It's High Time for Science

Abstract

"It's High Time for Science," is a preprint chapter for an upcoming volume ESPD III by Synergetic Press (in press, 2024) in which Dr. Bruce Damer makes the case for the resumption of research and practice in which psychedelics in combination with mindful preparation, can become a validated and valorized tool for breakthrough solutions in science, engineering and leadership. He also reveals his own use of psychedelics and other modalities in his own work on the scientific question: how did life begin? The deeper history and future opportunities and challenges of 'elixirs of creative discovery' is also put forward along with an invitation for collaboration.

Full text

It’s high time for science
“Long a tool for artists and musicians, could psychedelics refined with endogenous practices yield a
high-octane fuel to advance science and engineering? If so, this capability will come just in time to tackle
the hard problems of human and planetary survival.”- Bruce Damer
Speculations on the foundations, research, and practices of psychedelics as catalysts of creative problem
solving in science, engineering, and leadership
Dr. Bruce Damer, PhD
Astrobiologist
Institute Director and Chief Scientist at BIOTA
ABSTRACT
A few months after the criminalization of LSD in California in May 1966, a groundbreaking pilot study
carried out by Willis Harman and colleagues was published. Harman and his team had administered doses
of LSD and mescaline to a group of 23 professionals including engineers, a mathematician, and an
architect. Participants then worked on their chosen problems, with useful and in some cases highly
innovative solutions reported by over half of the study group. Extraordinary states of consciousness have
generated inventions and fueled scientific discovery from far back into our ancestry on the plains of
Africa. The ingestion of psychoactive substances to produce visionary insights is commonplace
throughout our history but their study as tools for problem solving in technical fields is emerging from a
nearly six-decade hiatus. This essay reviews the 20th Century history of psychedelics as “mind
manifesting” tools for creativity, and speculates on the connection between extraordinary or ‘genius’
levels of creativity and neurological states induced using psychedelics. Exemplars of such creative
capacities are given and some new terms introduced. The author concludes by describing in depth his own
creative experience working on a solution to a key problem in science: how did life begin on the Earth,
four billion years ago? Some questions and proposals surrounding the return to the clinical study and
work practice of psychedelics in technical fields are offered and the case for this new direction is made in
our time of increasingly complex global challenges.
PERSONAL PREAMBLE
I took the opportunity during my talk at the ESPD55 meeting to fully and publicly step out of the
psychedelic closet reporting my own use of psychoactive compounds both for my own healing but also as
tools for my profession. I was not without feelings of trepidation as there is a taboo for ‘drug use’ in many
professional fields, including the “hard” sciences. Indeed, many organizations carry out screening for
drug use or will not employ those who admit use of psychedelics, still a criminal offense in much of the
world. At the age of 60 with much of my original contributions to science, computing, and the space
exploration field already under my belt, I chose to come out and become an advocate. Despite the
reputational risk entailed, I still hope to be able to continue to work with colleagues and institutions.
I believe that any price I am obligated to pay will be outweighed by the potential benefits to society, and
that I can serve as an example for young people entering problem-solving careers. Perhaps some of them
will experiment as I have done and find more effective routes to their own ‘way to genius.’ I am a
passionate believer in this doorway to the elevated intellect and believe it will be essential for us to pass

