Edward E. Wilson

A program for the organized study of disparate mental states by Academy 23

The first phase in the program would be the study of so called hallucinogenic drugs. These are selected due to the relative ease of achieving altered states of awareness in untrained participants. Drugs however are only the first phase.

Remember anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways. You don’t need drugs to get high but drugs do serve as a useful short cut at certain stages of the training. (Burroughs, 1989, 137)

Brain state observation machines and biofeedback devices are purchased or rented collectively by the involved student-researchers. It is important that Academy workgroups retain their economic independence and hence retain control of their research. The desired drugs are also purchased collectively even the non-users must contribute.

While hooked up to recording brain machines multiple participants use the drugs, multiple times each. Each person can be run through separately if multiple recording machines would be prohibitively expensive. Participants are to journal about the drug experience in what are called subjective experience reports. The “hard data” from each session is compared to the other sessions to abstract commonalities and also compared to the subjective account to correlate less common features.

The biofeedback devices are programmed with goal states based on the abstracted common pattern for the particular drug under study. Additionally versions of the goal state for less common drug experiences could be experimented with.

The participants are now run through the biofeedback programs. Subjective experience reports are again prepared and used to judge the efficacy of the biofeedback.

At this stage fresh participants are brought in who have not gone through the drug trials or read the experience reports. The non-drug subjects are run through the biofeedback programs and prepare their own experience reports. If the non-drug biofeedback experiences are considered sufficiently similar to the original drug experiences these programs are considered a success.

The next stage requires the researchers to learn how to self-install NLP or self-hypnosis anchors so that they can enable easy machine-less re-experience of the trained mental states. Participants are to run the biofeedback program and when in the maximum state of congruence create the anchor.

Anyone can now be trained to experience these mental states using the biofeedback programs and anchoring technique. This method is not limited to drug states only; it can be applied to any desirable mental state.

Works Cited

Burroughs, William S. and Odier, Daniel. (1989). The Job. New York: Penguin Books.