My mind swirls on top of my intuition like oil on water. We’re supposed to be in this together, self.

No chance.

Mind: You have everything you need.

Intuition: Something’s missing.

Mind: You have everything you need.

Intuition: Something. Is. Missing!!!

Mind: Okay, okay, WHAT?

Intuition: Look inside

I sit in lotus position. I close my eyes. I stare into the darkness.

A gnawing in my gut swells, clawing at my stomach and making its way into my heart. It was there all along.

Nothing happens.

Mind: Why is nothing happening?

Intuition: Just wait

Mind: What does it want from me?!

Intuition: Wait.

Mind: Okay, okay

Minutes turn into days turn into weeks.

I ride into waves of nausea, tension, restlessness, and then, suddenly…calm.

I know what to do.

Oil On Water was originally published in Shantigar Press on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Breaking things is a legitimate form of catharsis, but it may not get to the root of your problem

By Shelby Hartman

Plato and his disciple Aristotle disagreed on many philosophical matters. One of them was the purpose of anger. Plato found the emotion to be an irrational passion and, like Buddha, thought it should be internally tamed. In contrast, Aristotle wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics that anger can support moral order when expressed “on the right grounds and against the right persons, and also in the right manner and at the right moment and for the right length of time.”

The debate about the proper response to this human emotion spans millennia, cultures, and even religions in which divine spirits are portrayed as wrathful.

In the United States, thousands of people are now finding relief from anger by unabashedly demolishing furniture, old computers, fax machines, and other household items at the Anger Room, a business in Arlington, Texas that builds rooms to be destroyed by customers in need of catharsis…or just a good time.

The phenomenon doesn’t surprise Raymond Novaco, a University of California, Irvine, professor of psychology and social behavior, who has been a leading researcher of anger and violent behavior for more than 20 years.

We’re hardwired for anger. It has a lot of survival functions for us.

– Raymond Novaco

“We’re hardwired for anger,” Novaco says. “It has a lot of survival functions for us. We often get upset because we have an exaggerated sense of whatever’s happened to us. The anger persists because of rumination, or perhaps gets blocked because you have no viable outlets for resolution. I could see the Anger Room appealing to a fair number of people.”

Despite some humorous news coverage, the Anger Room was never intended to be a joke. Founder Donna Alexander grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where there was a high rate of domestic violence and crime. “I figured if there was a place where people could go and lash out and not get in trouble for it, that would help not only society but our jail system,” Alexander says.

Now, the Anger Room serves 500 to 600 customers a month, half of whom Alexander estimates are repeat customers. The business has also held successful pop-ups in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, and plans to hold more events outside Texas next year.

The Anger Room offers three types of sessions: the five-minute “I Need A Break” for $25, the 15-minute “Lash Out” for $45, and the 25-minute “Total Demolition” for $75. The rooms are curated around themes like office, living room, or dining room. Alexander says that over the years she has noticed a trend in people requesting spaces that represent the problems they are facing in their lives.

Customers, who range from top-level executives to restaurant servers, get outfitted with helmets, goggles, coveralls, and gloves. They pick their “weapons” from a selection of rackets, baseball bats, and metal pipes. They choose their own music — whatever gets them pumped up — and then…they start breaking stuff.

“I often get people that are a little bit nervous, like, ‘Oh, I’m not supposed to be doing this,’” Alexander says. “Then, after they break that first item, something clicks in their head and they’re able to break an entire room in two or three minutes.”

The business is classified as entertainment and hosts a large number of birthday parties and corporate gatherings (customers have included Hilton Hotels & Resorts, Microsoft, and 7-Eleven). But they also have visitors who treat it as a serious form of therapy.

Regular Anger Room customer Elizabeth Shaw said she thinks it’s changing people’s lives. “It was inspiring to walk into the building and see the people who have signed the walls,” Shaw says. “I mean, we’re talking about victims of molestation and rape saying how much this helped them.”

Shaw, a 38-year-old mother of two who works in client relations for a merchant processing company, describes herself as “just a tall, blond chick who wears business clothes every day.” She’s been to the Anger Room roughly 20 times over the last few years. “I have stresses like everyone else,” she says. “I can’t imagine a person in the world that the Anger Room would not benefit.”

Professor Novaco doesn’t dismiss the potential therapeutic value of it either. He says the Anger Room might seem “goofy,” but he acknowledges that it may have therapeutic value by helping people alleviate tension — particularly if that tension might otherwise manifest in violence. Ultimately, though, he recommends reflecting on the origins of anger with mindful practices such as meditation and yoga. “Anger Room might give people a way to bash things up and get it out of their system,” Novaco says, “But life’s problems remain.”

Shelby Hartman is PrimeMind’s associate editor. Follow her on Twitter.

The Therapeutic Value of Anger Rooms was originally published in PrimeMind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A few vintners and a scientist think we’re underestimating plant intelligence

By Shelby Hartman

Vintner George Hanson wanted to know how to make the best wine possible, so he asked a divine source.

What can I do to grow the best grapes I can possibly grow?

The answer: Everything in the universe, including nonhumans, has a desire, an energy, and a vibration.

Hanson responded by promptly installing a stereo system worth more than $400,000 in his underground caves at Seven Stones Winery in British Columbia. Baroque classical music plays 24 hours a day from the speakers made by Burmester, the same company that outfits the sound systems in Porsche and Mercedes Benz cars. The performance is for barrels of Hanson’s merlot.

Seven Stones Winery isn’t the only vineyard that plays classical music for its plants. Professor Stefano Mancuso at the University of Florence has studied Brunello Di Montalcino, in Italy’s Tuscany region, where he says the grapes listening to 50 Bose loud-speakers are able to appreciate sound vibrations and low frequencies between 100 and 400 Hz. Mancuso runs a lab dedicated to plant intelligence. In his popular TED talk, he says that plants have not been properly recognized for the complex awareness they have of their surroundings. The vines at DeMorgezon vineyard in South Africa also get serenaded 24 hours a day.

Hanson uses a slightly different method than the other classical vineyards though. He chooses to play music to the grapes as they’re aging in the barrels rather than when they’re still growing. His inspiration was more spiritual than scientific. He and his wife spent seven years taking workshops and going on cruises with New York Times best-selling author Esther Hicks and her husband, Jerry, learning about “The Law of Attraction.” The Hickses — Jerry died in 2011 — have gathered a nearly religious following from their books promoting the idea, among others, that people can manifest their own destinies through positive thinking. This concept of “prosperity consciousness” dates back more than a century (notably achieving a widespread following from Napoleon Hill’s popular 1937 book “Think and Grow Rich”).

