Psychedelic Parapsychology and the Science of Shamanism

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

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