Sublime

Melanie Boly, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Medical School of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is painstakingly collecting EEG data from long-term Buddhist meditators during a state known as pure presence, an experience with no self, no discursive thoughts, and no perceptual content except for a luminous expanse, an empty mirror. Att

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there is a class of conscious experiences that come with a degree of lucidity uncommon in normal life. By and large, their mere existence was denied by science until the last century, and their study was consigned to the intellectual hinterlands of psychology, at the intersection of spiritualism, the paranormal, and the esoteric. But they are nothi

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One common observation is that psychedelics destabilize longrange cortical communication patterns and reduce activity in the posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus in the posterior regions of the neocortex. This is the compatible with our knowledge of the brains of people trained in mindfulness. It appears that the less these midline structures a

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The late Paul Tholey, a German psychologist and world-class oneironaut, developed and tested a variety of techniques for inducing lucid dreams, derived from over a decade of research involving more than 200 subjects. According to Dr. Tholey, the most effective method of learning to achieve lucidity is to develop “a critical-reflective attitude” tow

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Shortly after Carhart-Harris published his results in a 2012 paper in PNAS (“Neural Correlates of the Psychedelic State as Determined by fMRI Studies with Psilocybin” ), Judson Brewer, a researcher at Yale who was using fMRI to study the brains of experienced meditators, noticed that his scans and Robin’s looked remarkably alike. The transcendence

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