The Vibrant

Nature Of
Awareness
Essay
By Peter Fritz Walter
 Contents
What is Awareness? 3
Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness 10
The Nature of Dreams 24
Consciousness and Shamanism 42
Psychoactive Compounds 81
The Nature of Psychic Phenomena 113
Intention and the Memory of Water 127
Bibliography 148

—2—
 What is Awareness?
What is awareness? This is a big question, one
for your entire life! You will not be able to give a
clear-cut answer, and the answer you are going to
give may change over time. This is so for all the big
questions. That’s why I believe that while we should
attempt to deliver answers, we should not expect that
the answers are everlasting. In fact, they are always
temporary. So it’s actually better to stay with the
questions …
Before the onset of consciousness research, the
domain was not declared as science, but as philoso-
phy. For example, a trained scientist would not con-
sider William Blake’s grand statement ‘to see the
world in a grain of sand’ as something even remotely
relevant for science. Today, many scientists, mainly

—3—
because of their different training, and the notions of
basic ‘uncertainty’ and ‘nonlocality’ that are funda-
mental notions of quantum physics, tend to take
Blake’s grandiose mythical visions as metaphors for
the mysticism that submolecular physics presents to
them!
And there is one characteristics to observe with
human consciousness that is unparalleled in our
global habitat. Human consciousness is self-reflective.
It can become, and typically is, aware of its own
awareness! This kind of uroboric shortcut is typical
only for humans, it is not even present in highly
evolved primates!
And as today many people believe that we are
soon outmatched by computers, it is important to see
that while most of our human intellectual functions

—4—
can well be replicated by super-computers, there is
one capacity a computer will have to learn to become
truly humanoid: it is self-reflective awareness! And
here computer science is still in its infancy!
Consciousness research is also a science that in-
tersects with psychic research, as most of psychic phe-
nomena we can observe not only with mediums, but
with all intelligent humans, are related to the level of
awareness of these persons. Joe Dispenza, an Ameri-
can brain researcher, reveals in the movie ‘What the
Bleep Do We Know!?’ that about one billion stimuli
hit our brain every second, but that most of us can
only build awareness of roughly 4000 of them. That
means that there is an almost unlimited potential for
us to expand our consciousness farther and farther
into the higher realms of vibration.

—5—
 What modern science equally reveals is that vi-
bration is connected to cognition; the higher the vi-
bration, the more rapid is the process of cognition,
and the more complete it is. This shows that the an-
cient scientific knowledge of vibration comes in to us
so to speak ‘through the backdoor’ in the form of
consciousness research.
This is a good thing for we shall finally compre-
hend that consciousness, vibration, and energy are all
connected and interrelated!
Now, let’s go into some detail. To begin with, the
term ‘consciousness’ has more than one meaning. It
may connote the fact that we are awake, not asleep, it
may imply our social awareness, it may also embrace
emotional awareness.

—6—
 At present, as Peter Russell writes in Russell di
Carlo’s A New Worldview (1996), we are experiencing
the most significant era of change in this planet’s
consciousness. He speaks about an evolutionary
process in which we are called to use our creative
power and intelligence in ways that are sustainable,
not destructive.
Our awareness presently rises to understand
that we are all interconnected. It is true that in some
ways, on the global level, we are going through
chaos. We are seeing breakdowns of economic sys-
tems, and the turning around of some of the political
systems, first in Eastern Europe, then now in the
Middle East. It appears to be the breaking point, but
it’s also an opportunity for new levels of organization
to emerge.

—7—
 Peter Russell observes that we now have about
the same number of people living on the planet as
there are nerve cells in the human brain. If that is not
a signal that we are entering the age of the network-
ing society, I do not know what does! We may call it
the age of connectivity.
We may also talk about synergy, which can be
seen as an alignment between individual interests
and group interests.
In such a situation it is paramount that we do
not compromise our individuality and begin to ex-
press ourselves fully. We shall learn further down in
this book how individuation comes about. But con-
sciousness is prior to individuation, hence before we
can individuate, we must understand that conscious-
ness in its greater meaning requires us to live our

—8—
own truth, not the truth our media try to ordain
upon us. This then brings about a change in values.
We may consider peace today as much more im-
portant and even primordial than this was the case
for a majority of people 100 years ago. And we may
more and more be concerned that our sciences are
bringing about sustainable solutions and stop to de-
stroy our planet.
This threat to our survival as a race that we are
experiencing now is actually a blessing in disguise, a
great opportunity for renewal and for the right kind
of evolution, which is an evolution of consciousness
rather than one of technology. Peter Russell writes
that the critical decision rests upon how we perceive
the world, namely ‘as a threat’ or ‘as an opportunity
to go beyond the status quo.’

—9—
 This brings us to the discussion if consciousness
is merely an epiphenomenon of materialism, or if the
material world is a function of consciousness?
Now, the trend in new science is clearly to depart
from the former view and adopt, with much evi-
dence, the latter view, in the sense that consciousness
is the prime mover of all in the universe.

Non-Ordinary States of
Consciousness
Non-ordinary states of consciousness are a
unique source of profound insights into the deepest
recesses of the human psyche, writes Dr. Stan Grof in
Russell di Carlo’s science reader A New Worldview
(1996). In his opinion, their potential significance for
psychiatry is ‘comparable to the importance of the
microscope for medicine or the telescope for astron-
—10—
omy.’ Stanislav Grof criticizes traditional psychiatry
for seeing mental health as simply ‘the absence of
symptoms’ of what it defines as mental disease. He
points out that in homeopathy, the symptoms are seen
as expressions of healing, not of the disease.
In fact, in homeopathy, healing consists of a
temporary intensification of the symptoms for
achieving wholeness and healing. While in psychia-
try, we used to suppress symptoms by the use of pre-
scribed drugs, thereby showing that we did not really
understand the signals that the symptoms give us for
a more constructive and holistic approach to healing
mental illness.
Historically, mainstream psychiatry was based on
the materialistic worldview that considers conscious-
ness, intelligence and spirituality as epiphenomena.

—11—
 Stan Grof introduced transpersonal psychology
as an expansion of this science paradigm, which is
based upon the systematic study of non-ordinary
states of consciousness in which we can have direct
experiences of the spiritual dimensions of life. These
experiences, according to Dr. Grof, fall into two cate-
gories; in the first, we experience direct perception of a
greater reality, and in the second we perceive dimen-
sions of reality that are normally hidden to our senses,
such a visions of deities, or archetypal figures, as Carl
Jung would have called them, and we also have ac-
cess to mythological domains.
Grof observes that traditional psychology and
psychiatry have a model of the psyche that is limited
to the body and more specifically the brain, which is
seen as the source of consciousness. It also confines

—12—
itself to postnatal biography, while Grof’s research has
proven that the perinatal level has at its core the
record of traumatic experiences associated with bio-
logical birth. He asserts that the memories of the
emotions and physical feelings that we experienced
during our delivery are often represented in the psy-
che in photographic detail.
However, the perinatal level also functions as a
kind of gateway into the transpersonal level. In other
words, the insights that people get into the nature of
the cosmos in non-ordinary states are in fundamental
conflict with the traditional worldview in psychiatry.
In non-ordinary states of consciousness, the material
world is experienced as a dynamic process where
there are no solid structures and everything is a flow
of energy. Everything is perceived as patterns of energy

—13—
and behind patterns of energy there are patterns of
experience. Reality appears to be the result of an in-
credibly precise orchestration of experiences and the
observer plays a significant role in the creation of the
universe.
It is important in this context that Grof found ev-
idence that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon
of the neurophysiological processes in our brain, but
a primary attribute of existence. In addition, in the
course of the 20th century, quantum physics has un-
dermined the belief in the tangible and unambiguous
nature of our material reality. It has thrown new light
on the ancient idea that form is emptiness and
emptiness is form.
In the subatomic analysis, matter in the usual
sense of the word disappears and what remains is

—14—
pattern, relation, mathematical order, which are ele-
ments which we would today associate with con-
sciousness rather than matter.
Modern consciousness research actually has
brought ample evidence that there are other experi-
ential dimensions of reality with specific and demon-
strable characteristics. Grof relates that Robert Mon-
roe developed some effective means of inducing non-
ordinary states of consciousness, with special empha-
sis on those that are conducive to out-of-body expe-
riences.
Typically, in non-ordinary states of conscious-
ness, the sharp difference between what is ‘real’ and
what is ‘unreal’ tends to disappear. If we seriously
consider all the data amassed in the last few decades
by modern consciousness research, we discover that

—15—
the materialistic paradigm in psychiatry is incom-
plete, one partial aspect of a much more complex
picture. It can be maintained only when we suppress
all the evidence from psychic research and the study
of non-ordinary states of consciousness, such as mys-
tical, psychedelic, and near-death experiences, or
trance phenomena and meditation. In all these situa-
tions, we can also function as fields of consciousness
which can transcend space, time, and linear causality.
Stan Grof sees quantum physics as a sort of
teaching tale for a new perception of reality that is
holistic and integrative. He sees waves and particles as
two complementary aspects of the same phenomena
that each of them manifests under different circum-
stances. But most importantly, Grof criticizes the fact
that traditional psychology and psychiatry do not

—16—
make a distinction between a mystical experience
and a psychotic experience.
From a traditional point of view, all non-ordinary
states of consciousness would be assessed as patho-
logical phenomena. This would amount to, grossly
speaking, Western psychiatry having ‘pathologized’
the entire history of spirituality.
Similarly, anthropologists used to argue whether
shamans should be viewed as hysterics, epileptics,
schizophrenics, or maybe ambulant psychotics. Many
people who have transpersonal experiences are au-
tomatically treated as psychotics, people suffering
from a mental disease.
This limited perception of psychiatry is in sharp
contrast with the fact that throughout the whole of
human history, people have invested substantial

—17—
amounts of time and energy in the spiritual quest.
They have made tremendous sacrifices for this pur-
pose. In transpersonal psychology, the impulse to-
ward spirituality is viewed as a natural and powerful
drive in human beings.
When reading Grof’s book Beyond the Brain
(1985), I was touched by the drawings of LSD sub-
jects, and their remembrance of the trauma of birth;
and I was amazed about the association of these
drawings with horror and sadistic violence.
Grof explains sadism and violence as conse-
quences of the birth trauma. He argues that while
birth is a natural process, it is in most cases a terrible
ordeal for the fetus that leaves deep scars in the hu-
man psyche and emotions and that are responsible
for most of the violence that humanity is suffering

—18—
from. While my own violence research does not at all
confirm his theory, it should be noted as one of many
theories on the etiology of violence in the human
race.
However, that this theory will ever be verified, I
doubt it. First of all, I cannot believe that something
created by nature, such as birth, should be per se a
cause of trauma. What Grof sees in his research, in
my opinion, is cultural distortion of nature in the
form of mothers who have lost the true connection
with their bodies somewhere during their growing
up into adulthood.
Yet Grof generalizes that and seems to be oblivi-
ous of the cultural bias that he considers as a kind of
‘universal’ territory. The real counter-proof would be
the Cesarean cases, and here he should have really

—19—
insisted to bring forth his arguments. That thousands
of LSD subjects had such terrible birth trauma mem-
ories proves only that our culture is a madhouse and
that our birth methods are wrong! But this, Frederick
Leboyer, Michel Odent and others have said since
long and there are changes on the way.
Our birthing methods are wrong, the way moth-
ers consider birth is wrong, the preparation of moth-
ers for birth is wrong, the implications of the father
in birthing, namely his total absence, is wrong—to
say, about all is wrong. But in many native cultures
around the world it’s a natural and fulfilling experi-
ence for both mother and child.
Beyond the Brain (1985) seriously challenges the
existing neurophysiological models of the brain. After
three decades of extensive research on those non-or-

—20—
dinary states of consciousness induced by psy-
chedelic drugs and by other means, Grof concludes
that our present scientific worldview is as inadequate
as many of its historical predecessors. In this pio-
neering work, he proposes a new model of the hu-
man psyche that takes account of his findings. Grof
includes in his model the recollective level, or the re-
living of emotionally relevant memories, a level at
which the Freudian framework can be useful.
Beyond that is the perinatal level in which the
human unconscious may be activated to a reliving of
biological birth and confrontation with death.
How individual birth experience influences a
subject’s later development is a central focus of the
book. The most serious challenge to contemporary
psychoanalytic theory comes from a delineation of

—21—
the transpersonal level, or the expansion of con-
sciousness beyond the boundaries of time and space.
Grof indeed makes a bold argument that under-
standing of the perinatal and transpersonal levels
changes much of how we view both mental illness
and mental health.
In The Holotropic Mind (1993), Stan Grof exposes
his vision of a holographic universe, and he sum-
mons convincing amounts of data and evidence for
his view. Grof’s contribution appears to be important
especially right now as the holographic view of the
universe is only one of several ‘theories of everything’
or integrative visions that actually link back to the
systems view of the universe that was purported by
ancient Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Indian and Chinese
scholars.

—22—
 Grof also cites current research, thus blending
ancient and new cutting-edge science into something
like a total synthesis. With good reason and convinc-
ing arguments, he refers to David Bohm’s theory of a
constantly unfolding universe as one of the first
holistic science concepts in modern times.
The Cosmic Game (1998) is perhaps Grof’s best
book. It is written in fluent style, and summarizes the
most important of his LSD research and his research
with holotropic states and it is not grappling with
conceptual issues. It is a book that every intelligent
lay person can read, written in normal and descrip-
tive language; it is clearly the book of a master in his
genre, a man who also has an obvious literary talent
and an incredible knowledge of mythology, besides

—23—
his sharp scientific perception and reasoning that is
always empirical first and conceptual second.

The Nature of Dreams

We all dream, yet there are people who deny it
for themselves, saying something like, well, it may be
true that some people are dreaming, but for myself, I
know I don’t.
They have effectively told their psyche not to
dream, or rather, not to remember dreams. It is easy
to do that. Suffices you tell yourself that dreams do
not exist, or that you are afraid of dreams, or that
dreaming is only for ‘lunatics,’ and you won’t re-
member them.
But you do dream nonetheless!

—24—
 Research has shown that dreaming is an essential
survival function. There is a large body of research
on dreaming by now. A cat was deprived from
dreaming in one of those many experiments. Every
time her brain would fall into the REM (Rapid Eye
Movement) state (which can be seen easily by half-
way opening the eyelids), the cat was slightly
touched in order to wake up. After two weeks the cat
was dead.
Think tank Edward de Bono wrote in The Mech-
anism of Mind (1969/1990) that the brain can only see
what it is allowed to see. He explained that, for that
matter, much research is and remains biased because
the researcher has certain blind spots, areas of
knowledge that s/he does not allow himself to re-
search.

