The near death literature started growing in the 1960s when medical science started to bring back cardiac arrest patients. A light shines within those who have been completely transformed and they are far more present than ever before. How can conscience be enhanced?
Near death experience Hallucinations Drug effects Dream states Anoxia and Hypoxia. Specifically, anoxia is a condition in which there is an absence of oxygen supply to an organ's tissues although there is adequate blood flow to the tissue. Hypoxia is a condition in which there is a decrease of oxygen to the tissue in spite of adequate blood flow to the tissue. |
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The Mystery of DMT
The shamanic transformation consists of people going through some terrible experiences, often drug-induced. They usually use psychedelic chemicals of one form or another. Often mushrooms but in many cases ayahuasca in the Amazon. These experiences transport people to another world, or that’s at least how they interpret it. What we know about psychedelics could fit in a thimble as we know virtually nothing about them so far. Something that is very common among people who take these sorts of chemicals is that their personality transforms, permanently. Such that, one year later they are one standard deviation higher in openness. Openness being the creativity dimension - so that is quite remarkable. |
To watch more of Dr. Peterson’s content you may use this link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL_f53ZEJxp8TtlOkHwMV9Q
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They say we only use 10% of our brains, the other 90% is there for neurological Headroom which we need in order to say healthy and sane but it's also there because much of it is busy monitoring what's going on in our brains and monitoring the world around us in order to choose what to inhibit or what to dis-inhibit. If we used a hundred percent of our brains we'd be in a lot of pain and we'd probably be in a state known as status epilepticus, the ongoing epileptic seizure because that would be the only way to get a hundred percent of your brain operating at once, we wouldn't stay there long and then we die. If you look at an EEG an electroencephalogram something that displays brainwaves and you're eating you're going to have one set of patterns that appear on it. if you're falling asleep you're going to have another. |
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Each human behavior each way of thinking gives us a different set of brainwave patterns so it's not a very big step to think that if you're somehow connected to God through prayer through an actual vision of God by reflecting on the points of your faith in God your EEG pattern your brainwave pattern is still going to have another pattern this should come regardless of whether you're praying thinking of God or even hearing words that remind you of God so just from this simple straightforward way of thinking of it, we arrive at the conclusion that God whatever that means to you has someplace in your brain or some effect on your brain ...God began quite a while ago but one of the decisive observations about this came from the famous Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield who did his best work between the 1940s and the 1960s and he actually elicited a number of what were called in those days psychical visions out-of-body experiences strange and even spiritual moments that came up not only for his epileptic patients but also for the patients that he had on the operating table he would stimulate the surface of their brain and all sorts of interesting things happened he's well known for this work but he also recorded a case where one of his epileptic patients actually had visions of God coming down from the sky framed as if in a picture and this was published in the scientific literature which is what makes it such an important observation and that one actually ties down the notion that epilepsy, a brain disorder ,can have spiritual even theistic impacts on people, the experience of God can occur during an epileptic seizure.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky who wrote about it in his book that possessed had seizures that included not so much clear visions of God but the experience f bliss and ecstasy that was so intense that he couldn't attribute it to anything else and the next major step forward in this and I'm skipping by a lot of research by some very excellent people was accomplished by dr. Michael Persinger who is director of the Laurentian University behavioral neurosciences program and has been my mentor for about years and he was actually able to induce visions of God in the laboratory and he too used a piece of equipment for this called the Koren Helmet which has also gotten the nickname The God Helmet and we'll be seeing it further along in this talk one of the things that he did that helped him develop the god helmet the Koren Helmet was he developed a theory that allowed him to predict that this kind of thing should be possible in laboratory settings and I'll be getting to the procedures for that in a couple of minutes his most important contribution to understanding God in the brain or the science of spirituality came when he had an insight as to the origins of spirituality in human evolution now when our species first appeared as Homo sapiens our brains went through a couple of major changes actually, we went through lots and lots and lots of changes but two of the most important were the two areas of the brain became larger the frontal lobes which are concerned with the future anticipation extrapolation expectation planning especially planning social things thinking about how you'll relate to other people and the other is the temporal lobes.
