Rick Strassman - Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies

Contents

Rick Strassman , M.D.

Rick Strassman , M.D.

Rick Strassman , M.D.

Luis Eduar do Luna , Ph.D.

Luis Eduar do Luna , Ph.D.

Slawek Wojtowicz, M.D.

Ede Frecska, M.D.

Ede Frecska, M.D.

Ede Frecska, M.D.

Slawek Wojtowicz, M.D.

Rick Strassman, M.D.

Slawek Wojtowicz, M.D.

Foreword

Stephen Hickman

To those who are close observers of whats happening around them and who have reasonably sharp powers of analysis, it is apparent that there are fascinating things that science, as it currently stands, tends to ignore. Dr. C. G. Jung referred to these events, such as telepathy and precognition, as synchronous phenomena. I am morally certain that attitudes toward these phenomena will change in the foreseeable future, but at the moment any ideas that have the slightest breath of being paranormal or synchronous are highly charged and emotional issues that have a mystical or superstitious connotation.

As I understand from my reading and conversations on quantum theory, we exist in what I visualize as a sort of quantum soup, wherein what we experience as solid matter is actually the binding energies at an extreme end of the electromagnetic spectrum, the opposite end to the more familiar energies such as light and heat. If we were to venture into this end of the spectrum, thoughts would have the same validity or reality as solid matter. The Brooklyn Bridge is real; no one would dispute that. But its design had its inception in thought, didnt it?

The paranormal is so inherently fascinating that for any valid conclusions to be reached from investigation, a searching and objective skepticism must leaven the desire to discover wonders. The greatest obstacle to a clearer understanding of these matters is the overly naive willingness to believe virtually any authority on esoteric matters. This in turn has generated hordes of fraudulent exploitation that has done much damage to the validity of investigation into these subjects.

As a hardwired survival characteristic, the human mind has a highly developed pattern-recognition system built into it. However, like any other tool, the results of its use are limited to the skill of the userin this case, the objectivity of the searcher and observer. Wisdom is where you find it, no question about that. But if you look in the usual places, you are only likely to find someone at the end of a psychic hotline whose pattern-recognition skills have shown him or her how to profit from your search for answers.

This is much like the semi-mystical hysteria that clouded even trained scientific minds when dealing with the issue of powered manned flightissues that were solved by the triumph of a rational engineering approach over what can only be described as a superstitious alchemical approach. These two issues, mechanical flight and what might be called mental flight, are closely parallel in that the symbolic as well as the practical implications are of such tremendous significance that the emotional aspect tends to cloud public perception of them. Just look at the muddle-headed mistakes that were made by the early experimenters in human flight: Samuel Pierpont Langley, a trained astronomer whose catapult-launched Great Aerodrome nearly drowned his test pilot Charles Manley; Hiram Maxim, an otherwise competent engineer and inventor whose overly large aircraft designs never succeeded in getting off the ground; and Octave Chanute, a trained and successful civil engineer whose hang gliders never flew. Unbelievable stuff, from our modern viewpoint, isnt it?

The value of this book is that it takes a rational and scientific approach to esoteric subjects, opening a valid door to an avenue of wonder and the most fascinating implications. This it does in plain wordsone sure way of spotting the opportunist and the fraud is by their employment of a specialized esoteric vocabulary, deliberately obscure phraseology, and defensive or arrogant attitudes in the presentation of their material. This book is blessedly free of any taint of this. Please note that I do not think of technical terms as esoteric.

Survival is observation, pattern recognition, and objective analysis, whereas blind faith is walking blindly to destruction. Yet survival at its barest level is merely scraping along at its pragmatic best. Even scientific intuition has a strong element of what can be called faith. Certainly many of the greatest minds in the history of science, both past and present, have seen no conflict between a sense of the Divine and scientific thought.

In fact, the closer you look at things, great or small, the more miraculous they are (observation was in fact the original basis for all the worlds religious beliefs). If you do the research, you will see that this is literally trueorganic life, star formation, the vast and the unimaginably small, all are bound together in an infinitely beautiful magical pattern.

So the illusory conflict between survival (which is closely related to scientific thought) and Divine faith is evidently not a simple division of the practical and the mystical. Mythology, as defined by Joseph Campbell, is the mechanism by which the human psyche relates to the chaos of an infinite environment. The various types of human mythos are composed of what Jung called the archetypes, symbols with the power to release the stored energy of the human psyche. Sounds like quantum physics, doesnt it?