—25—
 For the brain of those biased researchers, these
areas of knowledge simply do not exist. This phe-
nomenon also explains why the church committee
looking through Galileo’s telescope was unable to see
the Jupiter moons. But even a spiritual authority
such as J. Krishnamurti used to say that he was not
dreaming. I have examined his claim in detail in my
essay and audiobook Krishnamurti and the Psychologi-
cal Revolution (2014/2017) and refer to these sources.
Let me explain here only K’s argument, for it is
interesting and bears some convincing logic, while it
is almost impossible to verify its veracity. K explained
that Freud’s idea of the unconscious would only
make sense for people, be it the majority, whose psy-
che is divided into a conscious and an unconscious
part. For himself he asserted that his mind was not

—26—
fragmented and whole, and thus not split in those
parts. Dreaming, he further argued, was logically a
necessity only for those who suffer from a fragment-
ed consciousness. Dreams then act like an interface
for the unconscious to express itself and thus to
communicate with the conscious mind.
When consciousness is unified, however, dream-
ing was no more necessary! To repeat it, while we
cannot verify if K really did not dream, his argument
is logically flawless!
Charles W. Leadbeater explains in Dreams: What
they are and How they are Caused (1903) why we
dream and what the spiritual reasons are for dream-
ing. Now, at a time when science was far away from
admitting anything beyond the five senses and when
it was firmly believed that all sensations and emo-

—27—
tions were processed in the brain, and only in the
brain, and when the luminous body was strictly de-
nied in science, Leadbeater provided scientific expla-
nations that today we know to be true. Leadbeater
first introduces the aura, or etheric body, explaining
of what it consists and what its function is:

Now this etheric double has often been called the

vehicle of the human life-ether or vital force
(called in Sanskrit prâna), and anyone who has
developed the psychic faculties can see exactly
how this is so. He will see the solar life-principle
almost colorless, though intensely luminous and
active, which is constantly poured into earth’s
atmosphere by the sun: he will see how the
etheric part of his spleen in the exercise of its
wonderful function absorbs this universal life,
and specializes it into prana, so that it may be
more readily assimilable by his body; how it then
courses all over that body, running along every
nerve-thread in tiny globules of lovely rosy light,
causing the glow of life, health and activity to

—28—
 penetrate every atom of the etheric double; and
how, when the rose-colored particles have been
absorbed, the superfluous life-ether finally radi-
ates from the body in every direction as bluish-
white light. (Id., 11).

Leadbeater’s assumption that it’s the spleen that

collects and refines the vital energy is in accordance
with the teaching of numerous tribal peoples, and it’s
also in alignment with our own Hermetic Tradition.
Now, Leadbeater has a funny way to explain how
the transmission of energy for healing works. Here,
we have to bear in mind that at his time what we to-
day call the unified field or the Akashic Field (Laszlo)
was still called magnetism or life-ether:

When a finger becomes entirely numbed with

cold, it is incapable of feeling; and the same phe-
nomenon of insensibility may readily be pro-
duced at will by a mesmerizer, who by a few
passes over the arm of his subject will bring it

—29—
 into a condition in which it may be pricked with
a needle or burnt by a flame of a candle without
the slightest sensation of pain being experienced.
Now why does the subject feel nothing in either
of these two cases? The nerve-threads are still
there, and though in the first case it might be
contended that their action was paralyzed by
cold and by the absence of blood from the ves-
sels, this certainly cannot be the reason in the
second case, where the arm retains its normal
temperature and the blood circulates as usual.
(Id., 12).

—See, also, for example, Lynne McTaggart, The Field: The

Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe (2002) and Ervin Lasz-
lo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Every-
thing (2005).

Still explaining the mechanisms, without having

even tackled the subject of dreams, the author ex-
plains the astral body, or desire-body, which is well

—30—
different from the etheric body that he previously
discussed.
The astral body serves as a vehicle for the astral
plane, the plane we are going to after we die and
leave our body, and before we reincarnate again, ex-
cept those of us who are spiritually developed and
can therefore move on to higher vibrational spheres.
For the astral plane, we need the astral body, be-
cause it’s the vibrational shell for this density of ener-
gies:

The astral vehicle is even more sensitive to exter-

nal impressions than the gross and etheric bod-
ies, for it is itself the seat of all desires and emo-
tions—the connecting link through which alone
the ego can collect experiences from physical life.
It is peculiarly susceptible to the influence of
passing thought-currents, and when the mind is
not actively controlling it, it is perpetually receiv-

—31—
 ing these stimuli from without, and eagerly re-
sponding to them. (Id., 16).

The first important fact about dreams that Lead-

beater reports is that they are not just ‘imagination’ as
psychology continues to believe, but another level of
consciousness, another realm of existence, with a dif-
ferent, more subtle, vibration, that we enter, using
our astral vehicle, more or less automatically, when
we sleep, and only when we sleep deep enough. In
that case, Leadbeater affirms, the ‘higher principles’
in our astral vehicle withdraw from the body, and
hover in its immediate neighborhood.
Now, how does this work, how do we move in
dreams, what propels us to certain places, and how is
the dream plot developed? In ordinary reality, when
we think of a certain place we wish to be, we can be

—32—
there in our imagination while being fully aware that
our physical body is stationary elsewhere. However,
in the astral state, our very thinking of being in that
place results in an ‘instantaneous transportation’ to
that place:

It has often been noted that while startling transi-

tions of this sort are extremely frequent in
dreams, the sleeper never seems at the time to
feel any surprise at their suddenness. This phe-
nomenon is easily explicable when examined by
the light of such observations as we are consider-
ing, for in the mere consciousness of the physical
brain there is nothing capable of such a feeling as
surprise—it simply perceives the pictures as they
appear before it; it has no power to judge either
of their sequence or their lack of that quality. (Id.,
26-27).

Before the advent of holistic science in the 20th

century, thought and thinking was considered as ‘pic-
tures in your mind;’ the deeper underpinnings of

—33—
thought and imagination were hardly understood
and inquired into.
The first thing to learn in holistic science conse-
quently was that thought is a movement of subtle en-
ergy that triggers immediate effects, both for oneself
and for others. The fact is only that most people, be-
cause they do not believe in the power of thought,
experience a low energy level in their thought, which
results in effectively insignificant results of their
thinking process. While the thoughts of those who
know about the power of thinking have actual cre-
ative power!
There are quite a number of highly achieved in-
dividuals around the globe who give evidence for this
fact. A master can kill somebody by concentrating
hostile thought forms and focusing the thought ener-

—34—
gy on that person in one moment, when all the pow-
er of that condensed thought comes through to the
person, like a deadly laser beam. This is what black
magic is all about, only that most black magicians are
not masters because they use additional stage requi-
sites, such as a photo of the targeted person or some
hair or a piece of tooth from him or her, to reinforce
and fine-tune the evil thought energies.
A real master only needs to focus their thought
and can trigger any desired effect. With saints and
yogis, it has been reported that their thoughts can do
miracles, such as producing matter instantly, letting
matter disappear instantly, shape-shift their bodies,
levitate the person in the air, or heal others virtually
as quickly as they think of it. All this is real, not fan-
tasy, while for the ignoramus it sounds like fantasy.

—35—
 In addition, we need to understand that we do
not own our thoughts and that actually many
thoughts we have are really not our own because
they are picked up from other people, without our
being conscious of this fact.
Now, let us inquire about the notion of time in
dreams. In fact, time in dreams is totally different
from time in wake consciousness. As Leadbeater il-
lustrates this with an old Sufi story and a story from
his own life; in a dream minutes, hours, days, weeks,
months, years and even decades can have passed,
while the subject was dreaming just one second. Un-
fortunately Leadbeater does not attempt to explain
why this is so. The reason is that we are basically be-
yond relativity theory when we are in the astral, as
relativity theory only is valid for matter, and for

—36—
mass, but not for energy-waves, and thought is wave-
like energy and moves with a speed that is approxi-
mately the speed of the light—which is why events
are dilated in time, just as it would be the case when
astronauts fly in space with a spaceship that can fly
close to, or identical with, the speed of the light.
However, this is not valid for lucid dreams, as
newest dream research shows. In lucid dreams, time
passes almost in the same manner as in real life. Evi-
dence for this fact has been derived from REM (Rapid
Eye Movement) during the dream phase of a subject
experiencing a lucid dream. In such a situation, EEG
(Electro-Encephalogram) measuring showed that the
sequence of those eye movements subjectively expe-
rienced by the person in the dream was approximate-

—37—
ly identical with the actual eye movements observed
in the experiment.
—See Stephen LaBerge, Exploring the World of Lucid
Dreaming, New York: Ballantine Books, 1991.

Another subject of interest related to dreams is

the faculty of prevision in dreams. Precognition has
always given rise to questions of ‘cosmic determinism
versus free will of the human,’ and Leadbeater voices
a clear credo for human free will, but he adds an im-
portant precaution:

Man, however, undoubtedly does possess free-

will; and therefore … prevision is possible only
to a certain extent. In the affairs of the average
man it is probably possible to a very large extent,
since he has developed no will of his own worth
speaking of, and is consequently very largely the
creature of circumstances; his karma places him
amid certain surroundings, and their action upon
him is so much the most important factor in his

—38—
 history that his future course may be foreseen
with almost mathematical certainty. (Id., 43).

This is however different with a highly devel-

oped individual, a person who is to a lesser extent
thrown around by external circumstances because of
his knowledge, will and determination.
While such a person equally is subjected to kar-
ma, the law of cause and effect, they can more easily
get beyond karma. They do this by the power of their
thoughts, their knowledge that thoughts do have an
effect upon matter and the course of events, and their
power to dream creatively, in the literal and the
proverbial sense.
But there is more to dealing with the astral realm
of existence, as Charles W. Leadbeater shows in his
extensive study, Inner Life (1911/1942). Our inner life

—39—
is indeed the door-opener to all worlds beyond the
visible and the physical. This brings me to ask what
in effect psychic powers are?

To be psychic means to be able to bring through

into the physical consciousness something of the
wider life; it is therefore / in the condition of the
physical vehicle that there is an inequality be-
tween the psychic and the ordinary person, but
when the physical is dropped that inequality no
longer exists. (Id., 4-5).

There are many observations in this book that

can neither be verified nor falsified, except you are
yourself a clairvoyant, and not just a clairvoyant but
one of the highest initiation. Leadbeater was on level
five which means a direct perception of the aura, of
the after-life through trance, and precise visions of
the future without needing to dream; his lucidity was
equal in the trance-state or in wake consciousness.

—40—
 It is this level of perception that for example the
well-known seer Nostradamus was gifted with. The
trance state is superior to dreaming because it can be
brought about voluntarily by the subject, and it can
be directed. Actually the trance state can be com-
pared with deep hypnosis.
By contrast, on level one, where I am, you can
neither directly perceive the when and how of having
precognitive dreams, nor can you direct them in any
way while being in the dream. It’s all a matter of ‘I
don’t know why this happened, why I got this
dream. It was so strange, yet very precise.’ In other
words, the psychic goes beyond the restrictions of
our space-time based perception and brings into or-
dinary consciousness an element of the wider pic-
ture.

—41—
 Consciousness and
Shamanism
Shamanism: Ancient Techniques of Ecstasy (1964)
by Mircea Eliade is considered to be the classic about
shamanism, and it remains a reference book, but it’s
not an easy read. Especially when compared with
Terence McKenna’s books, and those others on
shamanism written by Richard Schultes, Michael
Harner or Ralph Metzner, Eliade’s book clearly takes
the appearance of a dry scholarly work, reference
manual, or standard academia. But this is precisely
its value! It contains so many details that one single
lecture of the book will generally not leave very deep
traces, except you enjoy having a photographic
memory.

—42—
 The eminent advantage of Eliade’s approach to
shamanism is that his research did not take its origin
in the Amazon, but in Siberia! In fact, the most origi-
nal and untouched ritual of shamanism originates
from Siberia, not from the Amazon, while today’s
media suggest the contrary.
It is important at the very start of studying
shamanism to learn that it is not a religion. This is
probably why Eliade sub-titled the book ‘Ancient
Techniques of Ecstasy,’ for it’s that, a set of techniques
and rituals, something esoteric and not what religion
normally does; shamanism could in fact be called the
higher octave of religion, like the Mystery Schools in
Antiquity added something essential to Greek reli-
gion, without representing that religion. As a result,

—43—
the shaman, while highly respected, and even vener-
ated and encountered with awe, is an outcast.
On the other hand, while a certain mental alien-
ation may precede the actual initiation of the
shaman, Eliade’s early stance on shamanism helped
to repel the standard misnomer, for the most part
brought up by ignorant missionaries, that shamans
were mentally ill, schizophrenic or hysterical people.
The very contrary is true. The shaman typically
is in his set and setting the only person of a really
sane mind. But for developing that sanity of mind,
mental alienation is often brought about by the inner
self, as a temporary condition, for the sole purpose of
deconditioning the candidate and purifying their in-
ner world, and their perception of reality. Eliade ob-
serves:

—44—
 Psychopaths or not, the future shamans are ex-
pected to pass through certain initiatory ordeals
and to receive an education that is sometimes
highly complex. It is only this twofold initiation
—ecstatic and didactic—that transforms the can-
didate from a possible neurotic into a shaman
recognized by his particular society. (Id., 14).

Disease often has to worsen before it can be

cured. By the same token, those who rank high in
society often go through a difficult childhood or had
to go through trials in their first years of professional
engagement.
Eliade observes that many a shaman had a pre-
disposition to shamanism since their childhood,
which typically manifests in ‘being different,’ having
visions and precognitive dreams, but also suffering
from strange fears, or even epileptic seizures. Thus,
the shamanic power often is the result of an over-

—45—
coming of a difficult condition, be it a mental illness
or a physical trauma; this overcoming is the result of
a major effort from the side of the individual, some-
thing like a personal victory, but one that was in
some way aided by spiritual forces, not by ego-driven
action.
When we consider the extraordinary power of a
shaman, for healing himself and others, and for
communicating with spirits so as to alter fate—for
example help prevent a war between neighboring
tribes—we might wonder what personal qualities or
characteristics such a person must develop? Are they
innate, or can they be acquired?
Opinions vary from culture to culture. It seems
that communication abilities are primed in this
process. Finally there seems to be some agreement

—46—
that the shaman, while he may appear as an unusual
figure, is a person not of ordinary, but of superior in-
telligence.
Shamanism is distinct from religion also by its
redefinition or alternative definition of what is sa-
cred. Contrary to the common definition of sacred-
ness primarily being defined by religious tradition, in
shamanism sacredness has an immediate quality
about it, and is often related to mystic appearances,
or a direct perception of the divine. In this sense, for
the truly religious mind, the detail becomes the ma-
jor thing in life, and nothing will be really insignifi-
cant. Such an attitude, that in major religions only is
seen as awe in front of the divine, greatly enhances
our faculties of perception. As the attitude it not fix-
ated to a divine figure but is general, in front of na-

—47—
ture, nature as such is embraced and integrated into
a greater spiritual whole, and that makes that
shamanism is so successful in healing the human
body. For it brings along alignment, an alignment
that most tribal peoples indeed possess, which makes
for their peaceful and non-harmful living, and their
silent yet effective dialogue with nature.
The other fundamental question that Eliade
asked and tried to answer in his book is the intrinsic
quality of the shamanic cure, and how it comes
about. In fact, the astonishing difference between the
way shamans cure and our doctors cure is that the
shaman takes the medicine, and in our medicine it’s
the patient. The shaman, through the trance, enters
the vibrational field of the patient, and can thus de-
tect the real problem of their illness, by screening

—48—
their luminous body. This is all the secret, or the
most part of it. No medicine is needed when you can
alter vibrations within the aura, an insight that today
has been made useful for medicine again, and that is
at the basis of what we call vibrational medicine.

