By D. Scott Rogo
Modern psychologists say we use only one-tenth of our brains. The French philosopher Henri Bergson speculated that the human brain in its full force was capable of knowing all that was afoot in the universe at any given moment, but that in order to permit our cave-dwelling ancestors to get on with the woolly-mammoth hunting and other business at hand, our front-brains learned to automatically censor 90 percent of the perceptions they received lest we succumb to the stupefying Sensurround effect of information overload. The English philosopher Aldous Huxley—an enthusiastic LSD and mescaline fancier—speculated that if Bergson was correct, technological progress had evolved to the point where humans had the leisure to cultivate the neglected 90 percent, and therefore history had given us the gift of psychedelics in the twentieth century to help us climb back into inner space.
Think what you will of Bergson and Huxley, one persistent fact is claiming the attention of a number of parapsychology researchers today as they try to burrow through to the seat of psychic power. LSD and other hallucinogens just might stimulate extrasensory perception, or ESP.
Of course, psychedelic plants have been gobbled up by soothsayers in search of prophetic copy since the Greeks and Aztecs, but science has long scoffed at the claims of barbarian holy men who thought they could see the future. It was not until 1927 that Dr. William McGovern, an anthropologist/explorer of the Amazon River, witnessed and described a native ritual involving a hallucinogenic brew distilled from the Banistcriopsis caapi plant:
“Certain of the Indians fell into a particularly deep state of trance,” McGovern wrote, “in which they possessed what appeared to be telepathic powers. Two or three of the men described what was going on in malokas hundreds of miles away, many …
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Author: High Times / High Times
