing masculine
also in mexico with the masatech make
use of this psilocybin containing
magic mushrooms other magic mushroom use
we find in siberia
and northern canada with this amanita
muscaria
beloved of children’s fairy tales other
parts of the world such as india we find
the use of detura
or maybe patchuri in australia
or maybe iboga in africa or syrian rue
in the middle east
and of course in the amazon we have a
veritable cornucopia of various
psychoactive psychedelic substances
such as ayahuasca so ayahuasca
is a kind of interesting one and when it
was originally isolated for its
constituent chemicals about 100 years
ago
they named one of the chemicals in it
telepathy
on account of the fact that all the
explorers and ethnobotanists who had
encountered the use of this substance
had had telepathic-like visions and i
was curious about that
is it then that people other than
shamans can have these experiences of
transcending time and space
so i started doing my first bit of
research i did a survey and asked
contemporary modern day psychedelic
users
whether or not they’d had any of these
kinds of experiences
and what i discovered was that 50
percent of people had taken a
psychedelic substance
had had an experience of telepathy under
the influence of that substance
that’s quite an astonishing amount of
people if you compare that for instance
to people using non-psychedelic
substances like
maybe heroin or alcohol or coffee
or cocaine people don’t report having
experiences of telepathy with those
substances
so there’s something very specific to
psychedelics that induce these kinds of
experiences but are they real are they
in any way
genuine we have to apply the lens of
science
and look at these experiences within a
controlled
laboratory conditions to see if these
effects are in any way genuine
so my research over the years i’ve done
a lot of experimental
studies on precognition so precognition
is one of those
apparent experiences where you can
transcend time and get information back
from the future
without recourse to your usual sensory
experience
or through the means of inference so i
applied my research from precognition
and wanted to take it in to the
psychedelic realm
so the thing about precognition and the
study of it and
the field of parapsychology more
generally it’s been around for about 140
years
and it’s always been quite taboo it’s
always been on the outside of the
academy or at least on the edge
so i wanted to take that study and apply
the study of psychedelics to that as
well
and the thing about psychedelics is
they’ve always been in this area of
taboo research until very recently
neither of which attract very much
funding and so i did the unthinkable
i took two career suicide fields and i
joined them together
and committed double career harry carey
so first of all i went to brazil i
applied my precognition research
to the use of ayahuasca in christian
syncretic churches that make use
of an extremely potent jungle
hallucinogen
those experiments could have changed the
world
however it turns out my methodology
wasn’t very good but there’s no such
thing as a failed experiment
and so i learned from that i changed my
design my methodology
and this time i set off again for
ecuador
having studied ayahuasca i turned my
attention
to san pedro cactus which contains
masculine much like peyote
so i wanted to do something similar to
my previous experiment where i had
managed to get 20 participants and get
them to perform my precognition task
one trial each under the influence spent
most of my time however
on a limited budget traveling around
ecuador trying to find a shaman who
would let me do my experiments
in their ceremony i eventually found one
and i thought this is it i’m going to
make history
and i pulled out my laptop and he said
no
you’re going to scare off all the
spirits with your electromagnetic juju
and that was the end of that bit of
research so i thought
i didn’t want to go home empty-handed
with no data
and so i figured instead of getting 20
people to do my experiment one trial
each
if i just get one person to do all 20
trials it’s effectively the same thing
and so i did and that was me
so this is how i find myself uh doing
this experiment and the experiment goes
like this
there’s four stages to it there’s a
visualization then a viewing
then a voting and then a verification
anything beginning with v basically
so in the visualization stage under the
influence of mescaline
i would merely close my eyes and within
all the enhanced mental imagery
that the drug induces i tried to
visualize the future target whatever
that might be
and all i knew was that it would be a
one minute video clip
drawn randomly from some film or other
when i got my visualization i would
write it down something concrete i could
actually
describe and then i’d go on to the
viewing stage
and i would see four pre-prepared
randomized
one-minute video clips that were all
very different from each other
and i’d view each one but i wouldn’t