—See Richard Gerber, A Practical Guide to Vibra-

tional Medicine (2001) and Donna Eden & David
Feinstein, Energy Medicine (1998), The Energy
Medicine Kit (2004) and, by the same authors,
The Promise of Energy Psychology (2005).

In shamanism, illness is often attributed to the

interference of the spirit world. While our con-
sciousness evolved from a merely palliative and me-
chanical medical paradigm to one where the patient
is seriously asked how he or she may have con-
tributed to bring about their disease, the spiritogenic
etiology, method used by shamanic cultures, would

—49—
by most doctors probably be qualified as schiz-
ophrenic. Not so in tribal cultures. Rule and excep-
tion can be seen as reversed in the sense that in most
native cultures, illness is primarily seen as a form of
superimposition of malignant spirit power, and only
in second instance as a possible result of an individ-
ual’s condition, weakness, or fragility, or emotional
constriction.
The most important part for understanding
shamanism is the shaman’s frequent use of en-
theogens. What are entheogens? They are plants that
contain psychoactive compounds, such as DMT, and
others, and that, when taken at appropriate doses,
produce a consciousness-altering effect upon our
psyche and perception.

—50—
 There are various names for such plants, and the
name that is given reflects the state of mind of the re-
searcher. Eliade suggests in his book that a shamanic
culture was at its decline or caught in decadence
when their people take hallucinogenic compounds
for effecting the shamanic trance.
Today, this opinion is contradicted by the large
majority of shamanism researchers, such as Ralph
Metzner, Michael Harner, Richard Schultes, or Ter-
ence McKenna who agree in considering Eliade’s bias
here as a myopic view and a basic misconception
about shamanism.
Terence McKenna spent 25 years exploring ‘the
ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation’ and
was a specialist in the ethnomedicine of the Amazon
basin. In his book The Archaic Revival (1992) McKen-

—51—
na lays the groundwork for something we could call
a psychedelic culture, a culture based on completely
different values than those our patriarchal tradition is
based upon. In the etiology of the particular mental
group alienation that is so typical for our culture, the
author detects a basic denial, which I myself call the
denial of Ecstasy, or the second of the Eight Dynamic
Patterns of Living I have found to be constituent of
true civilization. McKenna writes:

In addition to choosing to repress the strange

abilities of the shaman and the psychic potential
of contact with the Other, Western tradition has a
built-in bias against self-experimentation with
hallucinogens. One of the consequences of this is
that not enough has been written about the phe-
nomenology of personal experiences with the vi-
sionary hallucinogens. (Id., 3).

—52—
 McKenna’s views are voluntarily political in the
sense that he claims nobody can develop a sane mind
within an insane culture, unless he rejects that insan-
ity and returns to reason. There is a parallel here with
Krishnamurti who had a similar position, only that
he did not endorse psychedelics; however, he wrote
that it was not a proof of mental health to be well ad-
justed to a profoundly sick society.
McKenna sees no way around the citizen’s per-
versity than by ‘civilizing’ us psychedelically, while
Krishnamurti sees the way out through an individual
process he called ‘psychological revolution.’
—See Peter Fritz Walter, Krishnamurti and the Psychological
Revolution, Great Minds Series, Vol. 1, 2014/2017.

When we give primacy to the self, the individual,

and hence see society, or the group as secondary, we

—53—
can build group values from such a starting point,
and we can build them with ecstasy as the social val-
ue and group fantasy.
This is exactly the outcome of my own shaman-
ism research. And I must add that I have found no
other author who sees this with an even remotely
similar lucidity as Terence McKenna. He writes:

Shamanism is use of the archaic techniques of ec-

stasy that were developed independent of any re-
ligious philosophy—the empirically validated,
experientially operable techniques that produce
ecstasy. Ecstasy is the contemplation of whole-
ness. That’s why when you experience ecstasy—
when you contemplate wholeness— you come
down remade in terms of the political and social
arena because you have seen the larger picture.
(Id., 13).

The shaman is a consciousness traveler, a mind-

alterer, a reality-shifter, a magician, and at the same

—54—
time, a healer. But he’s an outcast nonetheless, and
this is his crux. In that sense, the shaman does not
‘fit’ into a religion, and shamanism in the narrow
sense certainly is no religion, but rather, the antidote
of it.
However, in a general sense, we could say that if
anything is to come out of shamanism, it’s true reli-
gion, a truly religious attitude, and that the religious
attitude in most established religions simply is
hypocrisy! McKenna writes:

Unfortunately, religion for the past five hundred

years has been a hierarchical pyramid at whose
top were theologians interpreting dogma. This in-
terpretation was handed down through a hierar-
chy to the faithful. I think religious hierarchies
are very unsettled by the idea of direct revelation.
Nevertheless, this phenomenon is certainly thriv-
ing in preliterate cultures all over the world. We
discovered in dealing with this that the only peo-

—55—
 ple you could talk to about it or who seemed to
have familiarity with it were shamans. (Id., 28).

Now, we got shamanism and the spirits of nature

in our cultural soup, and we got no religion besides
nature’s religions, which can be called direct percep-
tion. But what is missing? McKenna puts a unique
stress on language, and the evolution of language
through psychedelics, as an essential characteristic of
the Archaic Revival as a new, and yet perennial cultur-
al paradigm. This has not been emphasized in the
same way by any other author in the context of
shamanism, but it has well been posited as the ulti-
mate goal in Lacanian psychoanalysis, provided that
psychedelics are avoided.
McKenna’s detractors cunningly argue that his
highly refined use of language was not the result of

—56—
psychedelics but of his Irish tradition, and that he
was using his obvious literary talent for making up a
cultural pretension, as a matter of show, and for es-
tablishing his particular niche in popular culture. I
cannot give a valid judgment here, and I think there
are good arguments for each of these positions.
McKenna had the ability to render complex and
convoluted speeches with a crystal-clear ‘premeditat-
ed’ logic, that, as his voice is rather monotonous,
suggests someone reading from an invisible book in
front of his eyes. Admittedly, I haven’t seen or heard
anything comparable in my life.
There is no question that McKenna, when mold-
ing his cultural Pygmalion, cannot rely on proven
theories only, but forwards many hypotheses that we
cannot simply give out as ‘science.’ In fact he always

—57—
denied to be a scientist, saying he was just ‘an ex-
plorer.’
The open question is if this ability of the shaman
to seize the ‘Centering Logos’ for healing purposes
requires a culture to be preliterate? Can the same not
happen in our own culture, and for literate patients?
The question hits home because in my unique
experience with Ayahuasca in 2004, the plant intelli-
gence communicated to me that I was more or less
atrophied in perceiving reality directly, and that this
atrophy had come about through the strong language
training I had received, so that language had become
in my life a barrier to the real understanding of na-
ture, and nature’s wisdom.
This fully confirms McKenna’s view that lan-
guage is in the way of understanding nature when it’s

—58—
not transformed, modulated ‘psychedelically,’ and
rendered a philosopher’s stone through the unique
alchemy of entheogens impacting, over long periods
of time, on our mindbody chemistry.
And this, in turn, is exactly what McKenna has
summarized as the essential in the Archaic Revival. It
is his mind-boggling assumption that only through
psychedelics humankind was able to build civiliza-
tion, and that originally entheogens were really laid
in our cradle, and have served over millennia their
good purpose, until exactly the moment when dur-
ing the 20th century, our paranoid leaders put them
on the index of ‘forbidden plants.’ In his book Food of
the Gods (1993), McKenna lucidly comments on this
prohibition that the very notion of illegal plants ‘is
obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.’

—59—
 Interestingly enough, McKenna shows a parallel
of this 20th century anti-psychedelic paranoia with
the worldview under Christianity that regarded any
wisdom from nature as diabolic and abject, and that
destroyed much of the direct knowledge that ancient
civilizations possessed about life. Our symbiosis with
the Other, the intelligence that speaks through psy-
chedelic mushrooms, and that is accessible through
their ritualistic ingestion, McKenna argues, was cut,
as just another cultural circumcision we were sub-
jected to, on the basis of spiritual dominance taken
as religion, and as a matter of religious, and later,
worldly tyranny.
The enlightened mushroom-nourished sage is
not a very good consumer of cultural and alimentary
crap, to be true, and here is the common sense be-

—60—
hind the paranoia of our leaders. If anything in their
agenda has a value, it’s money-making, and that phi-
losophy never was conducive to bringing about wist-
ful humans. But McKenna says it better than I can
ever put it, and he sees the powers of ignorance lined
up for the destruction of any true and wistful culture
not just since recently:

Ignorance burned the libraries of the Hellenistic

world at an earlier period and dispersed the an-
cient knowledge, shattering the stellar and astro-
nomical machinery that had been the work of
centuries. By ignorance I mean the Hellenistic-
Christian-Judaic tradition. The inheritors of this
tradition built a triumph of mechanism. It was
they who later realized the alchemical dreams of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—and the
twentieth century—with the transformation of
elements and the discovery of gene transplants.
But then, having conquered the New World and
driven its people into cultural fragmentation and
diaspora, they came unexpectedly upon the body

—61—
 of Osiris—the condensed body of Eros—in the
mountains of / Mexico where Eros has retreated
at the coming of the Christos. And by finding the
mushroom, they unleashed it. (Id., 40-41).

I have forwarded the point of view, and I am not

the only one, that psychoanalysis was meant to be,
from the start, more than a medical technique, that it
had from the start a strong underlying idea of
shamanism to it. The importance of the shaman as an
integrative and sacred figure in a highly technologi-
cally alienated culture such as ours is obvious. And it
may be the psychiatrist!
The integrative philosophy that McKenna’s Ar-
chaic Revival represents and that we are the inheritors
of, after the passing away of its creator in 2000, re-
quires us to build relationships between phenomena
we don’t usually associate with each other. McKenna

—62—
teaches that this synthetic view of the universe was
immensely facilitated through what he calls the ‘me-
diation’ of the plant teachers:

A voice that gave guidance and revelation to

Western civilization has been silent for about sev-
enteen hundred years. This is the Logos and all
ancient philosophers strove to invoke it. For Hel-
lenistic / philosophy it was a voice that told self-
evident truth. With the passing of the Aeon and
the death of the pagan gods, awareness of this
phenomenon faded. However, it is still available
through the mediation of the plant teachers. If we
could intelligently examine dimensions that the
psychedelic plants make available, we could con-
tact the Oversoul and leave behind this era where
dominance hierarchies must be disciplined by
UFOs and messiahs, and where progress is halted
for millennia because culture cannot advance
ethics at the same rate as technology. (Id, 61-62).

In fact, contrary to many who claim their

Ayahuasca experience was but a spectacle of colorful

—63—
visions, I can testify as a direct witness of what
McKenna writes about the Logos coming through as
an intelligence or plant teacher, manifesting in the
psychedelic state as an immediate telepathic presence
and response-giver that teaches a wisdom not from
this earth. And it has taught me a wisdom, not gen-
eral, but very much tailored to my own spiritual and
erotic needs, telling me through direct insight that I
needed to give love instead of wanting to receive love
from others, and that by doing this without wavering
in my attitude, I could overcome the undeniable dis-
tortion of perception that my overindulgence of lan-
guage-related thinking has brought about.
From 2004 to 2014, and thus within ten years, I
fundamentally changed not only concepts and rela-
tionships, but also my daily life and habits, and there

—64—
are no more depressions, no more outbursts of hate
and violence, no more sad remembrances of my ter-
rible childhood, and I have simply become wiser in
all I think and do.
McKenna’s vision of the Archaic Revival targets at
the creation of nothing less but a psychedelic science,
while he localized himself to be in an early stage in
the creation of that science, in similar ways as our
technological explorers some centuries back on the
road of progress, only that this kind of progress will
not be a fragmented and technological one, but a tru-
ly holistic one. And as a parallel movement with the
creation of that psychedelic science that McKenna
envisions, he predicts the ultimate encounter with
the Other, whenever on a timeline of events this may
occur.

—65—
 While McKenna seems to see this encounter with
the Other a bit in the way of science fiction novels, as
a spectacular one-time event, described by some as
the proverbial ‘UFO landing on the ground of the
White House,’ he acknowledges, what can be called a
consensus now, that this Presence, this Other does
not need to come here, because the eternal present
aligns all dimensions as superpositions, and not in
horizontal space. But what is the barrier, then, be-
tween them and us? According to McKenna, it is lan-
guage, and it’s by the evolution of language that we
are going to get over the fence and face the Other.
After my fascination with Terence McKenna’s
idea of some kind of ‘psychedelic revolution,’ the
sobering books by Dr. Alberto Villoldo came as a
surprise. A medical doctor from San Francisco who

—66—
studied more than twenty years with shamans high
in the Andes in order to learn to heal imprints in the
luminous body, well, that was an insightful reading
journey.
And the man came over as grounded, not a wist-
ful philosopher-sage who dreams about healing our
fragmentations with lavish doses of psychoactive
compounds ordained by sager governments in the
future, but a doctor who saw the immediate ap-
plications for healing of a technique that very few
Western people have ever researched about, let alone
mastered.
Healing States (1984) is a research volume that
Dr. Alberto Villoldo co-authored with Stanley Kripp-
ner, and it’s a glorious onset of his own career in
shamanic healing. I have not only done research on

—67—
these matters since about fifteen years, but worked
together with an expert, the head psychiatrist of Bali’s
Udayana University and medical doctor, Professor
Luh Ketut Suryani, who is a Balian as well, a natural
healer practicing the local medicine on Bali island.
Dr. Suryani is an international expert on trance
and obsession phenomena and she has told me many
anecdotes from her life where she depicted herself in
the role of a spirit communicator. She was also quite
often in the local newspapers as she is the only re-
puted healer on the island for a phenomenon unique
to Bali: the possession of whole groups of children,
typically a whole class in a school, by spirits.
In her presence and under the spell of her
mantras, the possession would vanish within min-

—68—
utes, while all other remedies against this intriguing
phenomenon have been proven ineffective.
Dr. Suryani published many books and co-au-
thored a number of others, as for example the study
by Jensen-Gorden-Suryani, Trance and Possession in
Bali: A Window on Western Multiple Personality Disor-
der, and Suicide (1993).
I was working with Dr. Suryani for giving medi-
tation training lessons to top-rank managers on the
island back in the 1990s. While we were interjecting
the meditation approach into the corporate world as
a form of relaxation and for building better perfor-
mance, the point of departure of Dr. Villoldo’s re-
search on paranormal phenomena and spiritual or al-
ternative healing was psychosomatic medicine. He was
interested what exactly makes the soma follow the

—69—
psyche, or why the spirit imprints itself on the soma,
thus causing either health or disease. The authors
write in Healing States (1984):

A growing number of allopathic physicians be-

lieve that as much as 80 percent of all illness may
contain a psychosomatic component. Allopathic
medical science, which does not publicly ac-
knowledge the psychic realm, is still at a loss to
explain the origin and treatment of many of these
psychosomatic disorders, often merely referring
to ‘unconscious conflicts’ that can trigger disease.
(Id., 19).