through the challenging keyhole soon to be presented by a planetary ecosystem convulsing from the
effects of human activity. Should we not investigate any tools or practices which can help us meet such a
daunting challenge?
The legalization and normalization of the use of psychedelics within the medical establishment is
imminent thanks to efforts of organizations like MAPS and Heffter Research Institute. As MAPS founder
Rick Doblin often reminds us, the reason this is now happening is that people stood up to be counted.
Cultural mainstreaming of psychedelics is also well underway. Thought leaders such as Michael Pollan
(2018) described “how to change your mind” through psychedelics and covered the Harman study in his
recent TV series of the same name. It may therefore be the right time to invite the underreported and
underground users of psychedelics in science, engineering and leadership to step forward, share their
story, and build a platform to evaluate and develop a “fourth path” of psychedelic research and practice.
INTRODUCTION
gen·ius
/ˈjēnyəs/
From Latin, ‘attendant spirit present from one's birth, innate ability or inclination’, from the root
of gignere ‘beget’.
Perhaps more than any other thing that we humans do, it is moments of creative genius that have laid
down the stepping stones to the remarkable and functional complexity of our civilization. Genius is
perhaps the most potent change agent for our future as well. Its mysterious action will likely determine if
we survive and thrive or, frankly, go extinct. When did the first stroke of genius occur? Genius probably
emerged as a capacity baked into our Homo ancestors. Sometime around a million years ago one of us
struck a hard rock against a chunk of glassy flint to make a cutting tool and was impressed by the
expected spray of sparks. In a flash of original insight, that ancestor understood that these sparks were
like tiny fires. Testing this insight, they struck the flint again over a clutch of dried grass and smoke
appeared, and then flames. Shared and packaged, like magic, fire then became on-demand and portable.
With flint in hand, a cooked food diet grew our bodies and brains and we spread out to successfully settle
much of the Earth.
The hypothesized discoverer of fire exhibited all the traits of genius at work: coming in with a level of
experience and an innate curiosity; open to questioning a common phenomenon; engaging in a rapid
association of disparate things including rock, sparks, grass and flame; being able to receive a novel
insight; formulating and carrying out an experiment to test that insight; and finally, to ‘beget’ the
invention by transforming it into a routine practice for others. Countless scientists, engineers and leaders
throughout history have experienced their own flashes of insight that have been called genius, once they
have been landed into practical solutions which alter many aspects of our lives. We are awestruck by the
generative power of genius, and have come to count on its appearance, yet it is still largely a mystery how
and from whence it comes. Science has only recently begun tackling the question of how similarly
elevated states of mind are made manifest. The investigation of the supercharged mind is moving into
hyperdrive with the development of powerful new tools. One of these is whole-brain real-time imaging,
and another, the well-prepared use of psychedelic substances. If we can crack the code of the catalysts of
high creativity, we will increase our capacity to deal with challenges of climate change and the
vicissitudes of the human psyche. Indeed, investing seriously in such a technology may spark a Century
of Genius.
A growing literature from scholars studying the lives and character of history’s geniuses has dispelled old
myths and produced new frameworks around the phenomenon. Imaging of the brains of highly creative

