#2 Sawyer, Dana. (2022). What Is the ‘Unitive Mystical Experience’ Triggered by Psychedelic Medicines an Experience of? An Exploration of Aldous Huxley’s Viewpoint in Light of Current Data. Religions. 13. 1061. 10.3390/rel13111061. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365140386

Rominger C, Subow C (2025) Feel connected to create: Self-reported psychedelic drug users exhibit higher sense of connectedness and better divergent thinking skills compared to non-users. PLOS ONE 20(4): e0320755. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320755

Carhart-Harris, Robin, Erritzoe, David, Haijen, Eline, Kaelen, Mendel and Watts, R.. (2017). Psychedelics and connectedness. Psychopharmacology. 235. 10.1007/s00213-017-4701-y. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319043190_Psychedelics_and_connectedness

#3 Griffiths RR, Richards WA, McCann U, Jesse R. Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2006 Aug;187(3):268-83; discussion 284-92. doi: 10.1007/s00213-006-0457-5. Epub 2006 Jul 7. PMID: 16826400. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16826400/

#4 One might attribute a magical quality to emergence, as the macro world emerges out of the quantum world, as water emerges from the combination of hydrogen and oxygen, as life has emerged on our planet, and as consciousness emerges in life. But water emerges reliably from the combination of hydrogen and oxygen rather than capriciously, as does the macro world from the quantum world and as do life and consciousness. And it is always water that emerges from the combination of hydrogen and oxygen rather than anything else. So while emergence may appear magical, there is something orderly about it. And even though what emerges may be completely novel to what went before, whatever emerges is itself also governed by the rules of nature.

#5 How, one might ask, could a consciousness associated with the universe as a whole acquire a personality that is distinct from any other? This will be addressed in detail in the chapters that follow. For the moment, consider that as an emergent phenomenon, this consciousness has become an efflorescence of the universe and does not comprise the universe in its entirety. As will be detailed later, there are aspects to the world that are beyond its ken.

#6 McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press, 2009.

#7 The Oracle of Love has been published in digital format only. It is free at most major ebook stores. It can also be found in multiple formats here or by searching "oracle of love i ching" on youtube.

#8 The apparently spontaneous disruption of radioactive isotopes can be seen as the stronger electromagnetic forces repelling their protons exceeding the constraint of the nuclear interaction binding them.

#9 This example of a sound waves maintaining a pure note raises an issue regarding waves of any kind; for although pure notes behave connectively, their frequencies and/or amplitudes have been contained within ranges by either the architective anchors present in their generating processes, the architective anchors present in the material through which they are propagating, or by the repetitive processes that generated them which in turn would have been architectively controlled. Another example is the frequencies of electromagnetic waves (eg colour of light) which are most commonly set by the energy differences in the (architective) atomic or molecular orbitals from which they were emitted or by the (architective) sizes of transmitting antennas. What I am getting at is that waves having a fixed frequency have been architectively contaminated as it were, and it would be better for an understanding of this discussion if one understood the term 'wave' in its unadulterated form. An interesting implication of this is that when meditating, which I will mention later for its ability to enhance one's perception of connectivity, it pays to follow sensations or vibrations having varying frequencies rather than those whose frequencies are fixed.

#10 I use the word 'empathy' in the sense of a concordance of feeling, a sharing of another person's emotional or sensual experience, without a necessity for suffering that 'em-path' might imply.

#11 Kevin C. Schlaufman. Evidence of an Upper Bound on the Masses of Planets and Its Implications for Giant Planet Formation Astrophysical Journal. 2018 Jan; Volume 853 Number 1. doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/aa961c.

#12 A priority may be externally imposed on a connective, for example by an observer deciding which level of patterning on the waves on a pond to focus on, or by tuning a radio receiver to a particular station, but that priority would not organize the connective's lower level expressions.

#13 Polanyi, Michael. Life's Irreducible Structure. https://inters.org/Polanyi-Life-Irreducible-Structure

#14 This also does not mean that all one's comprehension of architective serial meaning is conscious when one's architective sentience is conscious - and vice versa - only that when one's architective sentience is conscious none of one's comprehension of connective serial meaning is conscious.

#15 McGilchrist, Iain. The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (pp. 1288-1293). Perspectiva Press. Kindle Edition, 2021.