The phenomenon of contact with spirits is highly

uncanny and unusual for the Western mind. The au-
thors, well aware of this cultural bias or denial, have
found that in fact, it may be a question of terminolo-
gy only as psychotherapists talk about ‘complexes’
and ‘subpersonalities’ when they refer to the same
causal agents as for example a medium refers to. In

—70—
fact, in my own research on what transactional analy-
sis calls our inner selves, I found that here we en-
counter just another of those hidden key formulas
that open windows to other, wider, and deeper
realms of insight.
My research on Huna brought to daylight and
gave me evidence for the assumption that inner
selves are not just psychic modalities but inner spir-
its, real entities that are part of our multidimensional
psyche. And in my practice of the inner dialogue and
spontaneous art, I had encounters, at least one, with
spirits, and I have become acutely aware of the fact
that many of our thoughts and ideas are not entirely
our own but that we can, consciously or involuntari-
ly, benefit from the ideas sent to us by guiding spirits,
or receive thought forms which are forever floating in

—71—
the ether or the unified field, as they are resonance
patterns. To quote again from Healing States (1984):

But as we prepared to leave São Paolo we were

struck with the thought that communications
from the spirit world could be happening all the
time, and that we might simply not be aware of
them. Is it possible that many of our intuitions
and creative thoughts come from outside our-
selves? Although most scientists believe that con-
tacts with spirits are fantasies of the unconscious
mind, a small but growing number of investiga-
tors believe that the human brain may behave
like a complex transmitting and receiving appara-
tus, which under certain conditions can pick up
thoughts from other minds, and even across
space and time. (Id., 18).

The first landmark research described in the

book regards The Spiritual Psychiatry of Dr. Mendes, a
Brazilian spiritual healer located in the suburbs of
São Paolo and specialized on healing epilepsy, schiz-

—72—
ophrenia and multiple personality disorder. The in-
terviews with this phenomenal natural healer re-
vealed that it’s by following the natural principle of
self-regulation that healing states are realized. This is
achieved by letting the psychosomatic unity of the
organism regulate its own healing, which always
leads to the original wounding. By allowing this ex-
cursion into the past, which is called regression, full
healing can be achieved.
Alberto Villoldo, long before he was famous as
an alternative spiritual healer, already grasped the
importance of bringing self-regulation into healing; it
was namely before he departed to the Andes to learn
with the Laika shamans that he was directing the Bio-
logical Self-Regulation Laboratory at San Francisco
State University, and one of his motivational triggers

—73—
for doing this at that time still very controversial
work was his research experience with Dr. Mendes.
The authors come to an important conclusion
about shamanism, which points to the fact that
shamanism, in its very core, is basically non-judg-
mental and does not steer toward any fixated posi-
tion in terms of morality. It’s thus free of the all-per-
vasive moralism that is part of the cultural bias in-
herent in all monotheistic religions and their respec-
tive cultural incarnations (such as, mainly, Judaism,
Christianity and Islam).
Shaman, Healer, Sage (2000) is perhaps Villoldo’s
best book. He explains to the interested reader what
the luminous energy field represents, what it does in
natural healing and how the shaman can access it for

—74—
altering its energetic vibration in certain areas that
contain so-called imprints. The author explains:

We all possess a Luminous Energy Field that sur-

rounds our physical body and informs our body
in the same way that the energy fields of a mag-
net organize iron filings on a piece of glass. Our
Luminous Energy Field has existed since before
the beginning of time. It was one with the un-
manifest light of Creation, and it will endure /
throughout infinity. It dwells outside of time but
manifests in time by creating new physical bodies
lifetime after lifetime. (Id., 42-43).

I have done ample research on the existence of

this field, and started out with Paracelsus who was
something like a Western shaman. And I found that
the Laika native tradition that Dr. Villoldo had cho-
sen for his own initiation into the secrets of shamanic
healing has its correlates also in the Western esoteric
healing tradition. Generally, the practice of alchemy

—75—
in the Western esoteric healing tradition embraced a
holistic understanding of human life, and of disease.
In view of our cutting-edge science revelations
over the last two decades, and the insights we gained
from quantum physics about the quality of the light,
and of universal memory, the teaching Dr. Villoldo
received from the Laika shamans becomes compre-
hensive in a larger context, and is actually corrobo-
rated by newest scientific insights. In the light of In-
tegral Theories of Everything, and the revealing book
by Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field (2005),
what the author reports about the Akashic memory
does not sound so esoteric after all:

The Luminous Energy Field contains an archive

of all of our personal and ancestral memories, of
all early-life trauma, and even of painful wounds
from former lifetimes. These records or imprints

—76—
 are stored in full color and intensity of emotions.
Imprints are like dormant computer programs
that when activated compel us toward behaviors,
relationships, accidents, and illnesses that parody
the initial wounding. (Id., 46).

What Dr. Villoldo writes about the earth’s mag-

netic field, and how the luminous energy field con-
nects us to the luminous matrix of the entire universe
reminds the extraordinary research of Dr. Wilhelm
Reich (1897-1957) on what he called the orgone,
which he described equally both as a bioplasmatic
energy that animates the human organism, that irra-
diates from every single cell, and that is present in
the whole of the cosmos, as cosmic orgone, being re-
sponsible, inter alia, for the changes in weather. On
the basis of these discoveries, Reich was able to bring

—77—
about rain in desert regions and under conditions of
severe drought. Dr. Villoldo writes:

Although the strength of the Earth’s magnetic

field drops off very rapidly the farther it travels
from the planet, it never actually reaches zero. It
extends for hundreds of miles into space before
diminishing in strength, and travels at the speed
of light, at about 186.000 miles per second, to
the edge of the Universe. The human energy field
appears to extend only a few feet beyond the
body since, like the magnetic field of the Earth, it
diminishes in strength very rapidly. Yet it also
travels at the speed of light, connecting us to the
luminous matrix of the entire Universe, known to
the Inka as the texemuyo or all-pervading web.
(Id., 49).

In his book The Four Insights (2006), Dr. Villoldo

states that all life is made of vibration and light. This
is exactly what perennial science and philosophy
teaches since Hermes Trismegistus, as Manly P. Hall

—78—
shows with many examples in his book The Secret
Teachings of All Ages (1928/2003) and it is also what
we gradually rediscover through the cosmic window
of quantum physics.
The powerful message of this teaching for our
own culture is that we can overcome our negative
individual and collective karma by rejoining the orig-
inal pattern, through healing what the Kahunas call
complexes, and what Dr. Villoldo calls imprints in
the Luminous Energy Field (LEF).
Healing the Luminous Body (2004) was my first ac-
cess to Alberto Villoldo’s teaching of shamanic heal-
ing. In this DVD, the author retraces his professional
career, how he got to the knowledge that today bene-
fits so many people in the West, and how, at the start,
he was really a pioneer.

—79—
 Let us not forget that official science until very
recently denied the Life Force. It also denied the exis-
tence of both the luminous body and the fact that
our emotions, and emotional scars, are not to be
found in the brain, but in the luminous body.
Let me also remind of the fact that great scien-
tists, metaphysicists and healers like Paracelsus,
Swedenborg, Reichenbach, Mesmer, Reich,
Lakhovsky or Burr have endeavored pioneering work
decades and even centuries ago.
In this sense, even today and despite enlighten-
ing new openings presented to a greater public in the
film What The Bleep Do We Know!?, people like Alber-
to Villoldo swim against the stream. His teaching is
grounded, and therefore helps us connect with the
non-luminous forces in us, our inner shadow, or all

—80—
the shadows that are the results of the imprints in
our luminous body, which are for the most part the
energy imprints of early abuse suffered as children,
or that go back to former lifetimes.

Psychoactive Compounds
Psychoactive compounds can be described as the
essence in a plant or mushroom, or a seed that has a
psychedelic capacity, while the rest of the tissue of
that plant is not psychoactive. Now it is a fact that
these compounds were highly sought after in ancient
cultures and even are still today in shamanic soci-
eties. The reason, to repeat it, is the importance of
ecstasy in those cultures, as a truly religious experi-
mentation with the origins of life.

—81—
 Terence McKenna, in contradiction to Mircea
Eliade, and with regard to DMT, as well as Stanislav
Grof, for LSD, affirmed that while ecstasy can be
produced in other ways than with psychedelics—for
example through hyperventilation, which Grof came
to call ‘holotropic breathing’—the difference is that
psychedelics-based journeying is several 100% more
effective in terms of consciousness expansion.
Another important factor is that these com-
pounds serve deconditioning, which is important for
seeing the golden cage that our consumer culture has
put us into!
Let us inquire both into DMT and LSD for a
moment. In this context it is important to know that
our brain produces endogenic DMT which is one of
the reasons why Terence McKenna endorses it, for it

—82—
is relatively easy for us to metabolize it. The same is
not true for LSD which is an artificially produced
substance, while some of the alkaloids it contains are
well to be found in nature.
DMT—The Spirit Molecule (2001) by Dr. Rick
Strassman is a courageous book of a remarkable
American doctor, one who really stepped out of the
league and looked over the fence—with the result to
never return to where he was coming from.
I was very touched by his book, because the au-
thor vividly describes not only his scientific discover-
ies, but also how he got there. You will be moved by
this man’s honesty and endurance, and by the many
unconventional, or even revolutionary ideas he ex-
presses in this book. When a Terence McKenna
writes such things people tend to easily accept that as

—83—
‘witty psychedelic literature,’ but it’s quite of a differ-
ence when a medical doctor writes about what is
considered by many as tabooed research, taking the
obvious risk to be violently discarded out of the peer
group.
We know from the past how that can happen.
The life stories of, for example, Dr. Franz Anton
Mesmer and Dr. Wilhelm Reich give a vivid and pic-
turesque account of it. But Strassman does not want
to get out a book that goes in the face of some peo-
ple. He is not that kind of character. I got the impres-
sion throughout this book that he is a mature per-
sonality and knows what he is talking about. So
much the more need we to respect this voice of au-
thority in a jungle of information about what I call an
‘integrated’ worldview, as opposed to the scattered

—84—
worldview that is the day-to-day condition of mod-
ern consumer culture.
In my view, Strassman is more outspoken than
for example Stan Grof when it goes to clearly state
the disaster that was done by governmental authority
to prohibit LSD and a whole array of powerful en-
theogens that were used, with good care, in experi-
mental psychiatry for finding a better, and more ef-
fective, approach to healing mental disturbance. It
needs courage to pronounce heretic views of this
kind from the pulpit of an accredited doctor, because
it can result in professional ruin. That this man has
taken the courage to walk his talk despite the risk
needs a big applause, from what community or point
of view ever we look at him!

—85—
 On the other hand, some progressive movements
who foster abortion rights may be disappointed
about his total reject of abortion, a view that by the
way I myself personally support, too. He gives con-
clusive evidence for the point he makes, and if this
evidence will be corroborated by further research, I
am quite certain that legally sanctioned abortion will
be abandoned in the future.
It’s quite a hot issue, but unfortunately the de-
bate only focuses on the rights of the mother. What
about the rights of the fetus to be born, given that he
or she, if the mother was raped or not, has decided
to incarnate? When this is already sound from a spir-
itual point of view, the scientific evidence that
Strassman gives for his stance on rejecting abortion
speaks the same language:

—86—
 Opponents and supporters of abortion rights may
find fault with my proposal that a pineal DMT re-
lease at forty-nine days after conception marks
the entrance of the spirit into the fetus. (Id.,
xxvii).

If we are to respect life at all, we have to respect

it from the moment it’s animated matter, which is
matter that serves as a vehicle for spirit. This is rec-
ognized in all but Western cultures as one of the base
principles of life, and I can’t see why we should make
an exception for abortion.
In his overview over the history of psychedelic
compounds in psychiatry, Dr. Strassman gives much
food for thought that supports the alternative posi-
tion, the one taken, for example, by Terence McKen-
na, Richard E. Schultes, Jeremy Narby, Stan Grof, or
Ralph Metzner, to name only a few:

—87—
 Psychedelic research was a bruising and humiliat-
ing chapter in the lives of many of its most prom-
inent scientists. These were the best and the
brightest psychiatrists of their generation. Many
of today’s most respected North American and
European psychiatric researchers, in both acade-
mics and industry, now chairmen of major uni-
versity departments and presidents of national
psychiatric organizations, began their profession-
al lives investigating psychedelic drugs. The most
powerful members of their profession discovered
that science, data, and reason were incapable of
defending their research against the enactment of
repressive laws fueled by opinion, emotion, and
the media. (Id., 28).

It also was shown by research that LSD has a

powerful effect on enhancing creativity. On the other
hand, it is quite obvious that it is not a very comfort-
able condition for a scientist to do research in an area
and on a subject matter that is a potential case of
taboo, because the law suddenly shifted and declared

—88—
the specific topic of research an illegal matter. But let
us see what that means. Is science restricted to re-
search only in matters that are legal? Is scientific cu-
riosity limited to what the law givers think and en-
act?
Apart from the ethical foundation of science, that
by the way was never really questioned in the gov-
ernmentally funded research on genetic manipulation
and technology, and where there are real dangers, sci-
ence should in my view not be restricted to what is
declared legal, but overall needs to serve the progress
of humankind.
This is my own position as an international
lawyer on this subject. Dr. Strassman makes a good
additional point stating that the mere absence of aca-
demic attention for any given subject of research

—89—
should not keep curious scientists from investigating
in the matter to find out what is true, and what is
myth.
And there is another important distinction to be
made, that has turned out to be crucial from the legal
point of view. Namely, a psychoactive plant or mush-
room may be considered as a drug, or it may be con-
sidered as food. In the first case its consumption and
distribution may be penalized by law, in the second
case its consumption and distribution would be free.
Terence McKenna, in his book Food of the Gods
(1993) reminds us of an ancient truth. In all tradi-
tional cultures, food was used as medicine! And from
the start there were two of them that primed over all
others as the applications for healing were so gigan-
tic. They were Garlic and Cannabis!

—90—
 In fact, this book treats an important subject that
is rather obfuscated in modern times: food. When I
say obfuscated I really mean that most modern city
dwellers possess only a rudimentary awareness of
what they ingest on a daily basis; they are just gnaw-
ing away their very juice of life, with all the toxics
that modern processed food contains.
While in ancient times food was medicine. You
still have this philosophy in the Chinese food tradi-
tion where there are many dishes, for example a
whole array of mushroom dishes, that originally were
concocted for medical purposes but that today we eat
just for enriching our daily diet.
There is one rather esoteric dish among them,
that is called the ‘black chicken.’ The interesting
thing about this dish is that while you can buy these

—91—
small black chickens in any supermarket in Asia, the
other ingredients you best don’t buy there, but in a
Chinese medical pharmacy. They will open a number
of little drawers for you and put on a piece of paper a
funny composition of mushrooms, herbs, spices and
dried plums that you take home for just a couple of
dollars. Now, you brew this with water, and just put
some seasoning and some salt. You cannot imagine
what this dish can do! It cures any cold, influenza or
cough—guaranteed! The taste is exotic, it really
tastes like medicine, and when you eat the red meat
of this little black chicken, it has a very good taste.
This is the way to enjoy life as the ancients did: you
eat what you like, but you eat medicine at the same
time. Not like today, stuffing oneself with industrially
processed and poisoned food and then ingest chem-

—92—
istry when one has a bad digestion. And then, after
this unwholesome diet, you ‘smoke a joint’ that con-
tains I don’t know what, and that you bought some-
where on a black market from people you have never
seen before. This is what McKenna tells you:

No light can penetrate this situation of pandemic

drug use and abuse unless we undertake a hard-
eyed reappraisal of our present situation and an
examination of some old, nearly forgotten, pat-
terns of drug-related experience and behavior.
The importance of this task cannot be overesti-
mated. Clearly the self-administration of psy-
choactive substances, legal and illegal, will be in-
creasingly a part of the future unfolding of global
culture. (Id., xiv).