people in one early test group, authors from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, gave us a hint of which brain
regions may be involved during flashes of insight (Andreasen, 2005). Studies of family background and
environmental influences as well as genetic disposition have also given us a broad brush on who might
have an innate capacity for genius (Simonton, 2004). Lastly, the tools and knowledge afforded to billions
of us through the Internet offer the chance for unleashing genius in greatly increased ways. Our collective
genius may therefore be poised for a leap in expression, especially if we provide it some nudges along the
way. A quick Internet search finds only sparse reporting of major scientific, technical and leadership
breakthroughs aided by the use of strongly psychoactive compounds. Perhaps psychedelics might have
not actually played much of a role, if as suggested from the above definition, genius arises through an
‘attendant spirit present from one's birth, innate ability or inclination’.
There may be, however, a vast pool of unreported use of these compounds to unlock extraordinary
creative states, all cloaked under the veil of academic reputational risk and company drug testing. Under
the radar, tens of thousands (or more) of professionals have been using these psychoactive compounds
purportedly to boost their workplace problem solving ability. Employees at leading tech companies,
biomedical entrepreneurs, and crypto-financiers covertly share notes about their macro and micro-dosing
regimens. Company retreats immerse C-level leadership in plant medicine ceremonies to derive
innovative new business strategies. If this pool of use can be sampled and the data compiled, scientific
and clinical studies completed, and best practices defined, the use of psychedelics may be validated and
enter a normalized, legal and well-supported use in society. If this happens, we may obtain a vital new
tool for our future and, as the Beatles song suggested, our collective prospects could be lifted with a little
help from our friends.
At the May 2022 ESPD55 meeting to which this volume is dedicated, I called for both the validation and
valorization of the use of psychedelics in the fostering of genius. In other words, it may well be high time
to start the scientific study of these compounds and other practices in problem solving.
I believe we now stand on the brink of what could be called a fourth path of psychedelic science and
practice which just might become the most impactful on our collective future. The first path of the use of
psychoactive compounds comes from the dawn of human history, with their ceremonial use in family,
tribe, village and as a core sacramental technology behind the rise of cities and civilizations. The second
path began in the 19th Century and blossomed in the mid-20th as a doorway to individual exploration and
growth with major impacts on the arts, philosophy and spirituality. A third path has emerged both within
the indigenous homelands and western clinical settings employing these powerful compounds as
therapeutics in the realm of healing and human psychology.
THE MIND MANIFESTING POWER OF PSYCHEDELICS
Surprisingly, this proposed fourth path is not new, it traces its roots back seventy years to the very dawn
of psychedelic culture in the mid-20th Century. Many of the first experiencers of mescalin, LSD and
psilocybin immediately noticed a profound enhancement of perceptual and mental acuity. Instinctively,
they felt that such states could portend a great future as a tool for the scientific and technical arts. In fact,
the very term “psychedelic” was coined by Humphrey Osmond in 1957 derived from the Greek words
ψυχή psychḗ 'soul, mind' and δηλείν dēleín 'to manifest', for "mind manifesting," implying that
psychedelics might enable hitherto underutilized potentials of the human mind (Weil and Rosen, 1993).
One newspaper article published just after John F. Kennedy’s 1963 announcement that America would
place a man on the moon reported: NASA to use LSD to Train Lunar Astronauts (Damer, 2011). In his
seminal yet largely forgotten article published as the opening salvo in the first issue of the first academic
journal dedicated to psychedelics, Harvard’s Psychedelic Review (1963), philosopher Gerald Heard asked
“Can this Drug Enlarge Man’s Mind?” Heard opens with:

“Narcotics numb it [the mind]. Alcohol unsettles it. Now a new chemical called LSD has emerged
with phenomenal powers of intensifying and changing it — whether for good or ill is a subject of
hot debate.”
It is worth digging into a bit more of Heard’s intuitive sense of LSD’s value to society (with my
emphasis):
“Can LSD provide any assistance to the creative process? Even when given under the best of
conditions, it may do no more than "give an experience." Thereafter the subject must himself
work with this enlarged frame of reference, this creative schema. If he will not, the experience
remains a beautiful anomaly, a gradually fading wonder…
What, then, should be done about it?
It is the unique quality of attention which LSD can bestow that will or will not be of benefit.
Intensity of attention is what all talented people must obtain or command if they are to exercise
their talent. Absolute attention — as we know from, for example, Isaac Newton's and Johann
Sebastian Bach's descriptions of the state of mind in which they worked - is the most evident
mark of genius functioning.”
Psychiatrist Frank Barron (1962, 1965) took Heard’s beautifully rendered intuition and called for testing
such creative applications. , To rise to Barron’s challenge, engineer Willis Harman engaged in trials with
LSD with professionals including engineers, physicists, mathematicians, an architect, a furniture designer,
and a commercial artist. In the landmark paper “Psychedelic agents in creative problem-solving: a pilot
study” (Harman et al., 1966) the authors summarized their results:
“Based on the frequently reported similarities between creative and psychedelic (drug-induced,
consciousness-expansion) experiences, a preliminary study was conducted to explore the effects
of psychedelic agents (LSD-25, mescaline) on creative problem-solving ability. Twenty-seven
professionally employed males were given a single psychedelic experience in 1 of 7 small groups
(ns = 3 or 4) following extensive selection and preparatory procedures. This drug-induced
problem-solving session was carefully structured with particular focus on establishing Ss'
expectancies and a psychosocial milieu conducive to creative activity. Tentative findings based
on tests of creativity, on subjective reports and self-ratings, and on the utility of problem
solutions suggested that, if given according to this carefully structured regimen, psychedelic
agents seem to facilitate creative problem-solving, particularly in the “illumination phase.” The
results also suggest that various degrees of increased creative ability may continue for at least
some weeks subsequent to a psychedelic problem-solving session.”
That same year of 1966, both California and Nevada governors outlawed the manufacture, sale, and
possession of the LSD effectively shutting down Harman’s program, his psychedelic research center at
San Francisco State College and enforcing a nearly fifty-year hiatus in this compelling direction in the use
of psychedelics. One of the authors of the Harman study, a young Jim Fadiman, went on to start the
microdosing movement in the 2000s (Fadiman and Korb, 2019).
It seems to me that it is indeed high time for the scientific, business and practitioner communities to take
up where Harman and colleagues left off and restart this promising path of the use of psychedelics for the
Human future. Others including Sessa (2008) and Baggott (2015) have made a similar call. As of this
writing I am happy to report that the return to clinical study of the creative problem-solving potential of
psychedelics has resumed, with an exacting and much larger scale pilot study carried out in the
Netherlands (Mason et al. 2021) which I will return to later.

