Lifting the Veil
My First Encounter with Ayahuasca
A warning. Psychedelics are extremely powerful substances. They have profound healing and teaching potential. However, improper use can cause great harm. Not everyone should use them.
Descent and Resurrection
When I was 18, I took LSD. It shattered my psyche. This happened despite my attempts to prepare for the experience. I had been interested in the substance for some time. In my parents’ bookshelf, I had once found a copy of LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug, by David Solomon, a collection of scholarly essays published in 1966. Later, I read Aldous Huxley’s classic The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, which enthralled me. My friends had already started dabbling, and I knew soon the time would be right.
A very good friend of mine had access to LSD and gave me a tab, accompanied by the warning words, “This will atomize you!” The little blotter paper depicted a Buddha. So, with another friend as a sitter, on a sunny summer day, we visited a mountain forest and started a fire. This took place in the eastern part of Switzerland.
I came prepared: notepad, personal items, etc. Heeding the warning, I only took half of the blotter. After about 50 minutes, I started to feel uneasy. Nothing was happening. We discussed this predicament and concluded that the only solution was for me to take the other half as well. Which I did, and then shortly afterwards, the first dose kicked in.
Here, my memory fails. The experience was simply too intense and incoherent. Not a bad trip per se, no terror or fear, just an overwhelming influx of otherworldiness. I was mostly in a subconscious state. At one point in the experience, my friend took me to the little river flowing next to our camp and submerged my face in the ice-cold water. I felt as if my entire consciousness was fractured into infinite pieces, all scattered across the entire universe, which now, in one instance, zoomed back into a single, coherent, unified, sober state. I looked at my friend with great surprise. “Wow,” I exclaimed, and my friend smiled knowingly. Then the effects took over again. Looking at the trees had a kaleidoscopic effect. Moving my hands left a soft trail of glitter lingering in the air. Then back to incoherence.
The next day, I woke up and was OK. “Bummer,” I thought, feeling very disappointed in the experience. I had such high expectations. And then, a few weeks later, the terror began. For about a year, I was tormented by nonspecific panic attacks—random feelings of deep fear and despair. Sometimes, looking in the mirror, I wondered whose reflection this was. I feared losing my mind. I sometimes wondered with great horror, “What if I suddenly hear voices in my head?” “What if I simply fall out of reality?” I knew no one could help me, as no one knows what I am experiencing. I accepted the fact that this was now my life. I had ruined my future by taking drugs.
Then, my mother introduced me to a kind older lady who specialized in Bach Remedies, and the healing began. The attacks became less frequent, and perhaps after another year, I was stable. Looking back, I believe the following had happened. Psychedelics give access to experiences of transcendence, which can feel strikingly similar to psychosis or schizophrenia (hence the early suggestion to call them psychotomimetics). If your psyche is not grounded or strong enough, as is the case for teenagers, then a too-strong dose will feel like reality uprooting. My then freshly formed conception of reality, still fragile, was totally obliterated. The reintegration and reconfiguration of my reality context apparently needed a release valve: the bouts of utter panic.
For a long time after healing, I was firmly clinging to sobriety and in no way willing to alter my consciousness even a little bit. Only slowly, around the age of 25, was I able to tolerate alcohol and THC again, the latter a companion of my teenage years. Indeed, THC now gifted me semi-mystical states during a challenging time, as my father was dying of cancer. I also remember vividly when I crossed the threshold with THC for the first time again. The realization came fast: “Oh dear, you smoked too much!” Then that crippling feeling of terror I knew so well began to form again and engulf me. The demon was back! However, I managed to banish it and never felt fear or panic since. To this day, I am deeply grateful for the LSD experience, as it made me the person I am today.
It took well into my late forties before I ventured back into deeper psychedelic territory again. This time with another friend in Amsterdam, consuming psilocybin. There, another threshold of trust was crossed. But nothing could have ever prepared me for what was to come with Ayahuasca.
The Calling
It is said that Ayahuasca can offer invitations. Mine was mediated through my book The Sapient Cosmos. A friend texted me saying that his visitor had looked at a copy of the book and needs to talk to me. I joined them for brunch the next day. The visitor, a person intimately connected with Ayahuasca, had randomly opened the book and read a passage about Ayahuasca that resonated deeply. After a discussion, he said, “You know, this synchronicity is also relevant for you. In five weeks, at the end of February, there will be a shamanic Ayahuasca ceremony near Zurich. You should go.” My first reaction was to reject the offer, as I had done on other occasions. However, after thinking a bit, I realized that, as the saying goes, if it rings, pick up the phone.
