16 hours.
That’s all it took to shatter six decades of my beliefs about consciousness and communication.
16 hours.
The time it took me to binge-listen to every episode of The Telepathy Tapes — a podcast that features personal stories and interviews with families who believe their nonspeaking autistic children can communicate telepathically.
As the stories piled up, my eyes widened. My jaw dropped. I was transformed into an evangelist, texting the podcast link to all my besties.
What followed was a spirited exchange of messages, revealing a clear divide:
- The materialists questioned the lack of empirical evidence, emphasizing the need for scientific validation.
- The spiritualists argued that not all phenomena can be measured, suggesting that consciousness might extend beyond the physical brain.
This very tug-of-war plays out in the psychedelic space too.
Materialists say: Those visions and epiphanies you have? That’s just your brain on drugs! They point to brain scans of psilocybin users – multi-colored patterns lit up – revealing increased neural connectivity in once-quiet regions. These scans help explain the richer perceptions and deeper insights that arise during a psilocybin journey.
This science-based evidence has actually been the best sales pitch for psychedelics ever. It furthers main-stream acceptance of their brain-expanding capabilities. (On the other – less helpful – hand, it has also led to the medicalization of these newly-branded “pharmaceuticals,” risking the loss of their sacred soul in the shuffle toward clinical legitimacy.)
Materialism is the same playbook that helped meditation go mainstream. Despite centuries of revered practice, meditation was only adopted by the masses once MRI technology proved it was measurably transformative.
So what do the spiritualists say?
Spiritualists say that psychedelics pull back the veil. That they reveal the hidden layers of reality, other dimensions, cosmic orders, and even non-human intelligences.
So where do you land? Are you a materialist or a spiritualist?
I’ve got just the assessment for you to figure it out definitively.
Which statement feels truer to you?
A. The brain produces love.
B. Love is real beyond the brain.
If you chose A, welcome to Team Materialist.
If B speaks to your soul, welcome to Team Spiritualist.
Me?
I choose C. All of the above!
I’m a dualist. My experiences with Bufo have been my most profound teachers. The active ingredient in Bufo, 5-MeO-DMT, disrupts the brain’s default mode network. So it physiologically altered my patterns of perception and cognition.
But in doing so, I was able to access something realer than real: another dimension where everything is enveloped in the perfection of love. And maybe – just maybe – someday science will catch up and confirm the inarguable existence of that spiritual dimension…and telepathic communication, too.