Now, the temporal lobes are primarily concerned with memory but they also have a number of other functions which I'll be getting to shortly but for the moment what I want to get across is that the temporal lobes of the brain are the source for most spiritual experiences what are called in the scientific literature religious and mystic experiences and Dr. Persinger knew this because of Dr. Wilder Penfield work as well as the many reports that come from people with temporal lobe epilepsy that contained spiritual themes comments visions and so forth not a lot of that got into publication in the early days because the scientific community was not as open to it as they are now and what Dr. Persinger realized was that the only way we could understand the facts of our death is to think about it. No one with the exception of very few people who have had near-death experiences who have been dead and come back been resuscitated or revived after has been dead so the only way that most people can understand that they're going to die is to think about it and arrive at the verbal construction, I will die and from there think about it and take it a bit personally and it works in lots of different ways and one of them is something like this that person has a father their father died that person has a father their father died I'm a father oh-oh it's going to happen to me too this person got old and then they died another person got old and then they died I look in the stream in those days there probably were no mirrors we're talking early in our evolutionary history and I look in and see that I've got wrinkled skin and I've got gray hairs and oh my I'm going to die - taking it personally is very different from understanding the fact of death engaging the thought that one's own person will die take some time and every parent has the moment when they're three or four-year-old asks them daddy does everyone have to die that's the moment when they're beginning to take it personally and the reason that human beings can do this and especially at such an early age my own child asked me this question when she was three is because the temporal lobes are now more able to remember more kinds of information and process our memories far more extensively than we had earlier in our evolutionary history the frontal lobes are now able to extrapolate into the future in more ways and in more abstract ways than they had been previously so this very actually from the point of view of your average three-year-old unlikely experience that of personal death can be arrived at as a conclusion and so people tend to know that they're going to die now we tend to suppress these thoughts and this suppression is buttressed by nearly every religious tradition in existence
which tell us that we're not going to die we're going to move on. Death is not death. Death is a way, death is an awakening, death is a transition to the spirit world, death is going home, death is to be with the gods. death is to join our Father in heaven, but no matter how the religions process this, and there seems to be no culture on this earth that does not have a religion that has this concept embedded in it, somewhere we are allowed to suppress the fact of our own personal mortality and what this does is reduces death anxiety. Now death anxiety is a very good thing because it allows us, it encourages us to think of all the different ways that we can be killed and avoid them so if we understand that Jaguars live high in the trees and we're walking through the forest we're more likely to take a look
up once in a while and make sure there's nothing there that offers a threat if famine takes lives and the water supply gets scarce and we know that makes it
hard to find food then we're more likely to take notice of any unlikely food sources that we would have passed by earlier and if the food supply does run out we know where to go to get something that isn't so appetizing but at least will keep us nourished so we anticipate ways of dying and we avoid them this helps us survive but the stress involved in continually being aware of your own personal death can be quite unnerving if you think that you can think of your own personal death without
any stress or psychological discomfort try the next step below it and see how that feels pretend your doctor's told you you've just got terminal cancer see how that feels if you have no personal stress about the moment of death it's probably because you've really taken on board that you're not going to die as offered by your religion so spirituality extends our lives by helping us live with less stress with live without the stress that goes with death anxiety at the same time as we can maintain a regular awareness of the fact and the reality of death and take steps to avoid us and that is a very complicated arrangement for a mind of any kind to
live with but human evolution has allowed us the luxury of staying alive and allowed us the luxury of not being worried about dying and that makes life
very much easier to live and makes it lasts a bit longer than it would otherwise so Dr. Michael Persinger concluded that
we're predisposed to be in a healthy kind of denial about the fact of our own deaths and the experience of God the firsthand vision of God what the Hindus
called darshan what some Christians callthe you neo Mystica is a real enough experience that we can begin by accepting that it happens to some people
that all the people that have said they have met God face-to-face aren't lying they're actually giving what scientists can take on board as anecdotal reports
and an important question is why are our brains able to produce this experience one answer is that there actually is a God a creator of the universe who has a personal relationship with each one of us and that we are able to connect to through God's will the other possible explanation the one that I'm going to be working with tonight is that our brains are able to produce this experience for us and that brings an immediate question why it's a very unlikely thing to imagine that our brains are predisposed through their wiring and that we are able through our evolutionary history to have a face-to-face meeting with what feels to us like the creator of the universe the source of love and bliss and acceptance and all the glorious attributes that go with God and the answer is we're wired for it it happens naturally during the death process and the evidence for this is in near-death experiences and it's important for me to say now that I accept near-death experiences not as any kind of brain blips or a malfunction of the brain that happens when we're dying I think that near-death experiences act Julie reveal to us the death process as
experienced by human beings what people tell us when they tell us about their near-death experiences or when we read about them in the many books on the
subject actually reflects something from the wide range of possibilities that people have for their own individual deaths and the experience of God is probably more common in that context than in any other context hundreds thousands of monks and nuns have prayed to meet God face to face and their prayers for whatever reason have gone unanswered hundreds of people thousands of people have died and come back to life and reported meeting God and they never prayed for it at all so I think that the process that much more reliably produces the direct experience of God is a better place to look for evidence about the experience than the world's religious traditions and what we have on the screen now is a picture of the Koren Helmet also known as the god helmet and this is the apparatus that's used to produce experiences experiences of God and next to it we have a picture of Stan Koren who actually developed the first one working with Dr. Michael Persinger and
to start off explaining how the brain experiences the experience of God I need to tell you that according to Dr.Persinger's hypotheses and theories we
