Otherbrainly.

Many a superstition, belief system, worldview, and dogma has taken root from dreamlike stages of a brain – an influential brain – somebody convinced strongly enough of the illusion and able to convince others of its truth by pure assertion. I can conjecture two natural causes for this phenomenon: one, the cerebral-cortex-involved entanglement that happens just as you disengage from REM sleep that solicits memory (as opposed to the unconscious ones that do not engage memory) and two, the almost-dead-but-back-to-life (aka NDE, near-death-experience) neurological chemistry that engages the same experience-slash-memory attribute of the brain.

Both, I feel, have startling, surreal, powerful residual ‘memories’ that can leave the experiencing brain deluded into believing falsehoods that it would normally not entertain. Such unreal ‘realities’ or deluded beliefs can then go on to have real effect on real life to which they assign meaning that impacts a tribe, community, or society. And then the crowd-sourced fun starts! Hijacked for reasons of control and power are such experiences cast as legends, myths and eventually scripture – of portent, prophesy, tunnels with lit ends, muzzy clouds of joy, effervescent all pervading sense of love, angels speaking words hidden deep inside their own psyches, gods directing them to do things and many other otherworldly sensations. Some fade away as delirious rantings of madmen and yet others get written down as holy scripture, find adherents who follow these writs and end up becoming world religions.

States of such brainfarts could be achieved artificially via mind-altering, hallucinogenic drugs that lead to hit-and-miss states of memory and from which you come back – if you are not totally blasé or scientifically rigorous – with possibly life-altering memories. Many so-called spiritual persons actually seek out such states of mind using LSD, mushrooms, psychedelics and hallucinogens (ayahuasca.)

Another method to achieve this would be powerful, directed, controlled meditation. This is what ascetics, hermits, sages, yogis et al. work at and train for over sustained periods of time focusing the activity of their brains towards thoughtlessness or mindlessness. The result is that weird state of headlessness or being able to observe thoughts and events as they come and go without feeling them.

Either way, these states are merely a brain-chemistry vector and should have zero real-life decision-making capacity, much less being socially imposed and endorsed as a way of living. I have nothing against such states of mind by individuals but bringing mindsets from such otherbrainly experiences into the real world as social norm is fraught with risks – risks we see exemplified in the dangers of religion that fosters intolerance and hatred.

The scientific question to be truly pursued in this area is this: Does the ‘flow’ of such entangled memories have that specific course because of ‘memory-loops’ from the past or are there unknown interactions that come from other agents such as high-functioning creativity, foods we have eaten, body chemistry alterations via fasting, environment the body is in, etc. Can such states help cure pathologies or solve neurological conundrums?

If only more of society was exposed to this concept as part of its education – consciousness-raising (as Dawkins would put it) – it would mitigate much of the blindness associated with their acceptance of ‘altered-brain’ prophesy and superstition pushed down their throats by religion or control memes.