Our present leaders won’t do this reappraisal for

us, and that is why we can wait ad infinitum until this
dangerous situation in our dietary life will change

—93—
some day in the future. Food and mind do interact:
this is the essential message of this book.
And there is one more link to it. Food acts on
sexuality, and sexuality acts in turn on the mind. This
is not an insight unique to McKenna’s food research
but many studies have shown that alcohol has a par-
ticular effect on sexuality in that it renders the sexual
appetite more violent, and more sadistic, or else leads
to impotence. McKenna speaks of an ‘alcohol culture’
and a little later he also speaks of a ‘coffee culture’ so
as to characterize, in terms of food, our Western pa-
triarchal tradition:

Dominator style hatred of women, general sexual

ambivalence and anxiety, and alcohol culture
conspired to create the peculiarly neurotic ap-
proach to sexuality that characterizes European
civilization. Gone are the boundary-dissolving
hallucinogenic orgies that diminished the ego of

—94—
 the individual and reasserted the values of the ex-
tended family and the tribe. (Id., 148).

On the other hand, the still prevailing demoniza-

tion of the harmless hallucinogenic Cannabis will in
the author’s opinion cause us a particularly heavy
price to pay for the surrender to dominator values
that the suppression of Hashish will bring about
long-term, and the deterioration of the individual
self, and selfhood, that will be the result of this turn
of events.
McKenna’s research was fully confirmed by a
thought-provoking and meticulous study written by
an American physician, Lester Grinspoon, M.D.,
Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine (1997). In the
meantime, as I am writing this book, in 2019, there
is no less than an avalanche of similar literature on

—95—
the market. On Amazon USA, the keyword ‘marijua-
na’ renders 46.266 results and on Google Search
258,000,000! What McKenna comments on this sub-
ject is so important that I put it here in full length:

Of all the pandemic plant intoxicants inhabiting

the earth, cannabis is second only to mushrooms
in its promotion of the social values and sensory
ratios that typified the original partnership soci-
eties. How else are we to explain the unrelenting
persecution of cannabis use in the face of over-
whelming evidence that, of all the intoxicants
ever used, cannabis is among the most benign. Its
social consequences are negligible compared with
those of alcohol. Cannabis is anathema to the
dominator culture because it deconditions or de-
couples users from accepted values. Because of its
subliminally psychedelic effect, cannabis, when
pursued as a lifestyle, places a person in intuitive
contact with less goal-oriented and less competi-
tive behavior patterns. For these reasons mari-
juana is unwelcome in the modern office envi-
ronment, while a drug such as coffee, which rein-

—96—
 forces the values of industrial culture, is both
welcomed and encouraged. Cannabis use is cor-
rectly sensed as heretical and deeply disloyal to
the values of male dominance and stratified hier-
archy. Legalization of marijuana is thus a complex
issue, since it involves legitimating a social factor
that might ameliorate or even modify ego-domi-
nant values. Legalization and taxation of cannabis
would provide a tax base that could help clean
up the national deficit. Instead, we continue to
hurl millions of dollars into marijuana eradica-
tion, a policy that creates suspicion and a perma-
nent criminal class in communities that are oth-
erwise among the most law abiding in the coun-
try. (Id., 155).

At the same time, with the suppression of the

harmless psychedelic Hashish (Cannabis) or Hemp, a
most harmful and toxic food rises: sugar. McKenna
writes:

Let us be absolutely clear, sugar is entirely un-

necessary to the human diet; before the arrival of

—97—
 industrial cane and beet sugar humanity man-
aged well enough without refined sugar, which is
nearly pure sucrose. Sugar contributes nothing
that cannot be gotten from some other, easily
available source. It is a ‘kick,’ nothing more. Yet
for this kick the dominator culture of Europe was
willing to betray the ideals of the Enlightenment
by its collusion with slave traders. In 1800 virtu-
ally every ton of sugar imported into England
had been produced with slave labor. The ability
of the ego-dominator culture to suppress these
realities is astonishing. (Id., 178).

I know that most people are absolutely unaware

of the dangers of modern-day sugar ingestion, and
gradually destroy their health with this peak form of
ignorance that is promoted and encouraged by all
governments in the world. McKenna unveils the
cunning trick that led to a total inattention of sugar
among really harmful drugs. It’s simply because it’s

—98—
defined not as ‘drug’ but as ‘food.’ The definition of
course denies that sugar is a highly addictive drug:

Many children and compulsive eaters live in a

motivational environment primarily ruled by
mood swings resulting from cravings for sugar.
(Id., 180).

Then, eventually, we talk about tobacco and the

myth of its supposedly cancerogenous nature that
other researchers, together with McKenna have un-
veiled, one of them being Jeremy Narby, whom I will
refer to further down.
McKenna explains that the tobacco of the Maya
was called ‘Nicotiana Rustica’ which still today is
smoked by the native populations in South America.
It has to be noted that from a chemical point of view,
this tobacco is actually more potent than the com-
mercial grades sold today as ‘Nicotiana Tabacum.’

—99—
The first has hallucinogenic properties, brings about
a deep meditative state and is an anti-depressant,
while the latter has no such properties.
Opium addiction was once the price paid for the
prohibition of tobacco, as addiction to gasoline has
been seen to be one of the consequences of alcohol
prohibitions both in 1930s America and in Iran un-
der the reign of Ayatollah Khomeini. As a general
rule, you can observe in life that every denial brings
about worse a condition compared to the original de-
sire that was denied to manifest!
That is a truth that was largely corroborated by
bioenergetic research conducted both by Wilhelm Re-
ich (1897-1957) and Alexander Lowen (1910-2008),
and continues to be corroborated by present-day re-
searchers.

—100—
 And so much depends on how we define food,
or not define it as food. Psychedelics were originally
defined as food, and no one had a problem with
them. And the suppression of culture and the sup-
pression of food go hand in hand, as McKenna
demonstrates very lucidly:

Psychedelic plants and experience were first sup-

pressed by European civilization, then ignored
and forgotten. The fourth century witnessed the
suppression of the mystery religions—the cults of
Bacchus and Diana, of Attis and Cybele. The rich
syncretism that was typical of the Hellenistic
world had become a thing of the past. Christiani-
ty triumphed over the Gnostic sects—Valentini-
ans, Marcionites, and others—which were the
last bastions of paganism. These repressive
episodes in the evolution of Western thought ef-
fectively closed the door on communication with
the Gaian mind. (Id., 223)

—101—
 Now, what is really so special about Ayahuasca,
according to McKenna? He and many other re-
searchers believe in a rather mechanistic theory of
causation, attributing all the hallucinogenic and I
should say, super-cognitive faculties of the liana to
DMT, the compound that was found to be the chem-
ical substance inherent in the plant. I contradict this
view with my own Ayahuasca research essay and au-
diobook that I entitled Consciousness and Shamanism.
This being said, Ayahuasca: Human Consciousness
and the Spirits of Nature (1999) by Ralph Metzner is a
fascinating reader collecting personal experiences
with the sacred Ayahuasca brew, and it’s a most valu-
able resource for both researchers and those interest-
ed in a spiritual voyage.

—102—
 In addition to this invaluable source material, the
introduction and comments by the editor of the
book, Ralph Metzner, a widely acclaimed authority
on shamanism and entheogens, are precious and
well-written. Ralph Metzner writes in the Introduc-
tion:

Ayahuasca is widely recognized by anthropolo-

gists as being probably the most powerful and
most widespread shamanic hallucinogen. In the
tribal societies where these plants and plant
preparations are used, they are regarded as em-
bodiments of conscious intelligent beings that
only become visible in special states of con-
sciousness, and who can function as spiritual
teachers and sources of healing power and
knowledge (...) The plants are referred to as med-
icines, a term that means more than a drug:
something like a healing power or energy that
can be associated with a plant, a person, an ani-
mal, even a place. They are also referred to as
plant teachers and there are still extant traditions

—103—
 of many-years-long initiations and trainings in
the use of these medicines. (Id., 3).

Some people, and among them many skeptics,

ask why one who is not part of such a culture and
who is not an ethnobotanist should have an interest
in engaging in a plant-induced spiritual quest? Ralph
Metzner gives a clear answer:

A powerful resurgence of respectful and reveren-

tial attitudes toward the living Earth and all its
creatures seems to be a natural consequence of
explorations with visionary plant teachers. (Id.,
4).

Terence McKenna emphasized in all his books

another important aspect of psychedelics: their
boundary-dissolving nature. Patriarchy is unique in
human history in its obsessional and neurotic striv-
ing for setting boundaries, putting up limits, erecting

—104—
fences, dividing naturally grown landscapes, dissect-
ing bodies for vivisection, splitting the atom, dividing
life and nature into ‘white-good’ and ‘black-bad,’ and
so on and so forth. We won’t get rid of our patriar-
chal tradition by a magic stroke of destiny nor by re-
bellion. The way to go is to overcome the boundaries
and gain access to the whole.
Alongside with erecting a divider between man
and nature, our culture developed a schizoid and
delusional fantasy of man being ‘superior’ in creation,
having ‘dominion’ over nature, obviously forgetting
that we own our very existence to this nature that we
tend to condemn as low and unspiritual.
In the run of patriarchy, since the last five thou-
sand years, the destructive and life-denying ideology
was not coming from Sumer or Babylon, neither from

—105—
the admittedly perverse Roman Games, but from the
suffocating ethics of Puritan fundamentalism. This
lasted a few hundred years, but perhaps we are now
at a turning point? Metzner notes:

Over the past two millennia Western civilization

has increasingly developed patterns of domina-
tion based on the assumption of human superior-
ity. The dominator pattern has involved the grad-
ual desacralization, objectification and exploita-
tion of all nonhuman nature. (Id., 5).

And by doing so, to paraphrase Thomas Moore’s

Care of the Soul (1994), we have created a cultural
narcissism without equal in human history.
For the scientist and explorer of consciousness,
there are other values connected with this quest of
getting back in touch with the spirits of nature. Met-
zner notes:

—106—
 As a result of the conflict between the Christian
church and the new experimental science of
Newton, Galileo, Descartes, and others, a dualis-
tic worldview was created. On the one hand was
science, which confined itself to material objects
and measurable forces. Anything having to do
with purpose, value, morality, subjectivity, psy-
che, or spirit, was the domain of religion, and
science stayed out of it. Inner experiences, subtle
perceptions and spiritual values were not consid-
ered amenable to scientific study and came there-
fore to be regarded as inferior forms of reality—
merely subjective as we say. This encouraged a
purely mechanistic and myopically detached atti-
tude towards the natural world. Perception of
and communication with the spiritual essences
and intelligences inherent in nature have regular-
ly been regarded with suspicion, or ridiculed as
misguided enthusiasm or mysticism. (Id., 6).

Now, as to the question of how plant-derived

psychedelics work and how they work on human
consciousness, Ralph Metzner explains the two main

—107—
theories or metaphors about psychedelics as agents
of consciousness expansion. The first considers them
as amplifiers of psychic content, the second as being
something like a biological microscope.
One aspect that ethnology may have overlooked
in shamanic cultures is their real—and not just fan-
tasmatic— knowledge about healing with plants they
possess as a cultural treasure, a knowledge so vast,
and so deep that, without having any technological
instruments of inquiry at their disposition, seemed a
sheer impossibility.
And that’s why the very acknowledgement of this
knowledge was brushed off as nonsense, exaggera-
tion or myth. Now, modern research has shown that
this knowledge is real, but at the same time re-

—108—
searchers became even more strongly aware of the
impossibility of it.
The only hypothesis that could explain it was the
one actually forwarded by the natives themselves:
they namely claimed since ages to have received this
knowledge directly from the plant teachers, without
using any further instruments or tools, while being in
psychedelic trance. It is important to see that this en-
cyclopedic knowledge native healers, herbalists and
shamans possess about botanics and phytotherapy is
acquired not through literacy, but through direct per-
ception.
Now let me explain what ‘psychedelic’ plants re-
ally are and why they are bearing this name, and sim-
ilar other names. There are actually quite a few ex-
pressive terms that explain their nature. Ralph Met-

—109—
zner writes in the Introduction to his reader that they
have been called psychotomimetic (‘madness mimic-
king’), psycholytic (‘psyche loosening’), psychedelic
(‘mind manifesting’), hallucinogenic (‘vision induc-
ing’) and entheogenic (‘connecting with the sacred
within’). In fact, these different terms reflect the
widely differing attitudes and intentions, and perhaps
also expectations that people bring to these com-
pounds.
More specifically about Ayahuasca, there is a
wide consensus doctorum that it’s the most wide-
spread and powerful shamanic hallucinogen. Natives
consider it as an embodiment of conscious intelligent
beings, and that was my own impression when I in-
gested the ritual brew back in 2004 in Ecuador. The
plants are not considered as drugs but as ‘medicines,’

—110—
which is a significant difference in cognizing the exis-
tence of these plants and their compounds.
They are also referred to as plant teachers, and I
would say that this evaluation of their existence re-
sults from a basically innocent view of life that values
the sacred, before it values pleasure, while in our he-
donistic culture, it’s pretty much the other way
around.
We can therefore conclude that shamanism is
quite opposed to our modern worldview that is basi-
cally humanocentric, in that it shows a fundamental
reverential attitude toward nature and living, and es-
pecially toward the plant realm; for that matter, it
does not erect the human into the center of Gaia, but
humbly posits us as important yet not indispensable
ingredients in the soup of life. In the context of this

—111—
reverence brought toward the eternal mother or fe-
male, shamanism represents a unique example for
how we could look upon nature in the future, from a
more expansive and integrative perspective, thereby
overcoming the mind-body dualism and, more im-
portantly even, the hubristic philosophy of patriarchy
that has done so much damage to life, nature and the
destiny of the human race.
Mind it, we are still with the question how to de-
fine a certain substance we take in … as food, or a
drug. If I define sugar as a drug, it may change my
perception of what sugar may do to my body. If I
consider Cannabis as food, which is the case largely
in India, this takes all stigma away and ‘normalizes’
our relationship to this plant. Now, let us look at to-
bacco. The Swiss anthropologist Jeremy Narby took

—112—
that deep look, in his book The Cosmic Serpent
(2003). Narby, who has done research on tobacco
over several years, has published in this book a good
part of the research results, and gives further refer-
ences in the footnotes. His research indicates that it’s
not tobacco that causes cancer, but additives and
preservatives that are put in cigarettes through indus-
trial fabrication.