actually have two senses of self one for each side of the brain the self on the left side of the brain where the language centers are is the linguistic sense of self that's the self that thinks in words and the self that is impacted upon by words it's the dominant sense of self it's the self that we usually are in most of our waking moments in what scientists call normal states of consciousness the self on the right side of the brain is a much more silent sense of self there are no language centers on the right side of the brain and what that means is that for us to be in normal states of consciousness where our linguistic skills are available for us to relate to other people where linguistic species we use words we have a constant stream of inner dialogue but we're also a social species and we primarily relate to other people through words this may not be the highest form of relating but it's the most common form and it's the one that you use when you're applying for a job when you're saying hello to your neighbor when you're having the ordinary garden-variety day-to-day relating x' that make up our social reality so we have to be the linguistic self in order that we can be integrated with other people and the usual way to integrate with other people is one way or another through our cultures and our culture's demand that we be able and available for linguistic tasking able and available to use words and relating to other people at any time now the other thing about the linguistic sense of self and here we have an illustration that shows you the two senses of self on the two sides of the brain as well as the language centers Broca's area and Wernicke's area for those of you who are interested Broca's area produces speech and Verna Keys area understand speech and ordinarily these two senses of self are quite seamlessly integrated so that even though we are this sense of self on the Left we get lots and lots of input all the time from the sense of self on the right and when I say self in this context I mean the word in a sense that matches the gaze self-esteem so that our self-esteem rises and falls according to the words that we hear if someone says you you're cute we feel a bit better about ourselves if our boss says you're fired we feel terrible if another employer says you're hired we feel great once again our self-esteem impacts on our emotions and there's very few things that go on in the inner landscape of the human human consciousness than our emotions almost nothing looms larger and our emotions change radically according to the words that we hear and this is an important piece of understanding to take on board to understand that we are our linguistic sense of self we are the left hemispheric one as as the dominant sense of self now ordinarily like I said the two work together quite seamlessly but once in a while communication between the two breaks down which is appears in this illustration as having the broken as having the lines that connect them sort of broken up a bit and this can happen for a number of reasons the communication between the hemispheres can lose its coherence they can fall out of phase with one another one hemisphere because of some circumstance can stop working as well as the other and we can find that for a moment we don't feel quite intact we absorb ourselves in a book and then someone calls to us and we have to pull our attention out and there's a brief moment where we sort of collect ourselves and bring ourselves back to that social being that we have to be in order not to be alone with the book but rather connecting and relating to someone else the relating is not completely automatic and in moments when we have to grope for it though we can find if you're looking carefully enough that your sense of self is kind of broken up a little bit when the two actually fall out of phase or lose their coherence in more extreme way both of them continue to operate but one of them is no longer available for us it's broken its communication with the other and what happens is that it's perceived as a separate being that exists outside of ourselves outside of our body space and this creates the basis for a whole class of experience is called visitor experiences and visitor experiences are any kind of experience where we're actually being visited or communicating with or even just seeing a non-physical being and it's very mean and it's very mildest form it's called the sensed presence and it refers to the reasonably ordinary experience not everyone gets it but most people have had a few times a feeling that there's someone standing behind you but when you turn to look there's no one there and when you feel that presence in that moment what you're actually feeling is your subordinates sense of self emerging into the awareness of your dominant sense of self so that in that moment you are actually in a kind of existential sense to beings at once the most intense of these is God and now we're back to the god helmet.
the Curan helmet and the way it works is it applies signals magnetic signals that are derived from electrical signals that either come from the brain or have an impact on the brain relies on the same kinds of mechanisms that produce any other visitor experience disconnecting or getting the two sides of the brain to work getting them to perform and act independently of one another and it works by applying magnetic copies of electrical signals that either come from the brain through EEG or that the brain is known to respond to and I'll be saying more about those signals in a moment one of the signals is derived from the amygdala structured deep in the brain deep in the temporal lobes of the brain it's a very very active structure it never shuts down completely and it actually uses more blood than any other part of the brain it has lower firing thresholds than any other part of the brain it takes less electrical input to get the amygdala to respond than any other part of the brain and the amygdala is a very social structure it helps us relate to other people when we look at other people and their facial expressions it tells us what other people's moods are it changes in most mood disorders nearly any emotional disorder will have an amygdala that's larger or smaller on one side of the other sometimes the differences can be quite dramatic it carries emotional memories most memories are embedded retrieved preserved consolidated and created in different areas of the brain but the amygdala is actually capable of remembering things that have sparked strong emotional responses to us what we
call emotional memories now the amygdala is very highly specialized on one side of the brain according to the research at Laurentian under Dr. Persinger which isn't the same as some others on one side on the right side it produces fear and in its own independent action the amygdala on the right can produce a state of fear that's so intense that people feel a sense of impending doom and the amygdala on the left is specialized for positive emotions things like elation happiness joy and even the kind of bliss that we associate with religious ecstasy and the way the Koran helmet works I'll be getting to in just a minute but for now let me go over very briefly the experiences that the Koran helmet has been able to produce visions of God out-of-body experiences seeing into a black inner space that's been nicknamed the void which can also occur in near-death experiences and here we have actually three pictures one of them is Stan Koren wearing the latest version of his apparatus one of them is the yellow Koren helmet the one that was used in so many experiments and then the one on the right is a commercially available device which you can learn about it's WWE ritual brain comm known as Shakti which is a Hindu word that just means energy and is also the name of a goddess other people have had visions