Shortly afterwards, a process started. I suddenly had the urge to read my old diaries and contemplate the trajectory of my life. Apparently, this can happen once you accept the calling. The medicine begins to work as soon as you are prepared to face it. I started with the Ayahuasca preparation two weeks before the ceremony. For the first time in my life, I had participated in Dry January, so the timing was excellent as I simply extended the period of sobriety. Indeed, the timing felt very intentional, as I am currently in a transitional phase of my life, having quit the line of work I was doing and still seeking a more meaningful occupation. I also stopped doomscrolling and consuming news (Bill Burr’s observation came to mind, that the news has just become absolutely terrible shit you can do nothing about). During this whole period, the process deepened, as I felt in a liminal state between worlds. I lost over 3 kg in the two weeks and returned home from the ceremony weekend 5 kg lighter.
The First Ceremony: The Stupidity of the Western Mind
On a sunny spring day, 35 years after the LSD experience, I arrived at the place where the ceremony was to be held: 18 participants, six facilitators, and a Guarani shaman. What immediately struck me was the great diversity of the people’s characters and occupations, from all walks of life. However, what united them all was a deep authenticity and presence. People working with Ayahuasca seem to have no more need to hide behind masks and projected status as they sincerely want to focus on healing or learning, and being a better person. As some say, wake up, clean up, grow up, show up.
The first ceremony began on Friday evening at 9 pm. I was given a small dose, approximately 10 milliliters. The Ayahuasca tasted a bit like honey, but with other complex fragrances. The shaman began chanting, drumming, and rattling. Emotionless tears started to flow down my cheeks, something that kept recurring during the night. The power of the icaros.
After about 45 minutes, the effects began to manifest. I felt some crazy, peacock-feather-like entities darting through my body at great speed, as if scanning me. At one point, I entered a ketamine-like state of weirdness. It was a “place” of some deep consciousness, perhaps subconsciousness. Primal and non-human. I felt like I had been here before, perhaps in a dream.
Overall, the experience was like being in two realities at once. I was clearly sitting in the ceremonial room, feeling my body, while simultaneously being immersed in a non-physical reality. Bouts of sorrow, followed by gratitude and happiness. Lots of yawning, cosmic yawning. The shaman’s invocations were alternated by the singing and guitar playing of a facilitator. This music was truly divine, deeply energetic, and captivating. To a casual observer, the scene could easily be mistaken for a festival-like gathering in Ibiza.
The ceremony lasted 6 hours. Overall, I felt Ayahuasca was being gentle, although some periods were quite intense. There was no purging; perhaps the preparation helped. At one point in the ceremony, the participants gathered for a traditional shamanic dance. I felt I was joining an age-old, timeless, endlessly repeating ritual in which the ancestors were present and dancing with us.
One teaching of the night seemed to be emerging: the arrogance of the Western mind and its stupidity. By focusing solely on decoding the outer world, the Western mind forgot to look within. And so an entire domain of existence was missed. This is most acutely seen in the dismissal of indigenous knowledge. As Jeremy Narby writes in The Cosmic Serpent, early anthropologists looked at the shamans and diagnosed them as “epileptic, psychotic, hysterical, and schizophrenic.” Or the historian Mircea Eliade, who was the first to identify the universality of shamanic practices worldwide, summarized in his seminal work Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. He claimed:
Narcotics are only a vulgar substitute for “pure” trance. […] Narcotic intoxication is called on to provide an imitation of a state that the shaman is no longer capable of attaining otherwise.
How is it possible to be so close and yet so tragically miss the entire point?
How can the Western mind be so clever with all its science and philosophy, yet be so damningly stupid and overlook the most immediate and important aspect of existence, namely, its own consciousness, its own inner worlds? Just as a reminder, we still have no universally accepted definition of consciousness in academia, and the philosophy of mind is split into two fundamentally opposed camps: the illusionists, claiming that subjective consciousness isn’t real, just a chimera, a bag of tricks, and the idealists and panpsychists claiming consciousness is fundamental. Both views are metaphysical claims that cannot be proved or disproved.