The Nature of Psychic

Phenomena
It was back in the 1980s when I first started re-
search on what at the time was called ‘parapsycholo-
gy’ and what today is more appropriately termed
‘psychic research.’
What fascinated me at the time was ectoplasm, a
whitish linen-like substance ejected by a medium in
—113—
the trance state. It was one of the first series of con-
trolled experiments in the history of psychic re-
search, conducted by Baron Albert von Schrenck-
Notzing and Dr. Charles Richet, observing the fa-
mous medium Eusapia Palladino, published in Albert
von Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialization:
A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Tele-
plastics (1920). Through my research I soon found
that ectoplasms are manifestations of dense bioener-
gy liberated by mediums in trance. This unique phe-
nomenon, then, is at the root of an array of other
topics in psychic research that became the investiga-
tive journey of Dean Radin.
I became aware of Dean Radin’s publications
through the movie What the Bleep Do We Know!?,
Rabbit Hole Edition (2006).

—114—
 And I ordered his books right away, and was
amazed to conclude that I had in front of me the
written proof for the ultimate veracity of psychic
phenomena. In fact, Radin was able to shatter the
coarsest prejudice against paranormal phenomena; as
a result he rendered psychic research eventually ac-
ceptable! How did he do such heroic a task?
He was defeating the enemy with his own
weapons; he applied the purest Cartesian method of
rigid trial and error, and meticulous detailed proof,
and step-by-step elucidation of scientific facts, and
he did this so brilliantly that it is today simply im-
possible to refute his findings. In the contrary, they
were corroborated by other researchers who replicat-
ed the experiments. Radin set for himself the vision
that psychic research is to be defined as correct and

—115—
official, and exact science. And then he started out.
And he got where he wanted to get at. And credibili-
ty, yes, he had to built, and a lot of it, for becoming
an authority in such a daring discipline that for
decades was shunned by ‘official’ science and relegat-
ed to the ‘unofficial’ yet enlightened pulpit of esoteric
freaks, geniuses, psychics, curious lawyers such as
myself—and indigo children.
His brilliant methodology certainly was one of
the decisive factors of his success; next to his vision-
ary quest and outstanding communication abilities.
And there we are, virtually transformed as a group, as
a society, where we can observe that with every day
the majority and the minority are changing roles, and
it’s now according to recent polls indeed the majority,
at least in America, who believe that psychic phe-

—116—
nomena are real and should be scientifically investi-
gated.
The funny thing is that the government, the mili-
tary and the CIA were anyway since long taking psi
serious and were investigating it, and not with minor
investments and efforts, and still, official science was
denying it. It was a paradoxical situation for many
years. Now, as the polls are showing that a majority
of the population is convinced that psychic phenom-
ena are real, there is also a democratic quest at stake
as from a constitutional point of view, science cannot
just disregard such a fact and continue to stubbornly
refuse using their funding for proper research.
So now, after the breakthrough, I would say that
the social picture is one that makes much more
sense, after all, and a lot of tensions that are not con-

—117—
ducive to smooth human relations have been allevi-
ated through this paradigm change.
Dean Radin defines psychic phenomena not in a
vacuum, but uses the popular custom to define these
terms, and I shall reproduce the complete listing here
as it is conducive to a better and clearer understand-
ing.

Telepathy
Information exchanged between two or more
minds, without the use of the ordinary senses.

Clairvoyance
Information received from a distance, beyond the
reach of the ordinary senses. A French term
meaning ‘clear-seeing.’ Also called ‘remote-view-
ing.’

—118—
Psychokinesis
Mental interaction with animate or inanimate
matter. Experiments suggest that it is more accu-
rate to think of psychokinesis as information
flowing from mind to matter, rather than as the
application of mental forces or powers. Also
called ‘mind-matter interaction,’ ‘PK,’ and some-
times telekinesis.’

Precognition
Information perceived about future events, where
the information could not be inferred by ordinary
means. Variations include ‘premonition,’ a fore-
boding of an unfavorable future event, and ‘pre-
sentment,’ a sensing of a future emotion.

ESP
Extrasensory perception, a term popularized by J.
B. Rhine in the 1930s. It refers to information
perceived by telepathy, clairvoyance, or precogni-
tion.

—119—
Psi
A letter of the Greek alphabet (Ψ) used as a neu-
tral term for all ESP-type and psychokinetic phe-
nomena.

Related Phenomena

OBE
Out-of-body experience; an experience of feeling
separated from the body. Usually accompanied by
visual perceptions reminiscent of clairvoyance.

NDE
Near-death experience; an experience sometimes
reported by those who are revived from nearly
dying. Often refers to a core experience that in-
cludes feelings of peace, OBE, seeing lights, and
certain other phenomena. Related to psi primari-
ly through the OBE experience.

Reincarnation
The concept of dying and being reborn into a
new life. The strongest evidence for this ancient

—120—
 idea comes from children, some of whom recol-
lect verifiable details of previous lives. Related to
psi by similarities to clairvoyance and telepathy.

Haunting
Recurrent phenomena reported to occur in par-
ticular locations, including sightings of appari-
tions, strange sounds, movement of objects, and
other anomalous physical and perceptual effects.
Related to psi by similarities to psychokinesis and
clairvoyance.

Poltergeist
Large-scale psychokinetic phenomena previously
attributed to spirits but now associated with a liv-
ing person, frequently an adolescent. From the
German for ‘noisy spirit.’

To begin with, I would like to stress the energy

nature of those phenomena that we use to call para-
normal, as this is the result of my own research on
the matter, that I did within my research on emotions

—121—
and bioenergy. When I speak of bioenergy here I
mean the bioplasmatic energy that is also called cos-
mic life energy, and not body electrics or electromag-
netism. This is also the energy that is meant and re-
ferred to in shamanism, when shamans talk about
the spirits of nature. These spirits, to be true, are en-
ergy streams that bear transcoded information, and
as such they are part of the huge communication
network built into living systems.
Dean Radin confirms my research results when
he says that psi research does not fit in conventional
theories and that it’s not correct that researchers ex-
plain what is so far unexplainable with the theory of
electromagnetism.

… we know that telepathy doesn’t work like

conventional electromagnetic signaling. And yet,
because the metaphor provides a powerful way of

—122—
 thinking about telepathy, many people still imag-
ine that telepathy ‘works’ through some form of
mental radio. (Dean Radin, The Conscious Uni-
verse, 1997, 16).

I may be allowed to add that Dr. Wilhelm Reich

explained very explicitly the difference between what
he called the orgone and which he held responsible
not only for all life functions but also for psychic
phenomena, on one hand, and electrical or electro-
magnetic phenomena, on the other.
I have verified the matter by contacting the Wil-
helm Reich Trust in Maine with this question. The
director at the time, the late Ms. Mary Boyd Higgins,
clearly affirmed that the books and manuscripts by
Wilhelm Reich contain the proof that ‘orgone’ energy
is prior to phenomena such as electricity or electro-
magnetism, that it well induces such phenomena,

—123—
but that it is itself not explainable with any of these
concepts, simply because other laws apply for it, laws
that conventional science hitherto more or less com-
pletely ignores.
In his book Entangled Minds (2006), Dean Radin
writes:

For centuries, scientists assumed that everything

can be explained by mechanisms analogous to
clockworks. Then, to everyone’s surprise, over
the course of the twentieth century we learned
that this commonsense assumption is wrong.
When the fabric of reality is examined very close-
ly, nothing resembling clockworks / can be
found. Instead, reality is woven from strange
‘holistic’ threads that aren’t located precisely in
space or time. Tug on a dangling loose end from
this fabric of reality, and the whole cloth twitches,
instantly, throughout all space and time. (Id.,
2-3).

—124—
 The first case he reports was a couple returning
from New York to their home town; the man had
tried to sleep in the plane, and had a horrible night-
marish vision to be buried alive in tons of cement
that were closing hermetically about him, virtually
crushing his bones one by one in this prison of stone
that was converging about him.
When they returned home, exhausted after the
long trip and three thousand miles away from their
friends in New York, and just went into deep slum-
ber, in New York the two towers of the World Trade
Center went down to ashes in an unprecedented cata-
strophe that was mediatized in its every detail.
In the second documented case, a couple had
passed the Pentagon on a highway and the woman,
in a sudden vision, had seen the Pentagon burning

—125—
and huge piles of dark smoke rising from it, while
her husband had wondered about her screams. In a
few seconds the vision had vanished away.
This had been several weeks before the 11th of
September, 2001. Dean Radin explains that it is be-
cause of the psychological fact of memory repression
and a blinding out of perception that so many people
do actually not get clear visions; the author seems to
be sure and convinced that we do receive clear pre-
monitions and visions in front of catastrophic events
that cost many human lives, but that our brain safe-
guards our mental health by suppressing as much as
possible of the disturbing impressions and all the
anxiety that is of course connected to it.

—126—
 Intention and the
Memory of Water
The first time I heard about human intention be-
ing able to influence matter was through William
Tiller’s research on altering the pH of water. In the
movie ‘What the Bleep Do We Know!?,’ William Tiller,
PhD, reports experiments conducted with simple
electronic circuits that were subjected to an ‘inten-
tional field’ created by several experienced medita-
tors. In this particular case, the intention had been to
alter the pH of water by a full unit of difference.
Then this ‘imprinted’ device was wrapped in
aluminum and sent by overnight shipping to a labo-
ratory 2000 miles away, where it was placed beside
the ‘target experiment’ and turned on. The results
were encouraging as indeed the water’s pH state sim-

—127—
ply through its being in the vicinity of an electrical
device that had been imprinted with that intent al-
tered by at least one ph unit and later on by as much
as 1 1/2 pH units. This is a very remarkable outcome
for you must know, stated Tiller, that a human being
will be dead when their inner water would be altered
by more than a full pH unit.
When the same experiment was repeated, even
more significant effects began to show. For when in-
tent is repeated in the same space, it somehow be-
comes permanent. Tiller speaks about a ‘conditioned
space.’ When that happens, the laws of physics in
that space no longer operate as they did before!
In the same film, I learnt about Masaru Emoto’s
amazing research on the memory of water. Masaru
Emoto is an internationally renowned Japanese re-

—128—
searcher and an independent thinker. Certified as a
Doctor of Alternative Medicine from the Open In-
ternational University, he is also a graduate of the
Yokohama Municipal University’s department of hu-
manities and sciences, with an emphasis on In-
ternational Relations. Masaru Emoto’s research has vi-
sually captured the structure of water at the moment
of freezing, and through high-speed photography he
has shown the direct consequences of our thoughts
and intentions on the formation of water crystals.
The revelation that our thoughts can influence
water has profound implications for our health and
the wellbeing of our planet. Masaru Emoto has writ-
ten many books, including the New York Times best-
selling The Hidden Messages in Water (2004). While I
do not hide the fact that this research is controver-

—129—
sial, it has hit the rock, so to speak, it has moved the
earth, it has made huge waves, mobilized funding
and got people to change their lives, their worldview,
and their way of thinking. Masaru Emoto’s research
speaks for itself when you consider that our bodies
consist of more than 70% of water. As the stranger in
‘What the Bleep Do We Know!?’ told Amanda in the
metro station:
—Imagine, if thoughts can do that to water,
what thoughts can do to us!
Frankly I have never considered before in my life
the fact that I consist mainly of water, and that be-
cause of this simple fact, I have to do something
about that water I am consisting of. Have you? Only
Paracelsus, one of the greatest healers in human his-
tory, and whom I have studied at length, reading his

—130—
writings early in my life, in their German original,
said something similar. But it’s somehow obvious as
water is the main transporter of vital energy in our
body.
Having studied virtually all written traditional
knowledge about the bioenergy, over so many years, I
yet overlooked the most essential and thus had to
learn it from Emoto. The ch’i that flows through my
body flows through my body because of water; it
flows through that watery substance in me. Now,
Emoto, puts it more precisely, by a sound compari-
son with homeopathy:

More now than in the past, the medical commu-

nity has begun to see water as a transporter of
energy, and it is even being used in the treatment
of illness. Homeopathy is one such field where
the value of water is recognized. (Id., xvii).

—131—
 Homeopathy is indeed concerned with water.
But we hardly ever knew why; we barely knew why a
homeopathic formula is diluted so much, and con-
sists almost entirely of water? When we get to know
that water is the magic here, and not the substances
that are mixed with it in a homeopathic tincture, all
becomes clear.
Succinctly speaking, there are two major argu-
ments that Emoto advances in order to explain his
research, and that his detractors do not seem to catch
up with. What is it that makes water to be a receptor
and vehicle for thought?
I think it is the fact that water, as all in life, is vi-
bration; this vibration can be manipulated through
intent. Now, how does the alteration of vibration
come about? Emoto explains:

—132—
 The lesson what we can learn from this experi-
ment has to do with the power of words. The vi-
bration of good words has a positive effect on our
world, whereas the vibration from negative words
has the power to destroy. (Id., xxv).

Now, in fact this is true. The hermetic tradition

taught since times immemorial that words are codi-
fied vibrations. The scriptures all converge in saying
that in the beginning there was the Word, and that
the Word was sacred and had creational power. In
old Egypt and India, as Manly P. Hall writes in The
Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928/2003), the hiero-
phants used vibrations for healing:

The magic rituals used by the Egyptian priests for

the curing of disease were based upon a highly
developed comprehension of the complex work-
ings of the human mind and its reactions upon
the physical constitution. The Egyptian and
Brahmin worlds undoubtedly understood the

—133—
 fundamental principle of vibrotherapeutics. (Id.,
2).

More generally, Jonathan Goldman, a present-

day vibrational healer, writes in his book Healing
Sounds (2002), viii:

Everything is in a state of vibration. Everything is

frequency. Sound can change molecular struc-
ture. It can create form. We realize the potential
of sonic energy; we understand that virtually any-
thing can be accomplished through vibration.
Then, the miraculous seems possible.

Now, there is one more catch to understanding

the Shinto tradition. Emoto writes that in Japan, it is
said that words of the soul reside in a spirit called
‘kotodama’ or the spirit of words, and that the act of
speaking words has the power to change the world.
Regarding human beings, the fact that we vibrate,
that we are a bunch of frequencies, has been affirmed

—134—
by not only the hermetic tradition, but also by clair-
voyants.
Not only do we vibrate, but we vibrate different-
ly. In a sense, we all come with a unique vibrational
pattern. For example, Shafica Karagulla writes in her
book The Chakras (1989):

It is said by some that every human being emits a

unique tonal pattern which is created by his in-
dividual energy fields working in unison. This is
sometimes referred to as the personality note.
(Id., 2).

Emoto confirms this to be true from the perspec-

tive of the Shinto tradition and esoteric Japanese
knowledge about the bioenergy:

Human beings are also vibrating, and each indi-

vidual vibrates at a unique frequency. Each one of
us has the sensory skills necessary to feel the vi-
bration of others. (Id., 41).

