John Horgan writes:

I’m still mulling over a meeting I attended last month at Esalen, the spiritual retreat center, on “exceptional experiences” that challenge conventional science. More specifically, I’m mulling over imagination. What generates it, and what are its limits, if any? Is it sometimes more akin to revelation than invention?

Imagination is arguably the quintessential human trait. Our capacity to imagine the consequences of our choices gives us free will. Lacking imagination, we’d lack art, science, mathematics, technology and social progress, which comes about only after we imagine a better world.

I’ve been brooding over imagination since telling Lindsey Swindall, a friend and colleague at Stevens Institute of Technology, about how the Esalen meeting tested my open-mindedness. One talk focused on mediums, who “channel,” or serve as mouthpieces for, the dead. Some mediums spout information that they could not have learned through conventional means. Allegedly. I don’t buy channeling, I told Lindsey.

To my surprise, Lindsey, an authority on African-American history, said she sometimes feels like she’s channeling when she writes. She wrote her second book, a biography of the great performer and civil-rights activist Paul Robeson, over the course of a single summer. The words just poured out of her, and the writing seemed better than what she ordinarily produced. She felt as though she had tapped into a deeper part of herself, to which she didn’t ordinarily have conscious access. Her editor validated her judgment. He loved the book and published it with virtually no changes.

My only experience of this sort, I told Lindsey, occurred not while writing but while tripping. In 1981, a potent hallucinogen catapulted me into a trance that lasted almost 24 hours, during which I was disconnected from the so-called objective world. I was immersed in elaborate narratives laden with metaphysical and theological significance. I gradually reconstructed these hallucinations after I emerged from the trip, dazed and exhausted.

The visions (which I describe in detail here) seemed produced by a director gifted with infinite talent and resources. They seemed far too artful, and grand, to have been invented by my puny little brain. They were utterly unlike my dreams, which, when I can remember them, tend to be dumb and clunky, as if made by a talentless teen with a smart phone. Experiences like Lindsey’s and mine suggest that the imagination might occasionally draw upon sources beyond the ordinary self. Could that be true? [Continue reading…]