#16 This implies that spirits are such only to those they influence - they may be spirits to a particular person or group of people, say, and not to others. It also means that only consciousnesses (as described earlier) are capable of contemplating spirituality since an awareness of one's capacities for description and control are required to make that judgment. It also means that spiritual contemplation and belief is possible for any consciousness, human or otherwise, even if not embodied as an organism. In this way spirits can be spirits to spirits as well as to humans and other animals, while allowing that a spirit to a dog may not be a spirit to a human, or that a spirit to me may not be a spirit to you.

Some fine print regarding the words 'influence' and 'control' as used here: Control is meant in the sense of a hierarchical architective top-down control while influence is meant as either a connective or architective affect that is not a top-down control. For example, my internal organs and processes affect me architectively but not as top-down controls, so they are influences on rather than controls of me; having to go to the toilet being an example. The same can be said of gravity except that it is connective - it influences me but does not control me. I in turn cannot control gravity, and though I do have hierarchical control over my internal processes in that they go wherever I go, I do not have control over their behaviour - they decide when I have to go to the toilet. So I do not have full control over my internal processes either. Both gravity and my internal processes influence me and I do not fully control them so they are spirits to me in this wider sense.

#17 That said, many biological organisms and processes are natural spirits to us and do show sentience - for example in the way our white blood cells hunt and destroy alien bacteria. But I do not see them utilizing their sentience to influence us as persons - rather their sentience only plays its part in the functioning of their and our organisms. I do not see my digestive system, for example, having an intention to disturb a business meeting. So I do not regard my internal or other biological processes as deities, spirits though they may be. Indeed, since I hierarchically control my internal biological processes to the extent that they are internal to me, I may even be a deity to them.

#18 It has been argued that in order to think a consciousness must operate at a scale where its internal communications can co-ordinate in a timeous manner. The physical limitation of the speed of light would make thinking at a scale much larger than our Earth therefore highly unlikely (it takes approximately 0.13 seconds for light to circumnavigate the Earth). While this restriction would not rule out a capacity for consistency of thought on the part of our Planetary Deity, it would render universally consistent thought impossible for the Cosmic Deity. But I have argued that a connective consciousness (which the Cosmic Deity has) feels rather than thinks. Feeling, even on a cosmic scale, requires neither spatial consistency nor temporal simultaneity, only connectedness. Besides, the consciousness of the Cosmic Deity could be distributed in self-consistent localized visages that flow into each other rather than being centralized or uniformly spread. (We see examples of decentralized consciousness in octopuses, whose neurons are distributed throughout their tentacles, while the sentiences of our enteric nervous systems are also not centralized.)

#19 Equating one's architective consciousness with one's ego is a little problematic when it comes to dreaming. In my dreams I still have a consciousness, and as will be described in chapter 20, I understand that consciousness to be even more architectively biased than in my waking state. That is, I have an architective consciousness in my dreams. Yet I "lose my ego" in my dreams in that I do not have the same ego I have in the waking state. Not only that, but I will likely have a different ego in each dream. In dreams, I lose my ego but nonetheless have an architective consciousness.

#20 LSD Fatalities at Erowid. https://erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_death.shtml.

#21 Stanislav Grof interviews Dr. Albert Hofmann, Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California, 1984. https://maps.org/news-letters/v11n2/11222gro.html.

#22 An interview with Rick Strassman by Avi Solomon May 2011. https://boingboing.net/2011/05/03/strassman.html.

#23 Timmermann, C., Roseman, L., Schartner, M. et al. Neural correlates of the DMT experience assessed with multivariate EEG. Sci Rep 9, 16324 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-51974-4.

#24 Haijen, E., Kaelen, M., Roseman, L., Timmermann, C., Kettner, H., Russ, S., Nutt, D., Daws, R. E., Hampshire, A., Lorenz, R., and Carhart-Harris, R. L. Predicting Responses to Psychedelics: A Prospective Study. Frontiers in pharmacology, 9, 897. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2018.00897.

Albert Garcia-Romeu, Roland R. Griffiths and Matthew W. Johnson. Psilocybin-Occasioned Mystical Experiences in the Treatment of Tobacco Addiction. Current Drug Abuse Reviews 2014; 7(3). https://doi.org/10.2174/1874473708666150107121331.

#25 The I Ching or Book of Changes: The Richard Wilhelm Translation rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes. Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1951.

Previous Home That's all, folks!