Otherworlds

Subtitled 'psychedelics and exceptional human experience', this book combines fieldwork and experimentation with academic papers and reviews covering the interface between psychedelics and ESP and delineating the interdisciplinary field of parapsychopharmacology. As Dean Radin observes in his foreword, this involves blasting open the 'doors of perception', a phrase popularised by Aldous Huxley in his 1950s book describing his experiences with mescaline. Dave also discusses the relevance of Huxley's 'filter theory' of the brain as a reducing valve based on the work of Henri Bergson - recent research suggests that psychedelics inhibit the brain's default filtering process. Here he might also have mentioned William James and arguably the originator of the theory the Oxford don FCS Schiller, whose work should be much better known. As a former President of the Parapsychological Association, Dave is well aware of the variety of exceptional human experiences and their dubious status within current science despite over 100 years of evidence and research. Nevertheless, he pushes the boundaries further in his systematic investigation of such experiences, linking them anthropologically to shamanic practices.

All this provides substantial reasons for his assertion that universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine. One of the features of these exceptional experiences is their transformative nature. Dave is sceptical of attempts by anomalistic psychology to explain these in mundane terms, mapping their phenomenology and cartography. In this respect, he provides a number of models and approaches backed up by 40 pages of references, often cross-cited in the text. He is also cautious in his approach, commenting that self-reports have more phenomenological merit than evidential value and also pointing out that the experiences described can also occur non-psychedelic states. Overall, this volume provides a fascinating exploratory interface between psychedelics and parapsychology with far-reaching implications for consciousness research.