My life’s obsession with consciousness began with a mystical experience fifty years ago and this drives me still. Academic research, and writing the textbook Consciousness: An Introduction, only deepened my perplexity. What is consciousness? How does it come about? Is it produced by the brain or is that another illusion to add to illusions of self and free will? I cannot keep work separate from life, and this not-knowing has driven decades of meditation, exploring psychedelic drugs, staying alert on the edges of sleep, and many other attempts to ask difficult questions. Who am I? And what does it mean to be alive in this world?
I wrote
Seeing Myself: What Out-of-body Experiences Tell Us About Life, Death and the Mind
I was stunned by this book when I read it nearly fifty years ago, when psychedelics were rarely talked about. Huxley describes in glorious detail the effects of taking 0.4 grams of mescaline one day in 1953. A vase of flowers revealed naked existence; the legs of a chair became miraculous in their tubularity, seconds became centuries, and as for self – was he looking at a chair or was he a chair? I have since explored many psychedelics, as well other ways of inviting extraordinary experiences, and this book remains an inspiration.
Discover this profound account of Huxley's famous experimentation with mescalin that has influenced writers and artists for decades.
'Concise, evocative, wise and, above all, humane, The Doors of Perception is a masterpiece' Sunday Times
In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. Huxley described his experience with breathtaking immediacy in The Doors of Perception.
Trying to have lucid dreams is so frustrating! Lucid dreams are those in which you know that you are dreaming – which mostly we do not realise until we have woken up. The experience and its imaginary world are very similar to those in an out-of-body experience, and lucid dreaming provides one way to reach the OBE state. This book is a classic and remains a terrific guide to what lucid dreams can be like, how to reach them, and the science behind why and how they happen. I learned much from LaBerge’s research on dreaming and this inspires me to keep on struggling to become more often lucid myself.
“[A] solid how-to book . . . For amateur dream researchers, this is a must.”—Whole Earth Review
Lucid Dreaming—conscious awareness during the dream state—is an exhilarating experience. Because the world you are experiencing is one of your own creation, you can do the impossible and consciously influence the outcome of your dreams.
Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming goes far beyond the confines of pop dream psychology, establishing a scientifically researched framework for using lucid dreaming. Based on Dr. Stephen LaBerge’s extensive laboratory work at Stanford University mapping mind/body relationships during the dream state, as well as the teachings of…
In 1662, a man is wrongly executed for signing the death warrant of Charles I. Awaiting execution, he asks to speak with a priest, to whom he declares a curse on the village that betrayed him. The priest responds with a counter-curse, leaving just one option to nullify it.
How horrible it is to wake up in the night and realise you cannot move. If you try to cry out, only a squeak emerges. This is the common, but disturbing, experience of sleep paralysis, and Hufford’s book is the classic exploration of ‘sleep paralysis myths’ from around the world. I was drawn into this when my own research revealed how many claims of psychic experiences really come down to sleep paralysis, and that OBEs often start from this natural state. On the verges of sleep, I regularly explore this and other states in the weird fringes of altered states of consciousness.
David Hufford's work exploring the experiential basis for belief in the supernatural, focusing here on the so-called Old Hag experience, a psychologically disturbing event in which a victim claims to have encountered some form of malign entity while dreaming (or awake). Sufferers report feeling suffocated, held down by some "force," paralyzed, and extremely afraid.
The experience is surprisingly common: the author estimates that approximately 15 percent of people undergo this event at some point in their lives. Various cultures have their own name for the phenomenon and have constructed their own mythology around it; the supernatural tenor of many Old…
How could anyone confuse his own wife with a hat? This famous story of the effects of brain damage is beautifully, and movingly, described by Sacks, along with many other extraordinary cases. What is it like to have lost your memory, to think your own leg does not belong to you, to have a heightened sense of smell or extraordinary mathematical abilities? I rarely read a book twice but have returned to some of these cases many times. Just thinking about how these people experience the world broadens my ideas of what it means to be conscious. And consciousness, for me, is the greatest mystery.
If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self - himself - he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.
In this extraordinary book, Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder. Here are people who can no longer recognize everyday objects or those they love; who are stricken with violent tics or shout involuntary obscenities, and yet are gifted with…
The Model Spy is based on the true story of Toto Koopman, who spied for the Allies and Italian Resistance during World War II.
Largely unknown today, Toto was arguably the first woman to spy for the British Intelligence Service. Operating in the hotbed of Mussolini's Italy, she courted danger…
Zen meditation has been one way I have pushed myself to explore the potential of the mind, though it’s so hard! After nearly 40 years of daily practice, I feel I am only just beginning to glimpse where this extraordinary, and naturally unfolding, process leads. What is unique in this book (and there are so many books on meditation) is the straightforward but amazing descriptions of ordinary people who have hit upon enlightenment experiences, whether after years of training or just spontaneously, as happened to me as a student. These accounts help me to keep going and to understand my own experiences in the wider context of what happens to others.
In this classic work of spiritual guidance, the founder of the Rochester Zen Center presents a comprehensive overview of Zen Buddhism. Exploring the three pillars of Zen—teaching, practice, and enlightenment—Roshi Philip Kapleau, the man who founded one of the oldest and most influential Zen centers in the United States, presents a personal account of his own experiences as a student and teacher, and in so doing gives readers invaluable advice on how to develop their own practices. Revised and updated, this 35th anniversary edition features new illustrations and photographs, as well as a new afterword by Sensei Bodhin Kjolhede, who…
This book sums up my lifetime’s quest to understand a dramatic out-of-body experience (OBE) I had as a student. It was so realistic that I jumped to the conclusion that it proved psychic phenomena, astral projection, and life after death. But my research revealed no such evidence and I had to think again. I learned that OBEs are common and that my experience might now be called a near-death experience and included a deep mystical experience of oneness with the universe. Fifty years on neuroscience is finally revealing what was really going on – from how the illusion of self is constructed to what is happening inside the brain when that illusion is transcended. In Seeing Myself, I finally have some answers to share.
As a young doctor, Carl Holman has experienced the horrors of World War I and the death of his lover, a fellow officer. Back home after the War, he befriends a young jazz musician who he hopes will become a companion he can share his life with. But this is…
None of them knew what was coming, and none of them will ever be the same again...
Detective Jelani is a tough, veteran cop. His younger partner, Detective Madigan, is brash and confident. But they were not prepared to become embroiled in a series of cosmic events they could never…