of angels visions of demons moments of bliss terror scene lights including little floaty lights and had very powerful tingly electrical sensations running through their body so the god helmet does not produce visions of God it produces lots and lots and lots of altered states and visions of God constitute only one of them and in order to use this or any other technology to produce and experience this as dramatic as that you actually need reasonably precise experimental conditions above all this means complete silence we see Dr. ma Persinger entering the acoustic chamber the absolutely silent chamber as well as a computer at the bottom of that picture running a program called complex which is authored by Stan Koren and which drives a computer to actually produce the signal the commercial device Shakti works with an ordinary computer sound card the coils for the current helmet the magnetic coils are located over the temporal lobes this isn't the arrangement but seen from above this picture shows approximately where those magnetic coils go above the temporal lobes which is located directly above the ears - about two inches above the ears and as I mentioned earlier the temporal lobes are the source for most spiritual religious and mystic experiences at least that's what the brain stimulation evidence is telling us and that kind of evidence continues to mount up rather impressively there are in fact several session designs that created spiritual experiences in Dr. Persinger's lab using this kind of technology and here we're only going to look at the most successful one in the first phase a signal is applied over the right side of the brain and the signal that's used is actually called a chirp signal and a chirp signal is one that just gets a lower pitch as it goes along so that the beginning of the chirp signal could be several octaves above middle C and yet within a quarter of a second it could take it down to two octaves below middle C that rapidly falling pitch and this signal is repeated for about half an hour and the second phase of this procedure now let me stay with the first phase for a moment in this phase of the procedure the right side of the brain is getting a stimulation that the left side is not getting and that sets the stage for - the two of them to unction differently to fall out of phase for their normal communicate to be a bit disrupted and as I mentioned earlier that's one of the prerequisites for any kind of visitor experience whether it's a simple sense of a presence or an actual vision of God the second phase of this procedure which you can see somewhat simplistically illustrated shows that another signal is now being applied across the head and being so that the entire brain is being exposed to it this signal is derived from the amygdala and EEG signal taken from deep in the brain that showed that the amygdala was working was taken turned into a magnetic signal so that the magnetic field rises and falls in the same pattern that the electrical activity the raw Milla voltage because we're talking about very small mounts of electricity here the same rises and falls in Miller and Miller voltage made for its pattern so that the electrical signal is now being applied as a magnetic signal not an electromagnetic signal electromagnets are used to produce the signal but electromagnetic frequencies are something very different these signals are in very low frequencies and electromagnetic output like your microwave oven is a different beast altogether this is related to the safety of these studies within it but this technology is not like putting a microwave on your head it's more like putting a pair of stereo headphones on your head stereo headphone headphones output magnetic fields that rise and fall with the music and actually in roughly the same intensity as the signals used in the laboratory but the signals in the lab have very specific patterns and the ones that you expose your brain to when you're listening to music with headphones don't have these patterns have whatever patterns come from the music so what happens with the second phase of this procedure is that the amygdala which has gotten on the left which has gotten more and more quiet as the one on the right became more and more active is now given information that allows it to burst into activity and compensating for this the amygdala on the right gets much quieter so that now the left amygdala the ,one that is specialized for bliss joy elation and so forth can burst suddenly into X into activation and the result is a visitor experience with a positive feel if the person is sensitive enough to this kind of stimulation if their amygdala is more sensitive than most and not all brain parts are equally sensitive in all people this explains a great deal about personality differences the person can actually find the experience unfolding into a vision of God and what I'm going to do now is read to you a brief email that I got from Dr. Persinger himself. I sent him an email asking how many people what percent of the total subjects that he had worked with had experienced God in his laboratory and the reason I like to put this in is because the technology that's used is called the Koren helmet the god helmet is a name the journalists gave it with their love of sensationalism always wanting to give the most flamboyant name to anything they run into in a laboratory and I'm being asked what percent of people experience God in the lab Dr. Persinger replied so thus far about twenty or so people have reported feeling the presence of Christ or even seeing him in the chamber the acoustic chamber where the experiments took place most of these people use Christ and God interchangeably most of these individuals were older thirty years or more and religious predominantly Roman Catholic one male aged about years old allegedly atheist but having early childhood romantic moment Catholic training saw a clear apparition the shoulders and the head of Christ staring him in the face he was quite shaken by the experience I did not complete a follow-up regarding his change in behavior of course these are all reports what we did find with one world-class psychic who experiences Christ as a component of his reported experience that by applying another pattern derived from a different brain
Fyodor Dostoyevsky who wrote about it in his book that possessed had seizures that included not so much clear visions of God but the experience f bliss and ecstasy that was so intense that he couldn't attribute it to anything else and the next major step forward in this and I'm skipping by a lot of research by some very excellent people was accomplished by dr. Michael Persinger who is director of the Laurentian University behavioral neurosciences program and has been my mentor for about years and he was actually able to induce visions of God in the laboratory and he too used a piece of equipment for this called the Koren Helmet which has also gotten the nickname The God Helmet and we'll be seeing it further along in this talk one of the things that he did that helped him develop the god helmet the Koren Helmet was he developed a theory that allowed him to predict that this kind of thing should be possible in laboratory settings and I'll be getting to the procedures for that in a couple of minutes his most important contribution to understanding God in the brain or the science of spirituality came when he had an insight as to the origins of spirituality in human evolution now when our species first appeared as Homo sapiens our brains went through a couple of major changes actually, we went through lots and lots and lots of changes but two of the most important were the two areas of the brain became larger the frontal lobes which are concerned with the future anticipation extrapolation expectation planning especially planning social things thinking about how you'll relate to other people and the other is the temporal lobes.