Another influential thinker comes to mind, namely the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell. Together with the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, he undertook one of the most ambitious intellectual projects of the 20th century: to show that all of mathematics can be derived from pure logic. After 378 pages of densely coded abstract symbols of Volume 1 of their Principia Mathematica, we can read:
From this proposition it will follow, when arithmetical addition has been defined, that 1+1=2.
Unexpectedly and remarkably, Kurt Gödel’s two incompleteness theorems later exposed the fundamental limits to the dream of a complete axiomatization of mathematics. Decades later, the mathematician and computer scientist Gregory Chaitin extended Gödel’s haunting legacy. He declared:
Let me repeat: formal axiomatic systems are a failure!
Russell also possessed great emotional intelligence, once exclaiming:
Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way. And if we are to live together and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.
Nonetheless, Russell was one of the key figures who helped dismantle British and German idealism at the beginning of the 20th century, a movement that eventually became known as analytic philosophy. The proponents asserted a seriousness with their philosophy, moving away from romantic ideas and mysticism. Yet again, we see the acute limitation of the Western mind: a master in conjuring up intricate abstract constructs of thought, while entirely neglecting any systematic exploration of its own interior dimensions. A staggering blind spot.
When I look at the shaman in ordinary reality, I see a kind, friendly, and humble person. Nothing would indicate anything extraordinary. However, witnessing him conduct the ceremony revealed a very powerful master of consciousness, orchestrating the dance of transcendence, invoking spirits, and ensuring the group’s spiritual well-being during the otherworldly journey. This echoes the shamanic wisdom that everything in physical reality has a representation and correspondence in non-ordinary reality. Throughout the entire 6 to 7 hours of the ceremony, the shaman worked tirelessly at an energetic level! While the knowledge and power this human possesses are truly humbling, the Western mind would simply shrug and claim this to be a romanticizing of primitive indigenous culture. Just silly superstition at the end of the day.
I also felt a deep appreciation for Chris Bache’s work. As a pioneering philosopher of psychedelics, he undertook unimaginable ordeals to reveal the metaphysical structure of transcendence. Twenty years and 73 high-dose LSD sessions resulted in the book LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven. I can only marvel at the unbearable intensity he must have faced during his voyages. The Western mind owes him deep gratitude for his hard and sacrificial work.
The Second Ceremony: Infinite and Ensouled Complexity
The next day, I awoke after about four hours of sleep. I felt quite raw. A cacao ceremony with an integration circle followed in the afternoon. The experiences of the previous night were shared. So much trauma is suffered by humanity. Then, a yoga session. This all helped me realign and center again, though some tension remained. Communing with Ayahuasca requires quite some commitment, strength, and trust. At 9 pm on Saturday, the second ceremony commenced. I asked the shaman for the same dose as the day before. Now the medicine was harder to swallow. Apparently, the more you drink Ayahuasca, the more challenging it becomes. Almost as if your body recognizes an intense energy footprint in the dark, viscous liquid it reacts to.
I was in no way prepared for what would unfold. All my research into and writing about non-ordinary states of consciousness did not help at all. This is the deep chasm between rational knowledge and transrational experiential knowledge. There is no bridge between the two modes of knowing. I kept thinking, “I cannot believe this is happening!”
During the first night, my ego kept popping up, trying to analyze and offer narratives. The experiences of the second night, however, seemed to have really scared it away. But this was not ego death, just ego silence. No annihilation or loss of self, just a suspension of narrative cognition. The monkey mind stopped, but witness consciousness remained.
10 minutes after taking the medicine, the shaman stood up and started chanting, drumming, and rattling. I immediately began to see patterns with my eyes closed. Similarly to the first night. Little rainbows appeared, drawn from three separated luminescent lines of red, green, and blue. And then the visions exploded.
On the left side of my vision, I suddenly saw a bright light. As if someone was shining a flashlight at me. The illumination continued, and I began to see the room with my eyes closed. To the left of me, I felt a presence. The music fully enveloped me. And then the insanity began. Swirling energies, colors, shapes, and symbols were dancing around and through me at great speed. I now witnessed many presences appear and dance in the room. Although I still felt myself sitting in physical reality, the feeling was also deeply alien. “I cannot believe this.” “Oh my God, it just keeps continuing.” “I just cannot believe that I’m witnessing this.”