know what the target was
one of them would be chosen later as a
target
and then i’d say well my visualization
was perhaps
maybe a little bit like the matrix scene
a smidging of that thing of the overview
effect
virtually nothing like rick and morty
and maybe a smattering of mary poppins
and so though i’ll be able to rank these
different video clips
according to which one i thought my
visualization was the most like
i’d done my voting and finally the final
stage would be the verification
and to do that a random number generator
would be invoked
to produce the actual target the random
number generator would decide
which one of these four clips would be
the future target
so i’m going to give you some of my
cherry pick results before i tell you
the actual and that is me
high on san pedro cactus i presume that
isn’t the results
so this was my very first go i didn’t
record the data from this i just
attempted to see
if i could actually perform well in in
this experiment
under these circumstances and this is my
visualization
an ancient greek scene eyes a city at
night
on a lake and this was one of the four
clips
while the first one i saw
well i could show that all day when the
clear pen ended after a minute i found
myself gripping the table
wondering what was going to happen next
and wondering why the clip had finished
and then i looked down and i saw what
i’d written a few moments earlier
ancient greek scene which i found to be
somewhat encouraging so i carried on
with the experiment i did a whole 20
trials and i’ll cherry pick you some of
the best examples
this is one i particularly like which is
very clear and direct
very simple desert dunes
the sands of time and this is
the one of the four clips which i
thought was most similar
to my visualization desert dunes
the sands of time
and there you have it uh but the
important thing is but what did the
computer
decide was the target and of course when
i ran the random number generator
on this occasion the computer also said
yes that
is the target now they weren’t always as
direct as that because that’d be
terrifying
and astonishing in equal measure they’re
often much more vague
often they’ll be when i got it right it
would be on a thematic basis
so there’ll be elements of my
visualization which would be
reflected in one of the video clips and
i would choose
this this one highlights that
particularly so this is my visualization
rotating like helicopter blades space
more mechanical stuff spacecraft
space skeletons and then a slightly
different vision
water a submarine a big rig but
underwater so something mechanical kind
of floating
and this is the clip out of the four
that i happen to choose
spacecraft anybody i mean this is star
wars
space more mechanical stuff i mean it
doesn’t get more mechanical than the
death star does it i mean it’s
a whole mechanical thing the size of a
planet
um and how about space skeletons do you
think george lucas when he was designing
the storm troopers like
yeah we want to have some kind of
futuristic skeletons you know robot
looking guys
and then finally what about the
helicopter blades well
here we see luke fumbling around in his
utility belt
pulling out something that’s going to
save them what is it
some kind of grappling hook maybe
swinging around
we get a closer inspection of it and we
finally see
it looks like helicopter blade so that
for me was it i didn’t see
him his sister kissing him though
unfortunately uh
my precognitive powers under the
influence of mescaline were not that
good
so you get the general idea and finally
after the end of 20 trials
i managed to score much better than
chance it was at a 40
hit rate ultimately that was significant
whereas we’d only expect 25
by chance now that doesn’t sound like
anything astronomical which it isn’t and
it’s only one experiment so this isn’t
conclusive this is just the start of a
research paradigm
this is essentially a proof of process
that it may be possible to do this kind
of research
i’ve since repeated the experiment with
other people not just myself this time
under the influence of lsd
and another group of people under the
influence of a drug called
dimethyltryptamine dmt
which is probably the most potent
psychedelic known to humanity
and i’m going to publish those results
very soon meanwhile i’ve embarked on
a new project not just looking at
precognition
but also telepathy and having two people
having the dmt experience at the same
time looking at see
seeing whether they can have a shared
visionary experience whereby they have
similar content to their visionary
episode so i’ve dedicated my whole
career
probably i’m the kind of a solo career
doesn’t seem to be anyone else doing
this research
curiously and i’ve tried to apply the
techniques of psychedelic parapsychology
to the science of shamanism and i think
it has potentially important
implications
not just for understanding the nature of
consciousness but also then perhaps the
nature of time
and maybe the nature of reality itself
thank you very much