Review: 'The Entheogenic Evolution' by Martin W. Ball

Until you do the experiment, Synchronium, you won't know. I suspect it would be possible for the person in the box to gain transpersonal knowledge from enough hallucinogens, especially DMT and 5-Meo-DMT. There is much anecdotal evidence of people gaining technical knowledge completely out of their field. Another example is that Stan Grof has recorded people, during holotropic breathwork sessions, speaking in ancient languages they knew nothing about, but which made perfect sense when translated. How do you explain this? A bit more unexplainable example - certain tribes in Africa were known to have known the precise locations and configurations of star systems, before they were "discovered" by high powered telescopes. Out of body travel is the only way this could happen. Not to mention modern day remote viewing experiments.

Not really. Imagine the following (incredibly unethical) experiment: You lock a kid in a box for years and years with no outside contact. You couldn't then give the kid some LSD and expect him to learn anything about his environment. He wouldn't suddenly calculate Pi to a million decimal places, or realise the importance of complex numers, or come up with his own "standard model".

The kid would have an interesting experience, and may produce some thoughts that are meaningful to him, but because the kid is so maladjusted, the rest of society wouldn't learn a thing from the kid's experience.

One thing hallucinogens (and other drugs) can do for us is generate new ideas from the new perspectives they give us. We can then go through these ideas at a later date and see which work and which don't.

Back to this lunatic and his crazy energy... If his energy can't be quantified, then why not? If it's some new kind of unquantifiable energy, then why is it unquantifiable? Anything that actually affects the real world will be quantifiable, so if he can't measure it or define it any better, then his idea can't possibly affect the real world. We're now in the situation where one of the following situations is true:

a) There are no other types of "energy" floating round
b) Some guy thinks there are other types of energy, but he reckons there's no way to scientifically prove it, because this energy has no effect whatsoever on us and the world around us.

Sure, b MAY be true, but occam's razor suggests otherwise.

Also, if this energy can't be measured, how does this guy know it exists in the first place?

Isn't seeing something from a new perspective basically what all new knowledge is?

I find the idea that hallucinogens won't teach you something you didn't know or couldn't work out a bit hard to swallow. But perhaps you could work it out without exogenous hallucinogens after you mastered endogenous hallucinogens, which would bring you to a pretty similar state anyway.

Also the definition of the word "you" in "teach you something you didn't know" is important. It seems quite clear that hallucinogens get the conscious you in contact with deeper, normally subconscious levels of you that were previously unknown.

So is it really knowledge that you didn't have, or just knowledge you weren't aware you had?

It's in this sense that I think psychedelics just help us remember something we already knew on a deeper, more fundamental level.

Because if it did, the methods section of every physics paper published would include a hallucinogen of some kind. If it were that easy to learn new truths about the universe, we wouldn't have spent billions of pounds building a fucking huge particle accelerator.

Granted, hallucinogens may allow you to think about scientific problems from a new perspective, but they won't teach you something you didn't know or couldn't work out already given enough time.

Why don't you two do an experiment by smoking some 5-Meo and find out if what he's saying makes sense.

Energy is defined as the ability to do work (and work, of course, is force times distance).

It's a lot of work to smoke 5-MEO and wave a feather about the patient, so there's a lot of energy involved!

Of course, there would be even more energy if he used a brick instead of a feather. For $500 I'll do the same thing, but I'll use a sacred brick.

The man's either a complete pillock or a bastard snake oil salesman.

He offers "Divine Energy" sessions for $200. I wonder why we've never seen this new kind of energy in any physics journal? Is it quantifiable in Joules? Is it really a measure of how much work can be done?