Now, the temporal lobes are primarily concerned with memory but they also have a number of other functions which I'll be getting to shortly but for the moment what I want to get across is that the temporal lobes of the brain are the source for most spiritual experiences what are called in the scientific literature religious and mystic experiences and Dr. Persinger knew this because of Dr. Wilder Penfield work as well as the many reports that come from people with temporal lobe epilepsy that contained spiritual themes comments visions and so forth not a lot of that got into publication in the early days because the scientific community was not as open to it as they are now and what Dr. Persinger realized was that the only way we could understand the facts of our death is to think about it. No one with the exception of very few people who have had near-death experiences who have been dead and come back been resuscitated or revived after has been dead so the only way that most people can understand that they're going to die is to think about it and arrive at the verbal construction, I will die and from there think about it and take it a bit personally and it works in lots of different ways and one of them is something like this that person has a father their father died that person has a father their father died I'm a father oh-oh it's going to happen to me too this person got old and then they died another person got old and then they died I look in the stream in those days there probably were no mirrors we're talking early in our evolutionary history and I look in and see that I've got wrinkled skin and I've got gray hairs and oh my I'm going to die - taking it personally is very different from understanding the fact of death engaging the thought that one's own person will die take some time and every parent has the moment when they're three or four-year-old asks them daddy does everyone have to die that's the moment when they're beginning to take it personally and the reason that human beings can do this and especially at such an early age my own child asked me this question when she was three is because the temporal lobes are now more able to remember more kinds of information and process our memories far more extensively than we had earlier in our evolutionary history the frontal lobes are now able to extrapolate into the future in more ways and in more abstract ways than they had been previously so this very actually from the point of view of your average three-year-old unlikely experience that of personal death can be arrived at as a conclusion and so people tend to know that they're going to die now we tend to suppress these thoughts and this suppression is buttressed by nearly every religious tradition in existence
which tell us that we're not going to die we're going to move on. Death is not death. Death is a way, death is an awakening, death is a transition to the spirit world, death is going home, death is to be with the gods. death is to join our Father in heaven, but no matter how the religions process this, and there seems to be no culture on this earth that does not have a religion that has this concept embedded in it, somewhere we are allowed to suppress the fact of our own personal mortality and what this does is reduces death anxiety. Now death anxiety is a very good thing because it allows us, it encourages us to think of all the different ways that we can be killed and avoid them so if we understand that Jaguars live high in the trees and we're walking through the forest we're more likely to take a look
up once in a while and make sure there's nothing there that offers a threat if famine takes lives and the water supply gets scarce and we know that makes it
hard to find food then we're more likely to take notice of any unlikely food sources that we would have passed by earlier and if the food supply does run out we know where to go to get something that isn't so appetizing but at least will keep us nourished so we anticipate ways of dying and we avoid them this helps us survive but the stress involved in continually being aware of your own personal death can be quite unnerving if you think that you can think of your own personal death without
any stress or psychological discomfort try the next step below it and see how that feels pretend your doctor's told you you've just got terminal cancer see how that feels if you have no personal stress about the moment of death it's probably because you've really taken on board that you're not going to die as offered by your religion so spirituality extends our lives by helping us live with less stress with live without the stress that goes with death anxiety at the same time as we can maintain a regular awareness of the fact and the reality of death and take steps to avoid us and that is a very complicated arrangement for a mind of any kind to
live with but human evolution has allowed us the luxury of staying alive and allowed us the luxury of not being worried about dying and that makes life
very much easier to live and makes it lasts a bit longer than it would otherwise so Dr. Michael Persinger concluded that
we're predisposed to be in a healthy kind of denial about the fact of our own deaths and the experience of God the firsthand vision of God what the Hindus
called darshan what some Christians callthe you neo Mystica is a real enough experience that we can begin by accepting that it happens to some people
that all the people that have said they have met God face-to-face aren't lying they're actually giving what scientists can take on board as anecdotal reports
and an important question is why are our brains able to produce this experience one answer is that there actually is a God a creator of the universe who has a personal relationship with each one of us and that we are able to connect to through God's will the other possible explanation the one that I'm going to be working with tonight is that our brains are able to produce this experience for us and that brings an immediate question why it's a very unlikely thing to imagine that our brains are predisposed through their wiring and that we are able through our evolutionary history to have a face-to-face meeting with what feels to us like the creator of the universe the source of love and bliss and acceptance and all the glorious attributes that go with God and the answer is we're wired for it it happens naturally during the death process and the evidence for this is in near-death experiences and it's important for me to say now that I accept near-death experiences not as any kind of brain blips or a malfunction of the brain that happens when we're dying I think that near-death experiences act Julie reveal to us the death process as
