On the Neurology of Gamma Brainwaves and the Psychology of Peak Experiences — Among humans, there are five levels of consciousness, and these mental states correlate to brainwave activity. Of course, correlation does not equal causation. This is important to understand, particularly when it comes to physiological versus psychological phenomena. Regardless, the point is that brainwaves, or neural oscillations, are rhythmic or repetitive…

In the early 15th century, somewhere in Northern Italy, a few decades before the birth of Leonardo Da Vinci, a tightly knit group of people created a set of documents that to this day have never been read by anyone else. It happened around the year 1420, when more than…

A Famous Female Philosopher — Roughly speaking, the Hellenistic religion lasted from about 300 BCE to 300 CE, give or take a century or so. In the wake of that, a girl named Hypatia was born in Alexandria, Egypt (which was part of the Eastern Roman Empire) in the year 355. She was the only…

A Reservoir of Qualia that Connects Us All — In the year 1916, Dr. Carl Gustav Jung coined the term “collective unconscious”. He used it to refer to a hypothetical set of shared mental concepts that are thought to exist below the level of the conscious mind, somewhere deep within us, in a reservoir of qualia that connects us…

Two of the spiritual movements that challenged Catholicism — Introduction In Classical Antiquity, amid the birth of the Western occult tradition, during the 1st century, in an age of radical religious revolutions in Roman-occupied Egypt, both Hermeticism and Gnosticism emerged alongside what was becoming Catholicism. Since then, the two spiritual movements have often been thought of as being the same…

Aleister Crowley’s Bible for the Thelemites — In 1904, a rather infamous occultist named Aleister Crowley founded the religion of Thelema, and it has been propagated by his followers ever since. As part of that, the central text of their faith is The Book of the Law, more properly known as Liber AL vel Legis sub figura…

A Brief Look Back on the Most Legendary Fraternity in the World — In the 12th century, a number of charitable Christian confraternities emerged on the British Isles, some of which were stonemason guilds. The members of those groups were fine upstanding men, who took care of each other and their communities. The masons also began to use their trade, as an allegory…

A Concise Solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness — In 1995, a philosopher named David Chalmers described what he called the “hard problem” in contrast to the “easy problems”, like that of finding the neural correlates of specific states of consciousness. The former requires a complex explanation-based solution, while the latter requires simple correlation-based solutions. By doing this, Chalmers…

A Monumental Reminder of the Impermanence of Things — On a lush floodplain, just above Tonle Sap Lake, deep within the tropical forest of northwestern Cambodia lie the crumbling ruins of a colossal ancient city at the heart of which is a magnificent monument called Angkor Wat. As a Hindu temple that was turned into a Buddhist sanctuary, Angkor…