SETUP
A new field of inquiry often requires new terminology and a refiguring of older definitions, so I would
like to propose the following language.
Endo and Exo
“Endo” is a shorthand term I have come to employ, signifying “from within” or endogenous, paired with
the term and “exo” or “entering in from outside”, or exogenous. Visionary states which manifest as trip-
like “takeovers” or “downloads” in awake states but without the ingestion of substances could be termed
“endo-trips.” Exo-trips would be those which are catalyzed by a drug, or also by a brain-changing practice
such as breathwork. As I will report later, in my case I found a way to employ an artful combination of
endo and exo practices to good effect. Problem solvers and others with strong innate imaginations
probably already possess strong capacities for visualization so they can build and inhabit many “endo
castles in the sky.” The reports of Harman’s subject group suggest that those already trained in endo-
tripping were greatly aided by the addition of an exo-element.
Micro and Macro
Bournemann (2020) provides an exhaustive review of the literature surrounding the burgeoning practice
of “microdosing” popularized by 1966 Harman study co-author James Fadiman (Fadiman, 2019).
Microdosing is described by scientists as ‘sub-perceptual doses of a psychedelic, usually defined as
between one tenth and one twentieth of a normal dose (Fadiman and Korb 2019). In addition, these
authors offered a web site and survey in which hundreds of participants sent in narrative reports in which
approximately 80% of accounts were positive or neutral in content, while other qualitative studies
summarized by Bournemann charted negative effects and others attested to an improvement of creativity.
Quantitative and interview studies were carried out using surveys with parameters such as focus and
productivity, to investigate many anecdotal claims made as the microdosing movement got its start in
Silicon Valley companies. Macrodosing studies in a clinical setting have only recently started up after the
long hiatus since Harman’s work and will be covered below.
Set → Setting → Setup
The memorable terms “set and setting” were developed by early psychedelic pioneers such as Al Hubbard
and popularized by Timothy Leary. In preparing for a psychedelic session, it was proposed that the
experiencer ought to have two aspects in hand: “set” (i.e., mindset comprised of thoughts, expectations,
and mood) and “setting” (the environmental and social environment). As Harman’s pilot study suggests in
their “carefully structured regimen” and as treated later in this essay, it might be warranted to add a third
term to this equation: “setup.” Setup would encompass the preparation of minds with a problem or design
to be considered, methodologies to engage in the creative work while under the influence of a
psychedelic, and tools and practices to land workable solutions later. Setup is related to and could also
incorporate Betty Eisner’s concept of “matrix” which she describes as: “consideration of the environment
from which an individual originally comes, in which the individual currently lives during the time of the
sessions, and, if changed, to which the individual returns after successful therapy--the everyday living
space” (Eisner, 1997).
Decrypting the Genius OS
It is valuable to take a trip into neurological pin-ball to track where creative thoughts might originate,
bounce around, reflect off other thoughts and end up depositing their balls of novel insight. Putting aside
proposals that consciousness might dwell outside of the brain and body or is plugged into a greater
“conscious field” or as Aldous Huxley mused in The Doors of Perception, a “mind at large” (1954) lets