experienced by human beings what people tell us when they tell us about their near-death experiences or when we read about them in the many books on the
subject actually reflects something from the wide range of possibilities that people have for their own individual deaths and the experience of God is probably more common in that context than in any other context hundreds thousands of monks and nuns have prayed to meet God face to face and their prayers for whatever reason have gone unanswered hundreds of people thousands of people have died and come back to life and reported meeting God and they never prayed for it at all so I think that the process that much more reliably produces the direct experience of God is a better place to look for evidence about the experience than the world's religious traditions and what we have on the screen now is a picture of the Koren Helmet also known as the god helmet and this is the apparatus that's used to produce experiences experiences of God and next to it we have a picture of Stan Koren who actually developed the first one working with Dr. Michael Persinger and
to start off explaining how the brain experiences the experience of God I need to tell you that according to Dr.Persinger's hypotheses and theories we
actually have two senses of self one for each side of the brain the self on the left side of the brain where the language centers are is the linguistic sense of self that's the self that thinks in words and the self that is impacted upon by words it's the dominant sense of self it's the self that we usually are in most of our waking moments in what scientists call normal states of consciousness the self on the right side of the brain is a much more silent sense of self there are no language centers on the right side of the brain and what that means is that for us to be in normal states of consciousness where our linguistic skills are available for us to relate to other people where linguistic species we use words we have a constant stream of inner dialogue but we're also a social species and we primarily relate to other people through words this may not be the highest form of relating but it's the most common form and it's the one that you use when you're applying for a job when you're saying hello to your neighbor when you're having the ordinary garden-variety day-to-day relating x' that make up our social reality so we have to be the linguistic self in order that we can be integrated with other people and the usual way to integrate with other people is one way or another through our cultures and our culture's demand that we be able and available for linguistic tasking able and available to use words and relating to other people at any time now the other thing about the linguistic sense of self and here we have an illustration that shows you the two senses of self on the two sides of the brain as well as the language centers Broca's area and Wernicke's area for those of you who are interested Broca's area produces speech and Verna Keys area understand speech and ordinarily these two senses of self are quite seamlessly integrated so that even though we are this sense of self on the Left we get lots and lots of input all the time from the sense of self on the right and when I say self in this context I mean the word in a sense that matches the gaze self-esteem so that our self-esteem rises and falls according to the words that we hear if someone says you you're cute we feel a bit better about ourselves if our boss says you're fired we feel terrible if another employer says you're hired we feel great once again our self-esteem impacts on our emotions and there's very few things that go on in the inner landscape of the human human consciousness than our emotions almost nothing looms larger and our emotions change radically according to the words that we hear and this is an important piece of understanding to take on board to understand that we are our linguistic sense of self we are the left hemispheric one as as the dominant sense of self now ordinarily like I said the two work together quite seamlessly but once in a while communication between the two breaks down which is appears in this illustration as having the broken as having the lines that connect them sort of broken up a bit and this can happen for a number of reasons the communication between the hemispheres can lose its coherence they can fall out of phase with one another one hemisphere because of some circumstance can stop working as well as the other and we can find that for a moment we don't feel quite intact we absorb ourselves in a book and then someone calls to us and we have to pull our attention out and there's a brief moment where we sort of collect ourselves and bring ourselves back to that social being that we have to be in order not to be alone with the book but rather connecting and relating to someone else the relating is not completely automatic and in moments when we have to grope for it though we can find if you're looking carefully enough that your sense of self is kind of broken up a little bit when the two actually fall out of phase or lose their coherence in more extreme way both of them continue to operate but one of them is no longer available for us it's broken its communication with the other and what happens is that it's perceived as a separate being that exists outside of ourselves outside of our body space and this creates the basis for a whole class of experience is called visitor experiences and visitor experiences are any kind of experience where we're actually being visited or communicating with or even just seeing a non-physical being and it's very mean and it's very mildest form it's called the sensed presence and it refers to the reasonably ordinary experience not everyone gets it but most people have had a few times a feeling that there's someone standing behind you but when you turn to look there's no one there and when you feel that presence in that moment what you're actually feeling is your subordinates sense of self emerging into the awareness of your dominant sense of self so that in that moment you are actually in a kind of existential sense to beings at once the most intense of these is God and now we're back to the god helmet.