“It’s very powerful and enabling when you realize that how you think, or what you think, has an energy and a vibration, and you can attract and have anything happen to you if you think about it and you care about it,” Hanson says.

The Hickses’ books espouse the most modern iteration of this philosophy. According to the couple’s writings, their wisdom comes from “Abraham,” a collection of “loving entities” who are in a nonphysical dimension. They say that Esther serves as their portal to communicate with the physical world.

“There are Universal Laws that affect everything in the Universe — everything that is Non-Physical and everything that is physical,” says the Hickses’ book “The Law of Attraction: The Basics of the Teachings of Abraham.” “These Laws are absolute, they are Eternal, and they are omnipresent (or everywhere). When you have a conscious awareness of these Laws, and a working understanding of them, your life experience is tremendously enhanced.”

Hanson says he has experienced the transformative impact of these laws. It was his lifelong dream to own a vineyard and winery. In 2003, when he was in his 40s, Seven Stones came out with its first vintage. “I received more recognition than I wanted, but I know the wine is even going to get better and better and better. Now, I have all the conditions to make it happen,” Hanson says.

He’s referring to the music, of course.

Next, the vineyard will perform what Hanson is calling a scientific test to prove his theory. When the fall vintage comes around in November, he will pull a couple of barrels of the merlot from the caves where the music is playing. Eighteen months later, the winery will do a taste test to compare the serenaded and not serenaded wines. Hanson has no doubt the musical grapes will taste better. In the meantime, his house guests staying in the room next to the wine caves will be serenaded around the clock. Hopefully, they like Beethoven’s Fifth on repeat.

Shelby Hartman is PrimeMind’s associate editor. Follow her on Twitter.

Musical Merlot: The Grapes That Age to Bach was originally published in PrimeMind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A former Orthodox Jew’s journey to getting right with herself and God

By Shelby Hartman

Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness these 40 years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.

– Deuteronomy 8:2

In 1971, Yiscah Smith stepped off the plane in Israel for the first time as a 20-year-old man from Long Island, New York, named Jeffrey. He knew very little about Judaism. In fact, he didn’t even know why he was there.

Forty years later, after a gender transition and just before turning 60, Smith returned to Israel as an Orthodox Jewish woman named Yiscah. This time, she had no need to contemplate her next move. She headed straight to the Western Wall in Jerusalem to finally join her fellow women in prayer.

“At the moment when my feet touched the women’s space for the first time in my life, nothing I had ever done until that moment felt as natural and right,” Smith said.

Then, she approached the wall.

“Shivers ran through my body, as the tears fell, and as I uttered words of gratitude and praise, I knew in the deepest recesses of my very being, in the marrow of my existence, that my transition was God’s loving and compassionate expression of bringing me back home — to Him, to myself, and to my spiritual center,” she writes in her memoir, “Forty Years In The Wilderness: My Journey To Authentic Living.”

Smith’s journey has been one of reconciling her transgender and Jewish identities. At times, they supported one another. At other times, she thought she would have to choose between two fundamental parts of herself, destined to an incomplete existence. She now travels the world inspiring others to live what she calls an “authentic life.” Smith compares her four decades living in the wrong body to the Jews who were sentenced to roam aimlessly through the desert, holding onto a promise from God that they would someday be rewarded for their agony with a home.

We all live “in the closet” at various points, she said earlier this year in Los Angeles at Beth Chayim Chadashim, the world’s first LGBT synagogue. Smith has become a force for inclusivity in the Jewish community, but her message is a universal one: Listen to your voice. Only you know if you’re being honest with yourself and others about who you are.

This notion of “authenticity,” that we all are unique individuals with our own paths, is relatively new in the history of Western intellectual thought. It became popular during the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. Previously, a “sincere” person was someone who followed expectations. Then, the concept of an inner self emerged. Society was perceived as a collection of individuals, each of whom had a personal set of beliefs, desires, and characteristics.

The power that the concept of authenticity has over the way people perceive their lives has only continued to grow. According to philosophers Charles Taylor and Alessandro Ferrara, we are now living in the age of authenticity. Taylor writes in “Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity,” “Selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes.”

This concept inspired Smith to make dramatic changes to her life. It was, she says, the only way she could get right with God. Yet, she acknowledges there is no word for authenticity in the Torah. “There is another word that is in the text and that is ‘truth’ or emet in Hebrew,” she said. “It’s part of the Shabbat prayer that we say: ‘to be with you in service and in truth.’”

Before her gender transition, Smith married a woman and had six children in eight years. They lived as an Orthodox Jewish family in an apartment in the Old City of Jerusalem. Smith became somewhat of a celebrity in their Jewish community. Every Friday night their family would host lively, intimate Shabbat dinners where Smith would offer passionate lessons about ancient Jewish texts. All the while she hated herself for preaching the importance of truth while lying about who she was: a woman in a man’s body.

It was January 1991 and the Persian Gulf War was in full swing. The United States was preparing to lead 34 countries, the largest coalition since World War II, into Kuwait to end the Iraqi occupation. When Saddam Hussein fired the first missile into Israel and the conflict got closer and closer to home, Smith felt it was a metaphor for her life. “No gas mask, no safe room, and no amount of preparation could have protected me from this onslaught seeking to destroy me, and by extension, my family,” Smith writes in her memoir. She says she was her “own personal Saddam Hussein.”

Smith came out as gay, divorced her wife, and moved to the progressive Israeli city of Tel Aviv. She didn’t yet have the courage to come out as a transgender heterosexual woman.

Lies and agony continued.

After a rabbi in Jerusalem ostracized her for coming out as gay, she no longer felt there was a place for her in the Jewish community. She moved to Manhattan and became a feminine man in the LGBT nightlife scene, completely rejecting religion.

Smith says it would take her several years to realize that “The rabbis are imperfect, they’re human. God is perfect.” This is ultimately how she managed to reconcile her gender-identity dysphoria and Judaism despite continued prejudice in some ultra-Orthodox communities.

In the Torah, there’s one Jewish law that supersedes all the others. It’s called pikuach nefesh and it means that a person does not have to follow the commandments if doing so will lead to his or her death. This is the passage Smith refers to when explaining why she believes God approves of her transition.