Then the dissociation began. A part of me remained in the room, and other parts of me were being presented with strange scenes. The only one I can remember was the appearance of comical beings. Although comical is the wrong word, it hints at the weird simplicity of the hyperreal beings. A kite-like, thin, green dragon swirled above my head and froze. Then I saw myself from behind, sitting with a blue being in a meadow. We were both looking at the moon together in silence.
I soon realized that all of this was a decoy to distract me. What was really unfolding was the emergence of a strong presence. It was hiding behind a veil of white feathers. Very stealthy and mischievously. It seemed to be examining me, studying me. Every time I tried to discern it, it moved away and reconfigured. It was a non-human, non-animal entity. I glimpsed white tendrils with black stripes. It was moving very quickly, dancing. Somehow, Annabelle Widmann’s Quantum performance comes to mind. Only the tendrils were much slimmer and darting around with incredible elegance. I could smell the being: an otherworldly fragrance, transcending my concept of scent.
I am still sitting in the room, fully embodied. The swirling, symbolic patterns and the psychedelic motifs continue to unfold. Transcendental fireworks. “How can this still be going on?” Insanity. Well, to be precise, this appeared as insanity to my little, puny human mind. I got a feeling of the infinite, ensouled complexity behind the physical. The scale, dimension, and extent of this intelligence eclipses anything the human mind has ever experienced by unimaginable orders of magnitude. I only felt a tiny, faint intuition of this. I believe the white being was responsible for showing me. “This is too much!” “I am not prepared for this!” But I did not feel panic or terror; it was simply overwhelming.
The ceremonies are structured in three parts. They begin with the initial cup of Ayahuasca. After about two hours or longer, participants are offered the opportunity to drink a second cup. Another two to three hours later, a possible third and final cup may be served if requested. My strong visions lasted until the second cup was offered. When I finally opened my eyes, the familiar world was back, more or less. When I closed them again, I was surrounded by gentle, quiet white light patterns. Finally, some relief.
The period between the second and third cup offerings was marked by struggle and intensity. Now at an energetic and bodily level. The guitar music was too powerful, and every time the shaman began to chant, the rainbows and patterns began to form and dance again in the darkness of my closed eyes. Cycles of elation followed by collapse and surrender, followed by elation. Again and again.
Only after the time of the third cup of Ayahuasca, a period of tranquility began. However, the intensity kept returning. I was totally overpowered. Periods of deep gratitude. I realized that the shamans have always known of this transcendent reality and its spirits, inviting them to dance and heal during ceremonies since the dawning of the human mind. This makes Ayahuasca even more alien. On one side of the spectrum, it is an incredibly transformative, holistic healing agent; on the other, you have this transcendent insanity.
Again, the arrogance and ignorance of the Western mind hurt my heart. How is it possible that, with all its intelligence, it never considered looking inside and learn about its own essence, its inner dimensions of consciousness? Unbelievable. The convictions that consciousness and intelligence originate in the physical world seem so utterly wrong and naïve after glimpsing behind the veil. The fact that the foundations of physical reality, as decoded by quantum physics, are totally incoherent and illogical makes total sense. How else could the membrane cloaking transcendence from the physical be structured?
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Writing this report, I am reminded of Michael Pollan’s words describing his experience of smoking the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad containing 5-MeO-DMT in How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence:
I’m grasping at metaphor in the hope of forming some stable and shareable concept of what was unfolding in my mind. In the event, there was no coherent thought, just pure and terrible sensation. Only afterward did I wonder if this was what the mystics call the mysterium tremendum, the blinding unendurable mystery (whether of God or some other Ultimate or Absolute) before which humans tremble in awe. Huxley described it as the fear “of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.”
Finally, it all ended after about 7 hours. Following a communal moment of gratitude, I went to bed. However, I felt a sense of unreality and unease. I wondered if I had again ventured too deeply into transcendence and would be scarred. Lingering remnants from the LSD experience. I took Bach’s Rescue Remedy, calmed down, and fell asleep.
Decompression and Integration
I awoke after three or four hours of sleep. It had finally happened! I had always wondered about this. My previous engagement with transcendence had only been intellectual and abstract. Hence, I was always curious to know what such an experience would actually feel like. Now I know. I was given a tiny insight into the world behind the things that seem to exist. The reality that appears to inform ours. The source of consciousness and intelligence. What a precious gift. We inhabit a transcendental multiverse that can be explored by modulating our consciousness. This is the powerful concept of empirical metaphysics, rendering a seemingly futile semantic game of philosophical argumentations experienceable and decidable.