the Curan helmet and the way it works is it applies signals magnetic signals that are derived from electrical signals that either come from the brain or have an impact on the brain relies on the same kinds of mechanisms that produce any other visitor experience disconnecting or getting the two sides of the brain to work getting them to perform and act independently of one another and it works by applying magnetic copies of electrical signals that either come from the brain through EEG or that the brain is known to respond to and I'll be saying more about those signals in a moment one of the signals is derived from the amygdala structured deep in the brain deep in the temporal lobes of the brain it's a very very active structure it never shuts down completely and it actually uses more blood than any other part of the brain it has lower firing thresholds than any other part of the brain it takes less electrical input to get the amygdala to respond than any other part of the brain and the amygdala is a very social structure it helps us relate to other people when we look at other people and their facial expressions it tells us what other people's moods are it changes in most mood disorders nearly any emotional disorder will have an amygdala that's larger or smaller on one side of the other sometimes the differences can be quite dramatic it carries emotional memories most memories are embedded retrieved preserved consolidated and created in different areas of the brain but the amygdala is actually capable of remembering things that have sparked strong emotional responses to us what we
call emotional memories now the amygdala is very highly specialized on one side of the brain according to the research at Laurentian under Dr. Persinger which isn't the same as some others on one side on the right side it produces fear and in its own independent action the amygdala on the right can produce a state of fear that's so intense that people feel a sense of impending doom and the amygdala on the left is specialized for positive emotions things like elation happiness joy and even the kind of bliss that we associate with religious ecstasy and the way the Koran helmet works I'll be getting to in just a minute but for now let me go over very briefly the experiences that the Koran helmet has been able to produce visions of God out-of-body experiences seeing into a black inner space that's been nicknamed the void which can also occur in near-death experiences and here we have actually three pictures one of them is Stan Koren wearing the latest version of his apparatus one of them is the yellow Koren helmet the one that was used in so many experiments and then the one on the right is a commercially available device which you can learn about it's WWE ritual brain comm known as Shakti which is a Hindu word that just means energy and is also the name of a goddess other people have had visions of angels visions of demons moments of bliss terror scene lights including little floaty lights and had very powerful tingly electrical sensations running through their body so the god helmet does not produce visions of God it produces lots and lots and lots of altered states and visions of God constitute only one of them and in order to use this or any other technology to produce and experience this as dramatic as that you actually need reasonably precise experimental conditions above all this means complete silence we see Dr. ma Persinger entering the acoustic chamber the absolutely silent chamber as well as a computer at the bottom of that picture running a program called complex which is authored by Stan Koren and which drives a computer to actually produce the signal the commercial device Shakti works with an ordinary computer sound card the coils for the current helmet the magnetic coils are located over the temporal lobes this isn't the arrangement but seen from above this picture shows approximately where those magnetic coils go above the temporal lobes which is located directly above the ears - about two inches above the ears and as I mentioned earlier the temporal lobes are the source for most spiritual religious and mystic experiences at least that's what the brain stimulation evidence is telling us and that kind of evidence continues to mount up rather impressively there are in fact several session designs that created spiritual experiences in Dr. Persinger's lab using this kind of technology and here we're only going to look at the most successful one in the first phase a signal is applied over the right side of the brain and the signal that's used is actually called a chirp signal and a chirp signal is one that just gets a lower pitch as it goes along so that the beginning of the chirp signal could be several octaves above middle C and yet within a quarter of a second it could take it down to two octaves below middle C that rapidly falling pitch and this signal is repeated for about half an hour and the second phase of this procedure now let me stay with the first phase for a moment in this phase of the procedure the right side of the brain is getting a stimulation that the left side is not getting and that sets the stage for - the two of them to unction differently to fall out of phase for their normal communicate to be a bit disrupted and as I mentioned earlier that's one of the prerequisites for any kind of visitor experience whether it's a simple sense of a presence or an actual vision of God the second phase of this procedure which you can see somewhat simplistically illustrated shows that another signal is now being applied across the head and being so that the entire brain is being exposed to it this signal is derived from the amygdala and EEG signal taken from deep in the brain that showed that the amygdala was working was taken turned into a magnetic signal so that the magnetic field rises and falls in the same pattern that the electrical activity the raw Milla voltage because we're talking about very small mounts of electricity here the same rises and falls in Miller and Miller voltage made for its pattern so that the electrical signal is now being applied as a magnetic signal not an electromagnetic signal electromagnets are used to produce the signal but electromagnetic frequencies are something very different these signals are in very low frequencies and electromagnetic output like your microwave oven is a different beast altogether this is related to the safety of these studies within it but this technology is not like putting a