Pikuach nefesh is also the law referred to by some rabbis and LGBT activists trying to interpret Jewish text to accommodate members of the community who don’t fall neatly into the categories of heterosexual male and female. According to a study done by UCLA’s Williams Institute in 2014, more than 40 percent of transgender people have tried to commit suicide.

Smith was never suicidal, but she was severely lonely and unfulfilled. “I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t go on. And I knew the only way to go on was to get a gender transition,” she said via video chat from her apartment in the eclectic Jerusalem neighborhood of Nachlaot. She looked like an elegant woman one might encounter at an art gallery with short brown hair, funky sterling rings on almost every finger, and a simple camel-colored sweater.

“One thing I’ve seen in my own life and in other people’s lives a lot, is the way in which coming out often makes people recognize how important Judaism is to them,” said Rabbi Lisa Edwards of Beth Chayim Chadasim. “Once you start integrating into your true self, all these disparate parts of who you are flow together better.” Edwards and her partner Tracy Moore have been LGBT activists in Los Angeles for more than two decades.

Jews have been encouraged to question the meaning of Jewish law and adapt it to their own lives for as long as the religion has existed. “There isn’t any one view of any of this,” Edwards said. “I think that fact is what helps a lot of us who are more liberal in our viewpoints.”

The tradition of interpretation in Judaism has helped some Reform communities to be at the forefront of the LGBT movement since the 70s. Israel is also arguably ahead of America when it comes to transgender equality, allowing people with gender identity dysphoria to serve in the military and subsidizing gender reassignment surgery as a part of the country’s universal healthcare system.

But the same flexibility in Jewish law that allows people to make the religion their own leads to an endless debate about God’s intentions. Some Orthodox Jewish communities believe the last rabbis granted the right to interpret these ancient texts did so in the Talmud written between 200 C.E. and 500 C.E. Others believe that the meaning of these texts evolves constantly with the passage of time, particularly as modernity presents problems that did not exist in the past.

Typically, when a Jew is looking for an interpretation of a law, they go to their rabbi seeking a reading that takes their circumstances into account. This is why Eshel, an organization founded in 2010 to promote LGBT inclusivity in Orthodox Jewish communities, is educating rabbis around the country about gender identity dysphoria. If rabbis realize that being transgender is not a choice, they’re more likely to interpret the Halakha, or collective body of Jewish laws, in a way that allows congregants to participate in the synagogue as their identified genders. In 2015, Eshel interviewed 33 Orthodox rabbis in the United States to assess their inclusivity.

“It’s very hard because there’s a lot in Judaism that has to do with the body,” said Eshel Executive Director Miryam Kabakov. “Someone in a male body has a whole other list of obligations. When someone transitions, the question is, ‘Do we now treat them as male or female?’”

The only commandment in the Torah that explicitly addresses gender ambiguity prohibits cross-dressing. In the book of Deuteronomy 22:5 it says, “A woman must not put on man’s apparel, nor shall a man wear women’s clothing; for whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord your God.”

Some rabbis believe that a person will always be the gender assigned at birth. Thus, even if the person is fully transitioned, they would be violating the law. This was the Torah portion that most troubled Joy Ladin. In 2006 she came out as transgender, the first tenured professor to do so at Yeshiva University, the oldest Jewish educational institution in America.

Ladin recalls being overwhelmed with guilt as a child when she would sneak up to the attic and try on her sister’s old clothing. As she got older, her life was affirmed by the nuance and malleability of the Torah. Like Yiscah Smith, she came to believe that being a woman was her God-given destiny. “If we didn’t insist that the Torah speak to our deepest needs, confusions, anguishes, the Torah would wither into something like the Code of Hammurabi — a text written by and for those who died millennia before us, a piece of archaeology rather than what our tradition calls it: a tree of life whose roots nourish the endlessly ramifying limbs and leaves of our individual lives,” Ladin writes in an article about how her transition influenced the way she reads Jewish text.

The same year Ladin came out, Elliot Kukla became the first transgender rabbi ordained by a Reform community. Over the last 10 years there’s been an increase in the number of rabbinical schools that admit transgender students. Still, there are many questions and disagreements about how transgender identity plays out in the synagogue.

Prior to Smith’s transition, one of the hardest parts of going to temple was being forced to stand on the wrong side of the mechitza, the wall that divides the female and male congregants. It was a physical representation of the barrier between who she was and how she was perceived.

Some ultra-Orthodox communities still will not allow her in their synagogue, let alone on the women’s side of the mechitza. They’re not transphobic, Smith insists, they’re just afraid of “the other.” In particular, ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews, who came from Central and Eastern Europe, live rigid lives in insular communities out of fear, she theorizes. “I believe now the Ashkenazi world, to a degree, is still suffering trauma from the European experience, from one institutionalized anti-Semitic policy after the next,” she said. “This does something to people. It erodes trust.”

In order to love others, Smith says, people must first start with themselves. It’s a cliché, but she knows it’s true from experience. Her vision? “I want to wake up to a world where everyone is so busy trying to figure themselves out that they begin to embrace the other.”

For now, Smith and other transgender Jews are fueling progress merely by their presence. More and more rabbis, inside and outside Orthodox communities, are committing themselves to learning about gender dysphoria so they can help their transgender congregants on their journeys.

And Smith’s journey is not over either. It never will be, she says. But at least for now, she’s out of the wilderness. After 40 years, she’s found herself, she’s found God, and she’s found a home in Jerusalem.

Shelby Hartman is PrimeMind’s associate editor. Follow her on Twitter.

Featured Image By Julien Menichini from Paris, France (Western Wall — Jerusalem) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wiki Commons

Jewish and Transgender was originally published in PrimeMind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s time to abolish the spirituality vs. religion distinction

By Shelby Hartman

A growing number of scientists researching religion believe the human brain has evolved to be spiritual, according to cognitive scientist Justin Lane. He says the impulse to believe in something greater than ourselves is universal and it doesn’t create hierarchies of religions. But you wouldn’t know that from looking at polls about religion around the world. The Pew Research Center, which generates some of the most comprehensive data on religion, places all New Age belief systems in categories labeled “other” or “ religiously unaffiliated.” Lane says this reveals a cultural bias that delegitimizes beliefs that don’t look like Christianity. He’s been invited to speak on March 30, along with other researchers, to demographers at the Pew Research Center on how to make the study of religion more scientific. Ahead of his talk, I spoke with Lane about how he’s using psychology to make sense of the rise in New Age beliefs and what he thinks religion around the world will look like in generations to come.