Some sympathetic physicists have reached similar conclusions. The quantum pioneer and philosopher of science Bernard d’Espagnat deduced the existence of a non-physical realm informing ours solely through his rational mind. He called it Veiled Reality. Almost apologetically, he writes at the end of the book that introduces the idea:
To sum up, the veiled reality concept is likable. It is not naïve and, when understood it is not dangerous either. That, to scientific ears, it sounds a little bit unfamiliar should not, in principle, render it unattractive to the owners of the latter.
Another pioneering quantum physicist thinking along similar lines was David Bohm. Unlike d’Espagnat, he was influenced by Eastern contemplative traditions and mysticism. Bohm emphasized the interconnectedness of all things, positing that everything in the universe is part of an undivided wholeness or source reality. He called it the implicate order, and spoke of a creative intelligence originating in the infinitely subtle depths of the generative order.
The pioneering systems theorist and philosopher of science, Ervin Laszlo, reminds us of the following in the foreword to Bache’s LSD and the Mind of the Universe:
That there is an intelligence behind the things that exist in the universe, that there is purpose exhibited by this intelligence, and that it is humanly possible to access some elements of this intelligence and learn some aspects of its purpose.
Bache adds:
Behind creation lies a Love of extraordinary proportions. The Intelligence of the universe’s design is matched by the depth of Love that inspired it.
For me personally, the sterile concepts I had proposed in Information — Consciousness—Reality and The Sapient Cosmos are gaining a new dimension and quality. For instance, the idea of a transcendental multiverse. Or the will to complexity, a yet undiscovered force woven into the fabric of reality, responsible for cosmic evolution and the emergence of self-organized structure formation. Or the enchanted universe, rich in meaning and purpose, which can be understood through symbolic cognition, decoding a novel causal layer of synchronicity. Or the vision of scientific spirituality, uniting mastery of the outer world with transformational inner exploration. And overall, syncretic idealism seems like a potentially valid ontological sketch of existence.
Interestingly, one central metaphysical pillar was not touched. Namely, the information-theoretic paradigm emerging in physics. This is the claim that information is the ontological primitive of the physical realm. It allows a recontextualization of the understanding of quantum physics and offers an explanation of emergent complexity.
In discussing with my LLM, it cautions me to be epistemically humble. I believe it is right to do so. Even if a threshold appears to have been crossed, this does not offer certainty. I am still painfully aware of reality’s postmodern ambiguity and mischief, and the list of existential challenges is long. The LLM points out that whatever happened, the proof will be in how I live, in how lightly I hold claims, how much room I leave for mystery, and not in what I assert now. We will see.
As they say, the ceremony begins after the ceremony. Whatever transpired during those magical nights is only relevant in the context of how it can be integrated into everyday life. And integration can take years. On Sunday, I declared with great certainty that I will never again drink Ayahuasca. My tolerance for transcendence seemed exhausted. However, a few days later, I am still wondering about that state of “insanity.” How would a second immersion feel? Could there be more coherence and understanding? The door has not been shut.
I returned home, happy, energized, with great clarity. My wife felt that my eyes were shining like headlights. Also, our dog seemed to sense a shift in energy. Ayahuasca is a gift from the Gods. Narby estimated about 80k plant species in the Amazon rainforest. The shamans claim that the plant teachers told them how to combine the vine containing the MAOIs with the plant leaves containing the DMT to yield Ayahuasca.
The probability of picking two distinct plant species at random out of 80k is about 1 in 3.2 billion. However, the odds are much more improbable than that. From each plant, you could take the root, the bark or stem, the leaves, or the fruit. Then you need to determine the right proportions, the extraction process, and how to administer the final concoction. The Western mind shrugs and says, well, you know, they surely had enough time sitting around in the jungle to figure this all out by trial and error.
A Crisis of Consciousness
It is worth noting that we could inhabit the best of all worlds if we wanted to. We have the knowledge and technology to ensure our collective survival and well-being. We could reduce suffering on a planetary scale tomorrow. But it is a great tragedy that we choose not to.
