Cosmogenic Vision

"If you analyze cave art ... there are so many details that make it clear that this was an art of altered states of consciousness, of visions. And plants like the amanita muscaria mushroom and psilocybin mushrooms appear to have been directly connected with this sudden and radical change. So to investigate this possibility when I got interested in this mystery, I went down to the Amazon where there are still surviving shamanistic cultures today, and where they drink the powerful visionary brew: ayahuasca, of which the active ingredient is dimethyltryptamine (DMT) which is actually closely related at the molecular level to psilocybin. [...] And one of those effects has to do with creativity, and we can see the creative cosmogenic impulse of ayahuasca in the paintings of Ayahuasca Shamans from Peru, like the paintings of Pablo Amaringo ... those richly saturated colors, they’re amazing visions that they reproduce. [...] And as these paintings show, another universal experience of ayahuasca is the encounter with seemingly intelligent entities which communicate with us telepathically."

- Graham Hancock (1950 - )
The War on Consciousness

Supernatural Visions

"In the last few decades, a new kind of art has been striking natives and tourists of Peruvian Amazonia with great wonder and enchantment: ayahuasca‑inspired visionary art. This very original iconography emerges directly from the artists’ visionary experience under the effect of the ayahuasca brew. [...] With the use of figurative techniques, sometimes learned in art schools or developed autonomously, mestizo visionary artists manage to translate and share their colorful supernatural visions with a much wider public than that directly involved with ayahuasca shamanism. One of the most important effects of this translation, in my view, is to render visible the invisible dynamics of shamanic worlds, even to untrained eyes. [...] This art functions as a shining window to the spiritual worlds of ayahuasca shamanism, translating the multidimensional and extraordinary visions to our more familiar realm of everyday iconic images."

- Vinícius Dino, Visionary Art in Peruvian Amazonia:
The Power of Images and Translation Effects

Other Minds

"Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. [...] We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question - for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality."

- William James (1842 - 1910)
The Varieties of Religious Experience

Spirit-Matter

"Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.

...

In a concrete sense there is not matter and spirit. All that exists is matter becoming spirit. There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. I know very well that this idea of spirit-matter is regarded as a hybrid monster, a verbal exorcism of a duality which remains unresolved in its terms. But I remain convinced that the objections made to it arise from the mere fact that few people can make up their minds to abandon an old point of view and take the risk of a new idea. [...] Life represents the goal of a transformation of great breadth, in the course of which what we call ‘matter’ turns about, furls in on itself, interiorizes the operation covering, so far as we are concerned, the whole history of the earth. The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self‑conscious. It is a cosmic change of state."

- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)

Underlying Manifestations

"Mathematicians are beginning to view order and chaos as two distinct manifestations of an underlying determinism. And neither state exists in isolation. The typical system can exist in a variety of states, some ordered, some chaotic. Instead of two opposed polarities, there is a continuous spectrum. As harmony and discord combine in musical beauty, so order and chaos combine in mathematical (and physical) beauty."

- Ian Stewart (1945 - )

Dancing Dream

"All great truths are only myths that exist momentarily 
in the evolving greater consciousness.
Like individuals, they die, to be
reborn fresh and glorious in
the minds of each new age.
They may bear a resemblance to their forebears,
but each brings with it new features of its own
and seeks to find its place and meaning in
the dancing dream that is the cosmos. "

- David Chethlahe Paladin (1926-1984)
Painting the Dream

Broken Symmetry

"The state of a really big system does not at all have to have the symmetry of the laws which govern it; in fact, it usually has less symmetry. [...] In my own field of many-body physics, we are, perhaps, closer to our fundamental, intensive underpinnings than in any other science in which non-trivial complexities occur, and as a result we have begun to formulate a general theory of just how this shift from quantitative to qualitative differentiation takes place. This formulation called the theory of 'broken symmetry' may be of help in making more generally clear the breakdown of the constructive converse of reductionism."

- Philip W. Anderson (1923 - 2020)