Shelby Hartman: The Pew Research Center recently came out with a study that said younger millennials — religious “nones,” as they call them — are driving America’s decrease in religiosity. Yet, many of them are still spiritual or have what they referred to as a “sense of wonder about the universe.” Do you think a poll can determine whether there’s a rise in spirituality by asking about a “sense of wonder about the universe?”

Justin Lane: My general reaction to that is that I’m not surprised at all. We have an evolutionary proclivity to be religious. Stewart Guthrie wrote about this in the late 80s in a book called “Faces in the Clouds.” He basically wrote about how we can sit around and see faces in the headlights of a funny car, or on a street sign, or in the knots of a tree, or in the way a cloud forms, and it’s because our brain has evolved to pick out agents and individuals in our environments.

A lot of people believe this comes from not always being the dominant predator in an environment. Because it makes a lot more sense to think a bump in the night is a predator that could kill you — and be prepared for that — than the alternative, which is to think a predator is just a bump in the night, not be prepared, and die.

This evolutionary process may have selected for people who are hyperactively detecting agents in their environment — and this would include God — so this is quite possibly a very deeply engrained cognitive bias that is almost impossible to outlearn. It would make perfect sense that even if you stopped going to a church or going to a synagogue or a mosque, that you very well still may believe in these spiritual forces that exist around us.

Interesting. And what do you make of the reported rise in spirituality? The Pew Research Center not only found the religiously unaffiliated have this “deep sense of wonder about the universe,” but that there’s actually been an increasing number of people with this feeling. Does that surprise you?

I’m not so surprised by it. I wonder to what extent that increase is due to religion. A sense of wonder can definitely be inspired by scientific inquiry as well. When you exist in a mundane world, perhaps where there are no gods, you can still be inspired by how massive our world or our universe is. And people are actively engaging in that in ways that they hadn’t before. They’re reading about physics — and you don’t have to be trained as a physicist in order to do so. And I think that’s really awe-inspiring for the new generations, where all this information is just a Google search away. Awe can come very quickly when you have the time to sit and think.

When I heard about this increase in awe, the first thing I started thinking about was the seeming rise in mindfulness, and interest in Eastern philosophies among millennials, people my age.

I not only think that that’s true in America, but my experience in Europe leads me to believe that that’s very true. And it’s like a religion without a gospel or social structure. One could hypothesize a million different reasons, but I think that a lot of what we see in the [religiously] unaffiliated bracket there in Pew Research are likely to fall into the New Age religious category, which I do consider religion.

Maybe they want to put them in “other;” maybe they want to put them in “folk religion;” but I put them in religion nonetheless. I mean, look at, for instance, what they’re talking about in these communities. They’re engaging in this global dialogue where they’re trying to create this global kumbaya that’s not based in any one political system, but in thoughts and ideologies that transcend any boundaries. Islam is no longer a Middle Eastern religion. You don’t really have this idea that “Oh, Europe is where Christianity lies.” A lot of people could argue that “Oh well, America is where Christianity lies.” There are more Jews living outside of Israel than inside of Israel. So in this weird, changing, global world, where now the internet has information going all over the place, I think the New Age traditions really are kind of embracing that and leveraging it — and also representative of it at the same time.

Why do you think it is that New Age beliefs are excluded from the religious category in studies like the Pew Research report?

’Cause I don’t think they know what to do with them. Most definitions of religion by surveys are defining religion in relation to Christianity. When people in the West think of religion, we think of churches and the hierarchies. Buddhism kind of resembles it. Hinduism has its resemblances. But then when you look at a UFO cult we think: “Oh, whoa, that’s super different.” Or a New Age tradition where they’re out meditating, possibly trying to use crystals in some kind of ceremony, and they think there’s some kind of spirit in the crystals — then we act like that’s really torrid. But if you take this evolutionary and psychological perspective, it forces you to rethink that paradigm.

You have to think, “All right, well, what is necessary and sufficient to qualify as a religion?” Scholars who have been doing this since the late 80s, early 90s, like a definition that more or less runs like this: “Religion is beliefs and behaviors acted by a community of individuals that either are directly addressed to, or backed up by, a belief in a supernatural agent.” So they don’t use the word God because, you know, it could be God, it could be Buddha, it could be Allah, it also could be an extraterrestrial. And that opens up this new definition that levels the playing field for Christians and people in the UFO cult. I like that sort of a definition, because now that brings New Age into the fold and it’s no longer “unaffiliated;” it’s rather a religion that has a very loose social structure, but it’s also definitively not atheism.

Do you think New Age beliefs are going to gain traction among millennials and the generations coming up underneath them? And if so, what does that mean for the American religious landscape?

I do think that New Age religions are going to gain more traction in the next 20 to 30 years. There’s one aspect of New Age religions that I don’t think will last, particularly as we get close to 2050 where the Pew Research stops. And that is the nonsocial aspect of New Age religions. New Age religions really are, some people could call, a cult of the audience. It’s not really participatory. You read about it. You might watch YouTube videos about it. Every once in a while you might go to a meditation retreat. But it’s not really social the way a church is. That, though, does not satisfy one of our other cognitive proclivities that seems to be very evolved, which is that group living has helped us to mediate social and environmental issues — threats, if you will.

There’s power in large numbers and that’s been key to human evolution and survival. As the global population increases, it increases exponentially. Food increases linearly. One of the things that it raises is: What happens to religion when the world becomes extremely populated — when population density packs us into cities much closer? Food may become more expensive, these sorts of issues. I don’t think that they’re apocalyptic by any means, but it does mean we have a serious problem when it comes to environmental changes, global warming — these environmental aspects will have an impact on religion.

I think one of the aspects of New Age beliefs is that they are more focused on beliefs than social communities. And I think that social communities are likely to rise up around the New Age tradition as the New Age tradition simultaneously becomes more incorporated in Christian and Buddhist thought. New Age beliefs are definitely going to change the landscape, but they’re also going to change over the next 40 years.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Shelby Hartman is PrimeMind’s associate editor. Follow her on Twitter.

Justin Lane is a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for the Bio-Cultural Study of Religion and a DPhil candidate at Oxford University’s Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology. He specializes in computer-modeling complex social systems, particularly religions, cultures, and economic markets.