—135—
 In his second book, The Secret Life of Water
(2005), Emoto has given more information about the
specific vibration of water, which is knowledge seem-
ingly only existing in Japan.
I would like to add an interesting detail that was
a surprising result of the experiments with exposing
water to positive affirmations, negative affirmations
(insults) or else leaving the water completely unat-
tended. The surprising outcome was that the worst
water, the one with the worst crystals, was not the
water that had received the insults from the school
children who helped carry out the experiment, but
the water that had received no attention at all from
their part. Emoto comments:

To give your positive or negative attention to

something is a way of giving energy. The most

—136—
 damaging form of behavior is withholding your
attention. (Id., 65)

This is a fact known from research on child

abuse. Children who have been abused tend to go
back to their abusers despite the fact that abuse is go-
ing to continue. And there was always a question
mark in forensic research why children do that, and
why they do not, or very seldom, betray their abuser
in order to get rid of the abusive relationship?
It has been found that it’s because the negative
attention children receive in the form of abuse is for
them still better than the total lack of attention they
get in their homes.
And this motivates us to perhaps render our ed-
ucation more attentive to the true needs of children,
as Krishnamurti emphasizes it in his book Education

—137—
and the Significance of Life (1978), because attention
and love are one and the same thing. Try to show
somebody that you love him or her and try to do that
without giving them any attention. You will see that
it’s impossible. The very thought of the person is al-
ready attention, and by thinking of the person you
are sending out a vibration, and energy.
The Secret Life of Water (2005), when you com-
pare it with Emoto’s first book, is like the scientific
back office of water research. In this book, Emoto
explains what hado is, a strange concept that seem-
ingly was unknown in the West, except among nat-
ural healers and clairvoyants. And yet it is a very old
concept, part of the Shinto tradition of ancient Ja-
panese philosophical wisdom, and thereby part of
perennial science.

—138—
 Once I got familiar with this ancient knowledge
tradition, I found a number of other books about
hado, as for example sending out hado by deliberate
intent for healing, or learning the hado of cooking.
Myself a passionate cook since fifty years, I always
wondered how it is possible that two people using
the same recipe, and the same kitchen for cooking
the same food can end up with cooking food that
tastes differently. While the dish may even look the
same, the taste is different. The mystical nothing that
the Western mind explains away as illusion, the Ja-
panese put in very precise terms, saying that the
cook whose dish tastes better has a better or more
sublime hado!
I have even found books how to deliberately im-
prove your cooking hado so as to cook better-tasting

—139—
food, while you may cook the same food that you
always cooked before. If this is not something West-
erners will be intrigued about, I don’t know what it
can possibly be that will rock your life?
Now, let’s go step by step and inquire further,
along with some quotes from this very well-written
book. Emoto enumerates three basic keys for the un-
derstanding of hado:

Three key words are helpful to understand hado.

The first is frequency. The entire universe is vi-
brating at a particular and unique frequency. Fre-
quency can be modeled as waves, a fact easily
supported by quantum mechanics. All matter is
frequency as well as particles. What this means is
that rather than considering something a living
organism or a mineral, something we can touch
or something we can see, everything is vibrating,
and vibrating at a unique and individual frequen-
cy. (Id., 30).

—140—
 The second word that is helpful in understand-
ing hado is resonance. Resonance comes in play when
there is a sender of hado information and a receiver
of the information.
Say you make a call to someone you want to talk
to. Unless that person picks up the receiver, there
will be no conversation. Without a receiver, informa-
tion cannot be sent. The Japanese expression aun no
kokyu, or ‘in-breath and out-breath,’ describes a state
where subtle synchronization occurs when we do
things together. This also refers to a relationship be-
tween a sender and a receiver. When there are vibra-
tions matching, resonance occurs.
The third word helpful for understanding hado is
similarity. The macroscopic world we know is a sym-
bol, an expansion of the microscopic world. The

—141—
planets in our solar system are the macro version of
the electrons circulating around the atomic nucleus,
and what is going on within the human body is a
mini version of what is going on in the grandeur of
nature.
Emoto also expands about healing with hado.
And he has collected amazing examples from all over
the world, and from different researchers, to prove
his point. He envisions what he calls hado medicine
becoming one day the medicine of the future.
A similar approach was taken by the Russian-
French researcher Georges Lakhovsky who, as early
as in the 1920s, was able to heal plant cancer simply
by exposing cancer-afflicted plants to vibrations that
were exactly opposite to the frequency of the malig-
nant cells. From these experiments, Lakhovsky then

—142—
elaborated a cancer etiology and sound healing pro-
cedures for both plant cancer and cancer in animals
and humans.
For Emoto, the body is something like a com-
plex sound machine and it really vibrates, emits fre-
quencies and can be seen as a musical composition.
All organs produce sounds, and all the sounds are in
harmony with each other in the healthy organism.
Now what happens when we are sick? Emoto ex-
plains it as a ‘discord’ with one of the sounds. As
when one sound is out of pitch, ‘the entire composi-
tion is not as it should be.’
A controversial point in Emoto’s science of hado
is what he calls the memory of water. He claims that
all water has a memory that manifests through the
fact once an affirmation has been emitted, and water

—143—
has been impregnated with such positive or negative
intent, this impression lasts. It will not just vanish af-
ter a day or a month. But how can we imagine this in
practice, and what are the details of this science?
How long will the impression last in the individ-
ual case, and how to detect it? This seems to be a
floating science, for it appears to lack specific data, if
I am not mistaken. Emoto expresses himself in terms
that can neither be criticized, nor taken as evidence
for the memory theory:

All matter has its own hado, and water relays this
information. The molecules of water carry mes-
sages like the magnet of a computer disk. Hado
can be either beneficial for life or harmful for life.
But even if the vibration is good for life, if wa-
ter—the mediator— is impure, the hado will not
be relayed correctly. (Id., 62).

—144—
 As I mentioned earlier, Emoto’s research is con-
troversial with regard to scientific standards applied.
While he seems to have given contradicting informa-
tion to the press in this regard, in the present book
he writes, quite honestly:

I admit that the selection process is not strictly in

accordance with the scientific method, but sim-
ply put, we choose the crystal that best repre-
sents the entire sample instead of simply one
from the most common category. (Id., 130).

The fact is namely that there is never a total uni-

formity in the water crystals that are formed after the
water was impressed, and impregnated, with intent.
There is always a mix. Now, when there is a mix,
which crystals are going to be photographed and
shown in a publication? It’s well clear that this is a
crucial point in the whole of this research. To argue

—145—
from the detractor position: if there is a mix, there is
no proof at all because when there is a mix, all is po-
tentially in there, and so I can just pick out what I
like to pick out, and comment on it.
Now, strangely enough, Emoto doesn’t even
come up with the idea of a predominant scheme of
crystals so that we could establish something like a
rule of evidence based upon majority of crystals ver-
sus minority of crystals. The fact is that Emoto not
only applies intent for choosing the crystals but he
also applies intent for choosing the choosers. He has
argued in interviews that he was carefully selecting
the people who were doing the photographs because
another crucial point brought forward by the detrac-
tors was that if intent is so powerful on water, then
what about the intent brought in the water, more or

—146—
less unconsciously, by the photographer? And how
can we detect to what extent the crystals have been
formed by the affirmations, glued as paper messages
on the bottles, on one hand, and the intent fostered
in the minds of the photographers, on the other?
I think I can dare to carefully put a question
mark here as to scientific credibility. While I intu-
itively agree with Emoto and his research, I think its
scientific foundation is far from being established.

—147—
 Bibliography
Anderson, Victor
Etheric Anatomy
The Three Selves and Astral Travel
With Cora Anderson
New York: Penguin Arkana, 1993
Albany, CA: Acorn Guild Press, 2004

Arntz, William & Chasse, Betsy

What the Bleep Do We Know
20th Century Fox, 2005 (DVD)

Down The Rabbit Hole Quantum Edition

20th Century Fox, 2006 (3 DVD Set)

Bateson, Gregory
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000
Originally published in 1972

Beaulieu, John
Music and Sound in the Healing Arts
London: Barrytown/Station Hill Press, 1995

Besant, Annie
An Autobiography
New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2005
Originally published in 1893

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna

The Secret Doctrine
New York: Tarcher, 2009

—148—
Originally published in 1888

Bohm, David
Wholeness and the Implicate Order
London: Routledge, 2002

Thought as a System
London: Routledge, 1994

Quantum Theory
London: Dover Publications, 1989

Brassai
Conversations with Picasso
Chicago: University of Chicago Publications, 1999

Brennan, Barbara Ann

Hands of Light
A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy Field
New York: Bantam Books, 1988

Buffet, Warren
The Essays of Warren Buffet
With Lawrence A. Cunningham
3rd Edition
New York: Carolina Academic Press, 2013

Burwick, Frederick
The Damnation of Newton
Goethe’s Color Theory and Romantic Perception
New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1986

Campbell, Herbert James

The Pleasure Areas

—149—
London: Eyre Methuen Ltd., 1973

Capra, Fritjof
The Tao of Physics
An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern
Physics and Eastern Mysticism
New York: Shambhala Publications, 2000
(New Edition) Originally published in 1975

The Turning Point

Science, Society And The Rising Culture
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987 (Author Copyright 1982)

Green Politics
With Charlene Spretnak
Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1986

The Web of Life

A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems
New York: Doubleday, 1997
Author Copyright 1996

The Hidden Connections

Integrating The Biological, Cognitive And Social
Dimensions Of Life Into A Science Of Sustainability
New York: Doubleday, 2002

Steering Business Toward Sustainability

New York: United Nations University Press, 1995

Uncommon Wisdom
Conversations with Remarkable People
New York: Bantam, 1989

—150—
The Science of Leonardo
Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance
New York: Anchor Books, 2008
New York: Bantam Doubleday, 2007 (First Publishing)

Learning from Leonardo

Decoding the Notebooks of a Genius
San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2013

Chaplin, Charles
My Autobiography
New York: Plume, 1992
Originally published in 1964

Chopra, Deepak
Creating Affluence
The A-to-Z Steps to a Richer Life
New York: Amber-Allen Publishing (2003)

Life After Death

The Book of Answers
London: Rider, 2006

Synchrodestiny
Discover the Power of Meaningful Coincidence to Manifest Abundance
Audio Book / CD
Niles, IL: Nightingale-Conant, 2006

The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success

A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams
Audio Book / CD
New York: Amber-Allen Publishing (2002)

The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire

—151—
Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence
New York: Random House Audio, 2003

Clarke, Ronald
Einstein: The Life and Times
New York: Avon Books, 1970

De Bono, Edward
The Use of Lateral Thinking
New York: Penguin, 1967

The Mechanism of Mind

New York: Penguin, 1969

Sur/Petition
London: HarperCollins, 1993

Tactics
London: HarperCollins, 1993
First published in 1985
Serious Creativity
Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas
London: HarperCollins, 1996

DiCarlo, Russell E. (Ed.)

Towards A New World View
Conversations at the Leading Edge
Erie, PA: Epic Publishing, 1996

Dossey, Larry
Recovering the Soul
A Scientific and Spiritual Approach
New York: Bantam Books, 1989

—152—
Dürckheim, Karlfried Graf
Hara: The Vital Center of Man
Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2004

Zen and Us
New York: Penguin Arkana 1991

The Call for the Master

New York: Penguin Books, 1993

Absolute Living
The Otherworldly in the World and the Path to Maturity
New York: Penguin Arkana, 1992

The Way of Transformation

Daily Life as a Spiritual Exercise
London: Allen & Unwin, 1988

The Japanese Cult of Tranquility

London: Rider, 1960

Eden, Donna & Feinstein, David

Energy Medicine
New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1998

The Energy Medicine Kit

Simple Effective Techniques to Help You Boost Your Vitality
Boulder, Co.: Sounds True Editions, 2004

The Promise of Energy Psychology

With David Feinstein and Gary Craig
Revolutionary Tools for Dramatic Personal Change
New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2005

—153—
Einstein, Albert
The World As I See It
New York: Citadel Press, 1993

Out of My Later Years

New York: Outlet, 1993

Ideas and Opinions

New York: Bonanza Books, 1988

Albert Einstein Notebook

London: Dover Publications, 1989

Eisler, Riane
The Chalice and the Blade
Our history, Our future
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1995

Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth and the Politics of the Body

New Paths to Power and Love
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1996

The Partnership Way

New Tools for Living and Learning
With David Loye
Brandon, VT: Holistic Education Press, 1998

The Real Wealth of Nations

Creating a Caring Economics
San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008

Eliade, Mircea
Shamanism
Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

—154—
New York: Pantheon Books, 1964

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987

Emoto, Masaru
The Hidden Messages in Water
New York: Atria Books, 2004

The Secret Life of Water

New York: Atria Books, 2005

Evans-Wentz, Walter Yeeling

The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries
London: Frowde, 1911
Republished by Dover Publications
(Minneola, New York), 2002

Ferguson, Niall
The House of Rothschild
Volume 1: Money’s Prophets, 1798-1848
New York: Penguin Books, 1999

Volume 2: The World’s Banker, 1849-1999

New York: Penguin Books, 2000

Freud, Sigmund
The Interpretation of Dreams
New York: Avon, Reissue Edition, 1980
and in: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud
(24 Volumes) ed. by James Strachey
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976

—155—
Totem and Taboo
New York: Routledge, 1999
Originally published in 1913

Gerber, Richard
A Practical Guide to Vibrational Medicine
Energy Healing and Spiritual Transformation
New York: Harper & Collins, 2001

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von

The Theory of Colors
New York: MIT Press, 1970
First published in 1810

Goldenstein, Joyce
Einstein: Physicist and Genius
(Great Minds of Science)
New York: Enslow Publishers, 1995

Goldman, Jonathan & Goldman, Andi

Tantra of Sound
Frequencies of Healing
Charlottesville: Hampton Roads, 2005

Healing Sounds
The Power of Harmonies
Rochester: Healing Arts Press, 2002

Healing Sounds
Principles of Sound Healing
DVD, 90 min.
Sacred Mysteries, 2004

—156—
Goswami, Amit
The Self-Aware Universe
How Consciousness Creates the Material World
New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1995

Grant
Grant’s Method of Anatomy
10th ed., by John V. Basmajian
Baltimore, London: Williams & Wilkins, 1980

Grof, Stanislav
Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science
New York: State University of New York Press, 1984

Beyond the Brain

Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy
New York: State University of New York, 1985

LSD: Doorway to the Numinous

The Groundbreaking Psychedelic Research into Realms of the Human Uncon-
scious
Rochester: Park Street Press, 2009

Realms of the Human Unconscious

Observations from LSD Research
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1976

The Cosmic Game

Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness
New York: State University of New York Press, 1998

The Holotropic Mind

The Three Levels of Human Consciousness
With Hal Zina Bennett

—157—
New York: HarperCollins, 1993

When the Impossible Happens

Adventures in Non-Ordinary Reality
Louisville, CO: Sounds True, 2005

Hall, Manly P.
The Pineal Gland
The Eye of God
Article extracted from the book:
Man the Grand Symbol of the Mysteries
Kessinger Publishing Reprint

The Secret Teachings of All Ages

Reader’s Edition
New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2003
Originally published in 1928

Hill, Napoleon
Think and Grow Rich
The Landmark Bestseller
Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century
New York: Tarcher, 2005
Originally published in 1937

The Law of Success

The Master Wealth Builder’s Complete Lesson Plan for Achieving Your Dreams
New York: Tarcher, 2008
Originally published in 1928

Holmes, Ernest
The Science of Mind
A Philosophy, A Faith, A Way of Life
New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998

—158—
First Published in 1938

Hunt, Valerie
Infinite Mind
Science of the Human Vibrations of Consciousness
Malibu, CA: Malibu Publishing, 2000

Jaffe, Hans L.C.