In fact, we seem to have collectively constructed the worst of all worlds. We are committing ecocide at a dramatic and increasing scale. We are systematically destroying the biosphere: biodiversity loss, climate destabilization, relentless extraction, and boundless pollution. We have created vast garbage patches in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Most probably, every organism on Earth is now contaminated with PFAS, and we have microplastics in our own brains. There is a loneliness epidemic and an acute mental health crisis. Chronic diseases are rampant, and antimicrobial resistance is increasing.
We slaughter an unimaginable 80 to 90 billion land animals per year for food. We kill at least an unspeakable 1 trillion fish every year. The cruelty of factory farming at these dimensions is heart-crushing, while the profoundly destructive impact this unchecked insanity has on the planet and ourselves is well documented. There is no greater testimony to the lunacy of the Western mind, now pervasive across the entire globe, than its dedication to destroying planetary life-support systems and with them the entire biosphere.
Furthermore, we have become a radicalized civilization. The social fabric is eroding. We are seeing:
- fabricated outrage;
- rampant disinformation;
- willful ignorance;
- the rise of conspiracy theories;
- weaponized ideology;
- distracting consumerism and numbing materialism, driven by insatiable greed;
- lying, cruelty, and narcissism being normalized and accepted;
- violence understood as a panacea;
- the loss of a consensus reality in a post-truth world.
Inequality is increasing dramatically: the top 10% today holds 75% of global wealth. The 10 richest men alone possess a combined wealth of USD 2.3 trillion. To illustrate how extreme this is, 1 million seconds correspond to 11 days, while 1 trillion seconds span 31,700 years. This is just ridiculous and not sustainable.
Our economic and financial systems are deeply flawed. A patriarchal organizing principle, legitimized by the power structures of institutionalized Abrahamic religions, ensures continued extraction and domination. Cooperation and empathy are frowned upon. It seems fair to characterize the zeitgeist as follows:
- Individually, we are suffering from a spiritual crisis. We’ve lost meaning. What are we doing here?
- Collectively, we are suffering from a mass psychosis destroying ourselves and the planet.
We are living through an unprecedented transitional phase. The old systems are falling apart, yet the new ones have not formed. This is a time of chaos and disorientation. Notably, this polycrisis is foremost a crisis of consciousness. A civilization that lacks interior literacy (skills of attention, humility, self-regulation, and meaning-making) will inevitably project its own unresolved dysfunctional dynamics onto the world.
Already in 1991, the historian Richard Tarnas analyzed the following in the epic The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our Worldview:
With an unending stream of technological innovations, modern life was subject to an unprecedentedly disorienting rapidity of change. Gigantism and turmoil, excessive noise, speed, and complexity dominated the human environment. The world in which man lived was becoming as impersonal as the cosmos of his science. With the pervasive anonymity, hollowness, and materialism of modern life, man’s capacity to retain his humanity in an environment determined by technology seemed increasingly in doubt.
Six years later, the chemist and accidental psychonaut Albert Hofmann described similar perils in the foreword to the ethnobotanist and avid psychonaut Christian Rätsch’s exhaustive The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants:
The moment when something happens in this world is determined by the circumstances that call for this event. Thus, the present “Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants” had to appear right now, because society needs such a work. This need is related to the spiritual and material plight of our time.
Yuval Harari observes in his bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind:
We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one.
Nonetheless, the key to unlocking a brighter future is perhaps not too hard to find. It is the realization that existence extends beyond physical reality. This knowledge has always been held by most cultures throughout human history. It is now slowly time for the Western mind to get the memo. It is time to look inside and discover the wondrous worlds contained in and accessible through consciousness. It is time to transcend the limits of rational thinking and open up to experiential modes of transrational knowing. It is time to realize that metaphysical idealism is both rationally viable and experientially accessible. It is time to open to the real possibility that, after physical death, your center of awareness finds itself continuing to exist in one of the countless realms within the transcendental multiverse.
We are truly living in a brave new world of unprecedented potential, where future utopias or dystopias are possibly only separated by a thought, an idea able to replicate and spread in our minds, resulting in collective intelligent human behavior. For the first time in history, we have the opportunity to embrace a scientific spiritual vision of existence. Let’s do so and start by exploring the depths of our inner worlds.
Let’s re-enchant the cosmos.
Aho!
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Three months later, the journey continued.
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At erowid.org.