Featured Image By Aljaz Zajc via Wiki Commons

Defining the Indefinable: The Science of New Age Beliefs was originally published in PrimeMind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A community says their spiritual drug use makes them better people and better parents

By Shelby Hartman

When Jonathan Thompson reflects upon the life he lived before taking his first sip of the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca, he recalls a redundant, meaningless existence: Roughly eight years as a functional alcoholic with most days stuck in a routine of getting up, going to work, and coming home to numb his sadness with booze until passing out on the couch.

Get up, go to work, pass out, repeat…

Then Thompson took what people in ayahuasca communities call a “journey” — a psychedelic experience during which participants say they “work” on their internal space. They drink the thick, herbaceous liquid reminiscent of molasses, derived from the ropelike vine of the Amazonian ayahuasca plant. People who describe their experiences with ayahuasca say it makes them sink into a deep analysis of their thoughts and emotions, usually for eight to 12 hours.

“I had this incredible experience,” Thompson said. “I went from being drunk every day to not having any desire to drink alcohol. I was not an abusive person, but I was depressed and angry and self-absorbed a lot. I became this person who’s [now] present for my kids and joyful and alert. For me, [ayahuasca] is not just like some hard-to-define thing that’s making me a better person spiritually, it made me a better person.”

In 2013 Thompson, inspired by how his experiences on psychedelics transformed him into a better father, founded the blog and podcast Psychedelic Parenting. And no, he emphasizes, his philosophy is not about giving hallucinogens to minors. Psychedelic Parenting offers an online forum for parents who choose to be open with their children about their own use of psychedelic drugs for spiritual and therapeutic purposes. It’s “a resource for passing on the values of plant medicines to our children,” according to the blog’s Facebook page.

The top five values of Psychedelic Parenting, says one of its blog contributors, Daphne Dawn, are spiritual growth and openness, conscious living, infinite curiosity, radical honesty, and authentic expression.

Psychedelic parents say their spiritual drug use helps them embody the values they hope to pass on to their children. It’s only natural then, Thompson said, for these parents to be open with their kids about these revelatory experiences.

“We’re now the third or fourth generation of people in European-derived society who have been doing this, and we still haven’t figured out how to talk about it,” Thompson said. “I wanted to be a part of what was going to change attitudes and change cultures and I couldn’t do that by hiding.”

Psychedelic parents say they do not volunteer information their children aren’t ready for. But when a kid asks a question, they answer it. Truthfully. Always.

“You just say, ‘I’m still your parent, I’m still a good person, and this is a source of a lot of joy and something that’s important to my life,’ ” Thompson said. He is starting to have such conversations with his oldest child, his nine-year-old son. Thompson and his wife of 14 years, Nicole, also have two daughters.

The Thompson family lives in Lansing, Michigan. Thompson graduated from nearby Michigan State University with a degree in anthropology and Eastern religions. Nothing about his appearance or day-to-day routine indicates an alternative lifestyle. He’s 37, bald with a neatly groomed red goatee, and brown square-frame glasses. He speaks in an upbeat, gentle manner — an approachable quality that helps him in his mission to show that his spiritual practice doesn’t make him an enigma.

When Thompson’s not blogging, he’s managing a holistic health practice with massage therapists and chiropractors. Nicole stays at home with their children.

“Most people are like, ‘I can’t say anything about this,’ because they’re afraid of Child Protective Services. And that’s a pretty dark place to be in for this subculture.”
– Jonathan Thompson

“Even people who haven’t had kids yet talk to me about this stuff and say, ‘I appreciate that you’re building this cultural container,’” Thompson said. “Who knows how many people are out there who want to share their stories. Most people are like, ‘I can’t say anything about this,’ because they’re afraid of Child Protective Services. And that’s a pretty dark place to be in for this subculture.”

Researchers such as Marsha Rosenbaum, director emerita of the San Francisco office of the national Drug Policy Alliance, believe drug education in general is most effective when, like the psychedelic parenting approach, it prioritizes radical honesty. Rosenbaum supports encouraging abstinence, but she also believes that it’s best to be frank with children about the different drugs and their effects. Such an approach, she said, helps young people feel more comfortable with coming to their parents when they need help. If parents lie, they risk losing credibility.

Rosenbaum’s “reality based” proposal can be found in a booklet she wrote for the Drug Policy Alliance, called Safety First, which has been requested and distributed more than 350,000 times to people around the world. For most parents, she said, the barrier to changing how they talk about drugs with their children runs deeper than rationality. “I think your first thought is it’s about fear. It’s about fear that the kids — especially when it comes to kids — will lose control.”

Rosenbaum agrees with a theory put forth by many scholars that much of how Americans view drug use is rooted in the tenets of the temperance movement of the early 1900s. Protestant Christianity has historically valued self-control and taught that drugs threatened the loss of it. This view led to moral crusades, such as Prohibition’s ban on alcohol in the United States from 1920 to 1933, that created a fear of all substances perceived to cause erratic behavior.

“What I have called ‘drug scares’ have been a recurring feature of U.S. society for 200 years. They are relatively autonomous from whatever drug-related problems exist or are said to exist,” Craig Reinarman, professor of sociology and legal studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, wrote in a chapter titled “The Social Construction of Drug Scares” for the book Constructions of Deviance: Social Power, Context and Interaction.

The drugs most commonly discussed in the psychedelic parenting community include LSD, MDMA, DMT, psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, and peyote. It’s hard to estimate the number of psychedelic parents, but longer posts on the Facebook page for Thompson’s blog often get 1,000 to 1,500 views. About 100 people are active participants on the forum, Thompson said. These parents tend to be a part of the psychedelic movement, including people such as psilocybin researcher Katherine MacLean and Medicine Children blogger Harmony Sue Haynie.

Psychedelic parenting communities have no established routines for taking drugs spiritually. The parents say they will often use these substances when they feel “called to them.” They see the drugs as therapy for times in life when they believe some introspection would be helpful.

Prominent visual artists and psychedelic parents Alex Grey and Allyson Grey spoke at The World Psychedelic Forum in 2008 about raising their only daughter, Zena, who was born in 1988. “If we wanted to take a psychedelic, we didn’t include [Zena] in that experience,” Allyson Grey said. “We would basically get a babysitter and we would go somewhere.”

The Greys had three reasons for not taking the drugs at home, Allyson explained: They didn’t want to act strange and confuse their daughter; they wanted to be fully present in case she needed their attention; and they didn’t want her to be concerned that what they were doing was illegal.