Picasso
New York: Abradale Press, 1996

Jung, Carl Gustav

Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
in: The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung
New York: The Modern Library, 1959, 358-407

Collected Works
New York, 1959

On the Nature of the Psyche

in: The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung
New York: The Modern Library, 1959, 47-133

Psychological Types
Collected Writings, Vol. 6
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971

Psychology and Religion

in: The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung
New York: The Modern Library, 1959, 582-655

Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy

in: The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung
New York: The Modern Library, 1959, 537-581

—159—
The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung
New York: The Modern Library, 1959

The Development of Personality

Collected Writings, Vol. 17
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954
The Meaning and Significance of Dreams
Boston: Sigo Press, 1991

The Myth of the Divine Child

in: Essays on A Science of Mythology
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press Bollingen
Series XXII, 1969. (With Karl Kerenyi)

Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

Collected Writings, Vol. 7
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972
First published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1953

Karagulla, Shafica
The Chakras
Correlations between Medical Science and Clairvoyant Observation
With Dora van Gelder Kunz
Wheaton: Quest Books, 1989

Krishnamurti, J.
Freedom From The Known
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1969

The First and Last Freedom

San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975

Education and the Significance of Life

—160—
London: Victor Gollancz, 1978

Commentaries on Living
First Series
London: Victor Gollancz, 1985

Commentaries on Living
Second Series
London: Victor Gollancz, 1986

Krishnamurti's Journal
London: Victor Gollancz, 1987

Krishnamurti's Notebook
London: Victor Gollancz, 1986

Beyond Violence
London: Victor Gollancz, 1985

Beginnings of Learning
New York: Penguin, 1986

The Penguin Krishnamurti Reader

New York: Penguin, 1987

On God
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1992

On Fear
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1995

The Essential Krishnamurti

San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1996

—161—
The Ending of Time
With Dr. David Bohm
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985

LaBerge, Stephen
Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming
With Howard Rheingold
New York: Ballantine Books, 1991

Lakhovsky, Georges
La Science et le Bonheur
Longévité et Immortalité par les Vibrations
Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1930

Le Secret de la Vie
Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1929

Secret of Life
New York: Kessinger Publishing, 2003

L'étiologie du Cancer
Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1929

L'Universion
Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1927

Laszlo, Ervin
Science and the Akashic Field
An Integral Theory of Everything
Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2004
Quantum Shift to the Global Brain
How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World
Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2008

—162—
Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos
The Rise of the Integral Vision of Reality
Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2006

The Akashic Experience

Science and the Cosmic Memory Field
Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2009

The Chaos Point

The World at the Crossroads
Newburyport, MA: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2006

Leadbeater, Charles Webster

Astral Plane
Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena
Kessinger Publishing Reprint Edition, 1997

Dreams
What they Are and How they are Caused
London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1903
Kessinger Publishing Reprint Edition, 1998

The Inner Life

Chicago: The Rajput Press, 1911
Kessinger Publishing

Leboyer, Frederick
Birth Without Violence
New York, 1975

Inner Beauty, Inner Light

New York: Newmarket Press, 1997

Loving Hands

—163—
The Traditional Art of Baby Massage
New York: Newmarket Press, 1977

The Art of Breathing

New York: Newmarket Press, 1991

Liedloff, Jean
Continuum Concept
In Search of Happiness Lost
New York: Perseus Books, 1986
First published in 1977

Long, Max Freedom

The Secret Science at Work
The Huna Method as a Way of Life
Marina del Rey: De Vorss Publications, 1995
Originally published in 1953

Growing Into Light

A Personal Guide to Practicing the Huna Method,
Marina del Rey: De Vorss Publications, 1955

Lowen, Alexander
Bioenergetics
New York: Coward, McGoegham 1975

Depression and the Body

The Biological Basis of Faith and Reality
New York: Penguin, 1992

Fear of Life
New York: Bioenergetic Press, 2003

Honoring the Body

—164—
The Autobiography of Alexander Lowen
New York: Bioenergetic Press, 2004

Joy
The Surrender to the Body and to Life
New York: Penguin, 1995

Love and Orgasm

New York: Macmillan, 1965

Love, Sex and Your Heart

New York: Bioenergetics Press, 2004

Narcissism: Denial of the True Self

New York: Macmillan, Collier Books, 1983

Pleasure: A Creative Approach to Life

New York: Bioenergetics Press, 2004
First published in 1970

The Language of the Body

Physical Dynamics of Character Structure
New York: Bioenergetics Press, 2006
First published in 1958

Maharshi, Ramana
The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi
New York: Sri Ramanasramam, 2002

The Essential Teachings of Ramana Maharshi

A Visual Journey
New York: Inner Directions Publishing, 2002
by Matthew Greenblad

—165—
McKenna, Terence
The Archaic Revival
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1992

Food of The Gods

A Radical History of Plants, Drugs and Human Evolution
London: Rider, 1992

The Invisible Landscape

Mind Hallucinogens and the I Ching
New York: HarperCollins, 1993
(With Dennis McKenna)

True Hallucinations
Being the Account of the Author’s Extraordinary
Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise
New York: Fine Communications, 1998

McTaggart, Lynne
The Field
The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe
New York: Harper & Collins, 2002

Metzner, Ralph (Ed.)

Ayahuasca, Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature
ed. by Ralph Metzner, Ph.D
New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999

The Psychedelic Experience

A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead
With Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert
New York: Citadel, 1995

—166—
Miller, Alice
Four Your Own Good
Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983

Pictures of a Childhood
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986

The Drama of the Gifted Child

In Search for the True Self
translated by Ruth Ward
New York: Basic Books, 1996

Thou Shalt Not Be Aware

Society’s Betrayal of the Child
New York: Noonday, 1998

Monsaingeon, Bruno
Svjatoslav Richter
Notebooks and Conversations
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002

Richter
Écrits, conversations
Paris: Éditions Van de Velde, 1998

Richter The Enigma / L’Insoumis / Der Unbeugsame

NVC Arts 1998 (DVD)

Montagu, Ashley
Touching
The Human Significance of the Skin
New York: Harper & Row, 1978

—167—
Moore, Thomas
Care of the Soul
A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life
New York: Harper & Collins, 1994

Murphy, Joseph
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
West Nyack, N.Y.: Parker, 1981, N.Y.: Bantam, 1982
Originally published in 1962

The Miracle of Mind Dynamics

New York: Prentice Hall, 1964

Miracle Power for Infinite Riches

West Nyack, N.Y.: Parker, 1972

The Amazing Laws of Cosmic Mind Power

West Nyack, N.Y.: Parker, 1973

Secrets of the I Ching

West Nyack, N.Y.: Parker, 1970

Think Yourself Rich

Use the Power of Your Subconscious Mind to Find True Wealth
Revised by Ian D. McMahan, Ph.D.
Paramus, NJ: Reward Books, 2001

Myss, Caroline
The Creation of Health
The Emotional, Psychological, and Spiritual Responses
that Promote Health and Healing
With C. Norman Shealy, M.D.
New York: Harmony Books, 1998

—168—
Narby, Jeremy
The Cosmic Serpent
DNA and the Origins of Knowledge
New York: J. P. Tarcher, 1999

Nau, Erika
Self-Awareness Through Huna
Virginia Beach: Donning, 1981

Neill, Alexander Sutherland

Neill! Neill! Orange-Peel!
New York: Hart Publishing Co., 1972

Summerhill
A Radical Approach to Child Rearing
New York: Hart Publishing, Reprint 1984
Originally published 1960

Summerhill School
A New View of Childhood
New York: St. Martin's Press
Reprint 1995

Newton, Michael
Life Between Lives
Hypnotherapy for Spiritual Regression
Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn Publications, 2006

Nichols, Sallie
Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey
New York: Red Wheel/Weiser, 1986

—169—
Odent, Michel
Birth Reborn
What Childbirth Should Be
London: Souvenir Press, 1994

The Scientification of Love

London: Free Association Books, 1999

Primal Health
Understanding the Critical Period Between Conception and the First Birthday
London: Clairview Books, 2002
First Published in 1986 with Century Hutchinson in London

La Santé Primale
Paris: Payot, 1986

The Functions of the Orgasms

The Highway to Transcendence
London: Pinter & Martin, 2009

Pert, Candace B.
Molecules of Emotion
The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine
New York: Scribner, 2003

Ponder, Catherine
The Healing Secrets of the Ages
Marine del Rey: DeVorss, 1985

Prescott, James W.
Affectional Bonding for the Prevention of Violent Behaviors
Neurobiological, Psychological and Religious/Spiritual Determinants
in: Hertzberg, L.J., Ostrum, G.F. and Field, J.R., (Eds.)

—170—
Violent Behavior
Vol. 1, Assessment & Intervention, Chapter Six
New York: PMA Publishing, 1990

Alienation of Affection
Psychology Today, December 1979

Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 10-20 (1975)

Deprivation of Physical Affection as a Primary Process in the

Development of Physical Violence
A Comparative and Cross-Cultural Perspective,
in: David G. Gil, ed., Child Abuse and Violence
New York: Ams Press, 1979

Early somatosensory deprivation as an ontogenetic process in the abnormal

development of the brain and behavior,
in: Medical Primatology, ed. by I.E. Goldsmith and J. Moor-Jankowski,
New York: S. Karger, 1971

Phylogenetic and ontogenetic aspects of human affectional development, in:

Progress in Sexology, Proceedings of the 1976 International Congress of Sexolo-
gy, ed. by R. Gemme & C.C. Wheeler
New York: Plenum Press, 1977

Prevention or Therapy and the Politics of Trust

Inspiring a New Human Agenda
in: Psychotherapy and Politics International
Volume 3(3), pp. 194-211
London: John Wiley, 2005
Somatosensory affectional deprivation (SAD) theory of drug and alcohol use,
in: Theories on Drug Abuse: Selected Contemporary Perspectives,
ed. by Dan J. Lettieri, Mollie Sayers and Helen Wallenstien Pearson,

—171—
NIDA Research Monograph 30, March 1980
Rockville, MD: National Institute on Drug Abuse, Department of Health and
Human
Services, 1980

The Origins of Human Love and Violence

Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Journal
Volume 10, Number 3:
Spring 1996, pp. 143-188The Origins of Love and Violence
Sensory Deprivation and the Developing Brain
Research and Prevention (DVD)

Radin, Dean
The Conscious Universe
The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1997

Entangled Minds
Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality
New York: Paraview Pocket Books, 2006

Reeves, John
The Rothschilds
The Financial Rulers of Nations
London, 1887
Classic Reprint
New York: Forgotten Books, 2012

Reich, Wilhelm
Children of the Future
On the Prevention of Sexual Pathology
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983

—172—
First published in 1950

CORE (Cosmic Orgone Engineering)

Part I, Space Ships, DOR and DROUGHT
©1984, Orgone Institute Press
XEROX Copy from the Wilhelm Reich Museum

Early Writings 1
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975

Ether, God & Devil & Cosmic Superimposition

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972
Originally published in 1949

Genitality in the Theory and Therapy of Neurosis

©1980 by Mary Boyd Higgins as Director of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust

People in Trouble
©1974 by Mary Boyd Higgins as Director of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust

Record of a Friendship
The Correspondence of Wilhelm Reich and A. S. Neill
New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981

Selected Writings
An Introduction to Orgonomy
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973

The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983
Originally published in 1935

The Bion Experiments

reprinted in Selected Writings

—173—
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973

The Cancer Biopathy (The Orgone, Vol. 2)

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973

The Function of the Orgasm (The Orgone, Vol. 1)

Orgone Institute Press, New York, 1942

The Invasion of Compulsory Sex Morality

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971
Originally published in 1932

The Leukemia Problem: Approach

©1951, Orgone Institute Press
Copyright Renewed 1979
XEROX Copy from the Wilhelm Reich Museum

The Mass Psychology of Fascism

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970
Originally published in 1933

The Orgone Energy Accumulator

Its Scientific and Medical Use
©1951, 1979, Orgone Institute Press
XEROX Copy from the Wilhelm Reich Museum

The Schizophrenic Split

©1945, 1949, 1972 by Mary Boyd Higgins as Director of the
Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust
XEROX Copy from the Wilhelm Reich Museum

The Sexual Revolution

©1945, 1962 by Mary Boyd Higgins as Director of the Wilhelm Reich Infant
Trust

—174—
Satinover, Jeffrey
Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth
New York: Baker Books, 1996

The Quantum Brain

New York: Wiley & Sons, 2001

Schlipp, Paul A. (Ed.)

Albert Einstein
Philosopher-Scientist
New York: Open Court Publishing, 1988

Schultes, Richard Evans, et al.

Plants of the Gods
Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers
New York: Healing Arts Press
2nd edition, 2002

Sheldrake, Rupert
A New Science of Life
The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance
Rochester: Park Street Press, 1995

Simonton, Otto Carl et al.

Getting Well Again
Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1978

Small, Jacquelyn
The Sacred Purpose of Being Human
A Journey Through the 12 Principles of Wholeness
New York: HCI, 2005

—175—
Strassman, Rick
DMT: The Spirit Molecule
A doctor’s revolutionary research into the biology of near-death
and mystical experiences
Rochester: Park Street Press, 2001

Talbot, Michael
The Holographic Universe
New York: HarperCollins, 1992

Textor, R. B.
A Cross-Cultural Summary
New Haven, Human Relations Area Files (HRAF)
Press, 1967

The Ultimate Picasso

New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000

Tiller, William A.
Conscious Acts of Creation
The Emergence of a New Physics
Associated Producers, 2004 (DVD)

Psychoenergetic Science
New York: Pavior, 2007

Conscious Acts of Creation

New York: Pavior, 2001

Van Gelder, Dora

The Real World of Fairies
A First-Person Account
Wheaton: Quest Books, 1999
First published in 1977

—176—
Villoldo, Alberto
Healing States
A Journey Into the World of Spiritual Healing and Shamanism
With Stanley Krippner
New York: Simon & Schuster (Fireside), 1987

Dance of the Four Winds

Secrets of the Inca Medicine Wheel
With Eric Jendresen
Rochester: Destiny Books, 1995

Shaman, Healer, Sage

How to Heal Yourself and Others with the Energy Medicine of the Americas
New York: Harmony, 2000

Healing the Luminous Body

The Way of the Shaman with Dr. Alberto Villoldo
DVD, Sacred Mysteries Productions, 2004

Mending The Past And Healing The Future with Soul Retrieval
New York: Hay House, 2005

Zukav, Gary
The Dancing Wu Li Masters
An Overview of the New Physics
New York: HarperOne, 2001

—177—