microwave on your head it's more like putting a pair of stereo headphones on your head stereo headphone headphones output magnetic fields that rise and fall with the music and actually in roughly the same intensity as the signals used in the laboratory but the signals in the lab have very specific patterns and the ones that you expose your brain to when you're listening to music with headphones don't have these patterns have whatever patterns come from the music so what happens with the second phase of this procedure is that the amygdala which has gotten on the left which has gotten more and more quiet as the one on the right became more and more active is now given information that allows it to burst into activity and compensating for this the amygdala on the right gets much quieter so that now the left amygdala the ,one that is specialized for bliss joy elation and so forth can burst suddenly into X into activation and the result is a visitor experience with a positive feel if the person is sensitive enough to this kind of stimulation if their amygdala is more sensitive than most and not all brain parts are equally sensitive in all people this explains a great deal about personality differences the person can actually find the experience unfolding into a vision of God and what I'm going to do now is read to you a brief email that I got from Dr. Persinger himself. I sent him an email asking how many people what percent of the total subjects that he had worked with had experienced God in his laboratory and the reason I like to put this in is because the technology that's used is called the Koren helmet the god helmet is a name the journalists gave it with their love of sensationalism always wanting to give the most flamboyant name to anything they run into in a laboratory and I'm being asked what percent of people experience God in the lab Dr. Persinger replied so thus far about twenty or so people have reported feeling the presence of Christ or even seeing him in the chamber the acoustic chamber where the experiments took place most of these people use Christ and God interchangeably most of these individuals were older thirty years or more and religious predominantly Roman Catholic one male aged about years old allegedly atheist but having early childhood romantic moment Catholic training saw a clear apparition the shoulders and the head of Christ staring him in the face he was quite shaken by the experience I did not complete a follow-up regarding his change in behavior of course these are all reports what we did find with one world-class psychic who experiences Christ as a component of his reported experience that by applying another pattern derived from a different brain
Agnosticism (Image~ Posted by The Thinker)
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"Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud, and that the major cancer research organizations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them." Linus Pauling Two-time Nobel Laureate 1901-1994 " . . . there is no disease whose prime cause is better known. That the prevention of cancer will come there is no doubt. But how long prevention will be avoided depends on how long the prophets of agnosticism will succeed in inhibiting the application of scientific knowledge in cancer." Otto Warburg Two-time Nobel Laureate 1883-1970 Chapter 1: A Tear in the Matrix http://meditopia.org/chap2.htm |
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Memory, Consciousness & Coma
Sadhguru at Harvard Medical School 1:52 - Professor's explanation on how anesthesia affects your brain. 6:50 - Sadhguru's explanation on difference between consciousness and wakefulness (dream states, memory). 22:45 - How can we use the yogic insights and adapt them into anesthesiology ? 30:17 - People lose sense of time both during enlightenment and during anesthesia. 37:49 - Discussion on space and time from a yogic perspective. 42:21 - How can we use your enlightenment experiences to solve the issues in the world ? 1:02:33 - How can we put aside memory and intelligence when those are the biggest gifts to us ? 1:19:13 - What are your thoughts on near-death experience ? |
Michael Pollan, author of the new book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.
Recent research suggests that certain psychedelic substances can help relieve anxiety, depression, PTSD, OCD, addiction and the fear surrounding a terminal diagnosis. |
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Certain drugs used to gain psychedelic experiences to try to gain insight into other realms ayahuasca is a very commonly talked about drug today we all produce DMT in the body a lot of research has gone on into this. MIT Debate on LSD: Dr. Jerry Lettvin + Dr. Timothy Leary - November 1967
Bending Reality
We can think about technologies which are embedded to become part of human consciousness. By fusing chips with brain tissue we don't need to teach a neuron to grow into the surface of a chip they do it automatically. Neurons are always searching for electricity and they go out until they hear electricity and as soon as they find it, they grow out more neurons and you develop a bandwidth with nerve cells growing on the surface of chips. Science has been fusing microchips with rat brain tissue for over a decade now but how many humans would like to be part of a joint conscious state?
Right: Implant for Synthetic Telepathy Remote Control of the Brain and Human Nervous System /nanobrainimplant.com/category/implant-for-synthetic-telepathy/ |
Neurological Biometrics
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What are examples of biometrics?
Examples include, but are not limited to fingerprint, palm veins, face recognition, DNA, palm print, hand geometry, iris recognition, retina and odour/scent. Behavioral characteristics are related to the pattern of behavior of a person, including but not limited to typing rhythm, gait, and voice.Biometrics - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometrics |
Manipulate the thinking of people?
A child spent much of her time alone in a white crib and an all-white apartment, separate from her mother and her brother this was often referred to as the ivory tower some have suggested the subsea use of white was a form of sensory deprivation a method used in MKULTRA programming (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zL_fWZDrIo) CIA / MK-ULTRA Hearings - Survivor Testimony 1996 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BINQ4jiQFsI