Alex and Allyson also cut back signficantly on their use of psychedelic drugs when Zena was between eight and 12 years old, a period when kids tend to be rule-conscious. “I know friends who were users who gave up during that period so they wouldn’t worry their children,” Allyson said.

One of the biggest challenges psychedelic parents say they face is explaining to their children why their use of hallucinogens is condemned by American society. Kids typically learn one thing at school and another at home, and the burden of resolving the cognitive dissonance falls on the parents.

Parents take on that challenge by comparing psychedelics to the social acceptance of drinking. In 2013, 70 percent of Americans over the age of 18 years old had consumed alcohol within the last year, according to a report by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. In comparison, according to a 2013 Huffington Post/ YouGov poll, less than 10 percent of Americans support the legalization of acid and ayahuasca. Psychedelic advocates say celebrities such as Steve Jobs, Susan Sarandon, and other Silicon Valley heavyweights who have opened up about their mind-expanding psychedelic experiences may play a role in changing those views.

In many cases, psychologists who have researched the effects of MDMA, ayahuasca, acid, and psilocybin mushrooms have advocated for their therapeutic value. MDMA, for example, has been remarkably effective at treating post-traumatic stress disorder in military veterans.

In research conducted by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), 83 percent of people with PTSD no longer met the criteria for having the disorder after they underwent MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. A study at the University of Arizona Medical Center determined that psilocybin mushrooms could help treat obsessive-compulsive disorder. Johns Hopkins University has done studies showing psilocybin mushrooms produce “substantial spiritual effects” which last more than a year.

Psychedelic parents use this information when discussing how other cultures revere psychedelics as medicine, pointing to how some indigenous Amazonian tribes and Native Americans introduce children to these drugs when they are as young as six years old.

A YouTube video from 2008 of a Santo Daime congregation in Fortaleza, Brazil shows how central psychedelics are to early childhood education in some communities. In the video, about 40 parents gather with their sons and daughters — some easily younger than 10 years old — singing what sounds like a simple children’s song and making rhythm with rattles. They sit on white plastic chairs under an outdoor cabana. Some of the kids jump around to the music and others sit on their parents’ laps. The children are not following along to any old melody though — they’re learning the chants they’ll sing when they, too, do ayahuasca in a few years.

“I think this is one of our biggest problems as entheogen [psychedelic] users and parents: We’re lacking context for the use of the substances in a kind of sacred setting,” Alex Grey said at the 2008 World Psychedelic Forum.

The Peyote Way Church of God, a nondenominational organization on 160 acres in southeastern Arizona, is one of a few places in the United States where people who are not born into sacred medicine cultures can easily and legally consume hallucinogens. The church was founded in 1978 by psychedelic parents Anne Zapf and Matthew Kent (the couple allowed their children to take peyote for the first time when each child was 14 years old).

According to a 2014 Village Voice article, about 120 to 140 people from around the United States and the world take peyote at the church each year.

In an essay about raising her three children around the church, Zapf wrote: “We explained that plant sacraments have a long history of safe religious use among indigenous people. As the children got older we also discussed more complicated issues surrounding the topic of drugs, like the politics and profitability of pharmaceutical drugs, and their subsequent listing as legal or illegal.”

While all these types of conversations begin at home, the ultimate goal of psychedelic parenting is much more ambitious. Like most parents, psychedelic families hope to pass their values onto their children so that as they grow up they can impact positive change in the world.

Rapidly shifting perspectives on marijuana use have given the psychedelic parenting community hope. According to a March 2015 Pew Research Center poll, 53 percent of Americans support the legalization of marijuana, up from 12 percent in 1969. Psychedelics expert Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, said in a talk at the 2015 Horizons Conference that this change in attitude happened after people began to realize that their ailing loved ones were getting real relief from marijuana. Doblin predicts a similar transition will occur with psychedelics when more people begin to share the beneficial experiences they have had with them.

And who will fuel this change? Potentially, a generation of kids raised by psychedelic parents.

Shelby Hartman is PrimeMind’s associate editor. Follow her on Twitter.

Parenting…With Psychedelics was originally published in PrimeMind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nobody knows what makes us who we are. A risky surgery planned for 2017 may give us the answer.

By Shelby Hartman

“I think, therefore I am”

– René Descartes, Discourse on the Method

In 1637, mathematician and philosopher René Descartes famously concluded that he only knew one thing for certain: he exists because he thinks. He decided to question everything he believed to be true in an essay that went on to become one of the most influential pieces of modern philosophy ever written. After much contemplation, he determined he was just a mind — or a “thinking thing” as he called it. It was even possible, he said, that his thoughts could exist without a body altogether.

Now, more than 350 years after Descartes’ discourse, very few philosophers take such an extreme position, but the jury is still out on what makes us who we are.

While neurologists have created all types of fancy scanning equipment (MRIs, fMRIs, PETs, EEGs) to study the brain and developed treatments for extraordinarily complex disorders, there is still no consensus on where identity originates. Does it come from the body? The mind? The brain? And what’s the difference between the mind and the brain, anyway?

In December 2017, Italian neurosurgeon Dr. Sergio Canavero believes he will finally provide the answers to this millennia-old mystery when he performs the world’s first head transplant. The head of a man or woman will be placed on the body of a brain dead donor. (If successful, it has the potential to help patients who are severely disabled around the world receive more functional bodies). The procedure, which has received international attention since Canavero announced his plans at the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopedic Surgeons’ annual meeting in June 2015, is scheduled to take place at a still-to-be-determined hospital in China with a team of about 150 medical professionals at an estimated cost of $15 million to $20 million dollars.

“This is going to be the revolution we’ve been waiting for. This is going to change life as we know it.”
– Dr. Sergio Canavero

“This is going to be the revolution we’ve been waiting for. This is going to change life as we know it,” Canavero says on video chat from his office in Turin, Italy. He declares that one day everyone will be able to have their heads transplanted onto younger, cloned versions of themselves.

Canavero looks a bit like a bionic man himself. He’s a fit 51 years old, with a shiny, bald head; a silver goatee; and perfectly round, Einstein glasses. He exudes an unshakable confidence, thoroughly convinced that his scientific and philosophical theories are sound. And they better be — not just for his patients’ sake.

Canavero’s going up against prominent academics who consider his plans improbable, insane — or both. Neuroscientists are debating the feasibility of the procedure. The majority of doctors agree that science has not yet figured out how to safely fuse a spinal cord to connect a head with a body. Bioethicists are debating the morality of the surgery (should it even be attempted?). The procedure is outlawed in Canavero’s home country of Italy, for example, because if a head-transplant patient were able to reproduce he or she would give birth to the children of the body donor.

Philosophers are continuing to have the same debates they’ve been having for at least 2,000 years. And yet there is a twist this time: since these theories may soon be put to test, the potential consequences of their stances are a whole lot more grave. If who we are — our personality, our memories, our hopes, our moods, our tastes — is primarily contained in our heads then someone who receives an entirely new body would still act and feel like themselves. But, if a significant portion of who we are is not simply in our heads, but contained in our bodies, then someone who receives a head transplant could wake up very confused potentially to the point of insanity.

“The interesting thing about these head transplants is that, at least from my point of view, it’s somehow making more real what has been theoretic up to this very moment,” says Dr. Giuliano Mori, a philosophy historian and fellow for the Foundation for Baroch Arts and Culture.

Mori meets with Canavero multiple times a week. He recently wrote a paper for the head-transplant surgery, summarizing the various philosophical perceptions of personal identity. Mori, however, will not take a stance. “I mean, you can take a theoretical position about the relationship between mind and body,” Mori says. “It’s a bit like saying ‘what’s your favorite color?’ My favorite color is blue. Does that really mean anything about colors? I don’t think so.”

The possibilities for how a brain might react to a new body are so numerous and uncertain that, until now, head transplants have merely been fodder for science fiction. James Giordano, chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program in the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at George University, believes that we can learn from these pop-culture representations. “…[F]ictionalized accounts and the fears they evoke should not be taken lightly: they tend to reveal important dimensions of public perception and emotion,” Giordano wrote in an American Medical Association Journal of Ethics article about new technologies that could alter the mind and self.

The potentially terrifying consequences of new neurotechnologies include mind control using deep brain stimulation in which a medical device, or “neurostimulator,” is implanted in the brain to treat, say, Parkinson’s disease or Tourette’s syndrome; or the body of a head-transplant patient rejecting the new head in the same way that bodies sometimes reject transplanted organs. (The plan is to put the patient on very powerful immunosuppresants.)

For this reason, Giordano helped to create a neuroethics code for the medical community. One of the most important principles in most medical research is patient consent, but there is disagreement about what that entails.

According to Giordano, consent is “based upon the provision of the greatest extent of information possible.” Patients can agree to unknown risks, like they often do in clinical trials, but the question remains: At what point does the medical community have a responsibility to say the unknowns are too great?

“On balance, you have to look at [head transplantation] with the same standards that you apply for any new medical technology,” says Emory University senior neurosurgery resident Jordan Amadio. “If you ask me, ‘Have we met those minimum standards?’ I think the answer is no. I don’t think there have been the requisite preclinical or animal studies done in order to justify doing this in humans at this point.”

Canavero is partnering with Chinese surgeon Ren Xiaoping, who last year decapitated and reattached the heads of two rhesus monkeys successfully. It’s worth noting, though, that the monkeys were never awoken and their spinal cords were not reconnected. Canavero says that wasn’t the point. Xiaoping merely wanted to prove, and according to Canavero he did, that a brain can be cut off from circulation without suffering damage.

In January 2016, Canavero also announced that South Korean surgeon Dr. C-Yoon Kim had successfully used his technique to cut and then refuse the cervical cords of eight rats that within three weeks could breathe and walk. Their survivability was not tested since they were euthanized after about a week, which is standard procedure in such experiments.

Now, Canavero says, “the animal stage is behind us.” Xiaoping performed the first head transplant using two dead human bodies in the fall, just to prove that reconnecting a head to a human body was feasible. In May, Canavero will travel to China to help a team led by Xiaoping to practice on two brain-dead donors.

In Canavero’s opinion, the team is on track to prove that he has discovered the missing ingredients for performing head transplantation. He will use an ultrasharp nanoblade to sever the spinal cord and then temporarily hold the pieces together with a microconnector. The key to regrowing the nerves will be the delivery of small electric shocks at the point of fusion and application of a substance called polyethylene glycol (PEG). PEG is a common ingredient in many skin creams, lubricants, and even toothpastes. Neuroscientist George Bittner discovered the substance in 1986, but only recently — after Canavero’s announcement that he would use it for head transplantation — did Bittner begin publishing academic papers saying PEG may be a game-changer for spinal paralysis. Canavero considers Bittner’s papers a huge indicator that he’s finally getting through to some medical professionals. But many dissenting voices remain.

Every step toward transplantation progress has been met with criticism. First, it was blood transplantation in the late 19thcentury. Then, it was kidney, heart, and liver transplantation in the mid-20thcentury. Most recently it’s been face transplants, which involve replacing all or part of an individual’s face using tissue from a dead donor. Canavero invokes renowned psychology scholar Steven Pinker’s article in The Boston Globe when addressing pushback. According to Pinker, bioethicists halt innovation, and the proper scientific response to them should simply be: “Get out of the way.”

Yet, no one denies that there are unique considerations in this case. Even if successful head transplants are performed on monkeys who can breathe, move, and live for extended periods of time, there will be no way to answer questions about the effects the surgery will have on personal identity until its performed on a human. “Will it allow for some remapping [of the brain] and will this individual feel that they’re reintegrated?” Giordano asks. “There’s no way we can know that with animals.”

Dr. Canavero estimates that 80 percent of the personality of the head-transplant patient will transfer with the surgery. But he willingly admits he’s just guessing. He believes some memories are contained in parts of the body such as the microbiome.

Canavero points out, though, that personality changes are inevitable with or without a head transplant, referencing the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus’ mantra: “Panta Rhei” or “everything flows.” It is Heraclitus to whom Plato’s Cratylus attributes the famous quotation: “Everything changes and nothing remains still…and…you cannot step into the same stream twice.”

Philosophy is Canavero’s “foremost driver” and he claims consciousness lives neither in the brain nor the body. In fact, “the self” altogether, he says, is an illusion. “You must be a deeeeep thinker” in order to understand this, he tells me while pointing aggressively to his forehead.

After practicing meditation for more than 30 years, Canavero came to the conclusion that we are just individual expressions of a universal consciousness (a similar idea is espoused by many philosophies including Buddhism). This consciousness, he explains in his book “Immortal: Consciousness Does Not Live In The Brain,” is merely “filtered” through the brain. He refers to the seemingly inexplicable cases of patients whose hearts have stopped completely from cardiac arrest, but were able to recount everything that occurred during that period after they were revived.

Canavero believes the head-transplant patient will also have experiences that he or she remembers even when his or her head is completely disconnected from their body. “There will be a few minutes where the head will be detached, no blood. They will be clinically dead, as dead as it gets,” he explains. When the patient wakes up and tells of the experiences he or she had in that moment: “We will prove no death. We are immortal. Absolutely.”

When Valery Spirodonov of Russia heard Canavero speak about the head-transplant procedure on television three years ago, he contacted the surgeon immediately. Spirodonov, 31, uses a wheelchair due to severe spinal muscular atrophy. Spirodonov’s request was simple and direct: he wants to receive the world’s first head transplant. Some media outlets have reported that Spirodonov will be the first patient, but Canavero admits the Chinese government will want him to choose a citizen of their country. The Chinese government will help decide who that person is, and then it will approach the family of a brain-dead donor for approval to use the whole body.

Still, Spirodonov’s decision to participate makes the procedure all that more real. He jokingly calls himself Canavero’s “media darling.” He’s been speaking to audiences and journalists around the globe about why he wants to receive a head transplant.

“I believe that after the surgery we will have all the answers about the soul, about the personality and where it lives. We just have to do this and see what happens,” Spirodonov explains via video chat from his home in Vladimir, Russia.

He has lived in this ancient city, about 100 miles from Moscow, for the last 20 years. “I have lots of stuff to do everyday,” he says. “That’s why I completely enjoy my life and I’m not some sick guy that’s like, ‘Please help me in any way; I have a terrible life.’” That said, Canavero regards Spirodonov’s condition as serious. He should have died when he was young, and he relies on others to help him get up in the morning, to shower, and to complete other necessary tasks. “It’s kind of depressing to be so dependent,” Spirodonov says.

Despite his condition, Spirodonov describes himself as ordinary. He works full-time designing computer education programs for schools in Russia. In his spare time, he likes to eat sushi or pizza and hang out with friends. He’s also a huge fan of the Stars Wars movies and can’t wait for the latest installment to come out on DVD.

More than anything, Spirodonov loves science. He always fantasized as a kid about working in a laboratory, but he was unable to do so because of his physical limitations. Computers were second best. He sees the head transplant as an opportunity to finally fulfill his lifelong dream to be a part of something significant.

“This is not just about saving one guy like me, no? It’s about creating new technology to save lives and to make breakthroughs in science,” Spirodonov explains. “When I had the possibility to take part in this kind of experiment, I was like ‘Wow! This is like flying to the moon and back.’”

According to Spirodonov, he, Canavero, and the Chinese surgeon Ren Xiaoping are a team. He fully trusts their judgment. When asked about the neurosurgeons who believe that Canavero’s science doesn’t add up, he chuckles and says dismissively, “You know, there are always people who refuse to believe that something can be done. We just have to do this. We do not have to reason with anybody. And when it’s done, everyone will see ‘Wow! It’s working!’” His sentiment echoes Canavero’s, who says bluntly that Western science has “fucking failed.”

Spirodonov admits, however, that he doesn’t really understand the science behind the transplant. Which, of course, brings up concerns about whether he’s qualified to consent.

“I certainly don’t think this individual [Spirodonov] could understand, because the scientific community doesn’t understand what the risks are,” Emory University senior neurosurgery resident Dr. Jordan Amadio says.

Certainly, members of the public don’t understand either. Anita Silvers, chair of the philosophy department at San Francisco State, says that despite all the headlines announcing Canavero’s endeavor, the complexity of the procedure makes it difficult for the average person to fairly judge whether it’s ethical.

Silvers says we must differentiate between critical ethical questions and what bioethicists refer to as “the yuck factor.” Just because people intuitively feel something is grotesque does not mean it’s wrong. “As the yuck factor stops distracting, you can start focusing more on this patient and what we know about the prospective outcomes,” Silvers says. She proposes using comparisons to help make rational judgements on the ethics of a head transplant.

“Let’s say [the patient is] replacing his body, not by transplanting another body, but instead by putting his head on a robot’s body,” Silvers says. “The issue now is amputation. Is it ethical to amputate parts of a body that are dysfunctional in order to make room for a more functional prosthesis? For legs, we do it all the time.”

She continues, “You can tell that I’m not against simply replacing parts of the bodies with other bodies, even a full body. I don’t think it’s necessarily a rejection of disability, because people with disabilities use prosthesis all the time.”

Arthur Caplan, the bioethicist who coined the term “yuck factor,” came out in Forbes adamantly against the head transplant calling it “rotten scientifically” and “lousy ethically.” He believes the “yuck factor” isn’t necessarily just a distraction, it can indicate a potential moral problem.

Caplan says he’s familiar with the Chinese medical community and that if the science isn’t there–he believes it won’t be–that the procedure “ain’t gonna happen.” Speaking hypothetically, though, about a patient on whom the head transplant would be performed, he says, “I think you’d wake up terrified and fearful because you wouldn’t know who you were.” He draws this conclusion based on his personal experience with face transplant patients who have had extraordinary difficulty readjusting after surgery.

No one, including Canavero, knows for certain what will happen if the head transplant goes forward as planned in December 2017. “It would be incredibly interesting from a theoretical point of view to see what happens if the transplant is successful, which means the patient wakes up, opens his eyes, and is able to speak, perceive stimulus, and he’s able to remember,” says philosophy historian Giuliano Mori. “That would have huge implications for, of course, all aspects of philosophy. That could be an actual rebirth of philosophy.”

Canavero has no doubt. He will succeed and he will change the world. He compares the head transplant to the Copernican Revolution. At the end of a TED talk he gave, he reminded the audience that pushback to groundbreaking discoveries like the one he is working on is inevitable.

“We must all remember the words of a great revolutionary: Gandhi,” he said. “First, they ignore you. Then, they laugh at you. Then, they fight you. Then, you win.”

Shelby Hartman is PrimeMind’s associate editor. Follow her on Twitter.

Daniel Marin Medina is a Colombian-born, Bronx-based illustrator. He uses queer theory as inspiration for drawing bodies and portraits. Follow him on Instagram.

Head Transplants: Severing the Mind-Body Link was originally published in PrimeMind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.