visit the neuroscientific endeavor to map the creative process within our skulls. Modern efforts to read the
boot code of the creative operating system began with the work of Nancy Andreasen et al. (2005) who
suggested that there were distinct regions of the brain which became more active and interconnected
when members of the renowned Iowa Writer’s Workshop where given word association tests in a brain
scanner.
Girn et al. (2020) add the psychedelic spin to this emerging creativity inquiry in their recent extensive
review “Updating the dynamic framework of thought: Creativity and psychedelics.” One key point they
bring up is that in some cases, the “subjective sense of creativity enhancement does not match the actual
‘quality’ of insights or realisations under the drug – as judged by others.” This ‘epistemic innocence’ of
the psychedelic experience (Letheby, 2016) leads some to attribute more novelty and importance to an
insight gleaned on a psychedelic exo-trip. This can also happen on an endo-trip without the sense of
expansion brough on by drugs, suggesting that the practitioner must be capable of being their own critic,
observing any and all “downloads” with more than one grain of salt. In technical fields, the skeptical
requirement is baked-in to the dictum to test, repeat, and test again (and preferably with independent
verification). Therefore, the genius OS best come equipped with its own built-in debugger!
As for the operation of the OS itself, glimmers of the operating modules and algorithms are beginning to
surface in brain-imaging studies, some carried out with the use of psychedelics. Carhart-Harris and
Friston (2010) proposed that “the action of psychedelics on primary process thinking and its hypothesized
relationship to changes in brain function, [operates] particularly in relation to the default-mode network”
(or DMN). A recently proposed model called the “dynamic framework of thought” by Christoff et al.
(2016) “focuses on the competing forces of constraint and variability on thought [viewing] creative
generation as a relatively unconstrained mode of thought that is similar, in that sense, to dreaming.”
Theoretical support enters at this point to propose an ambitious mechanistic model for drug action on
creative ideation by Carhart-Harris and Friston (2019) excerpted from Girn et al.:
“This model, couched in terms of hierarchical predictive coding and the Free Energy Principle
(Friston, 2010), proposes that psychedelics elicit their characteristic effects by decreasing the
precision-weighting of high-level priors (e.g., beliefs or assumptions) which are encoded by high-
level aspects of brain function, such as by the default network and other regions of association
cortex… Thus, as a result of a decrease in the weighting of these high-level priors during the
psychedelic experience, low-level inputs are liberated from top-down constraints and are more
available to conscious awareness. In effect, this is viewed to broaden the volume and breadth of
available sensory and mnemonic content and increases the potential for ‘out of the box’ ideas,
novel insights, and new perspectives.”
As is apparent, decoding the OS of creative processes, let alone the specific server calls of genius, is an
endeavor in a nascent state with decades of work ahead.
GENIUS IN THE SCANNER
Perhaps most compelling and largest recent human subject trial seeking causal pathways between
psychedelics and creativity is a groundbreaking study completed by Mason et al. (2021). This work
represents the resumption of the work begun in a preliminary way by Willis Harman and coworkers
(1966, 1970). This new generation of investigators used a 21st Century framework surrounding the
question of how the creative process works. The authors comment that “Over the years, a number of
anecdotal reports have accumulated suggesting that the consumption of serotonin agonist (5-HT-2A
receptor) psychedelic drugs (Nichols, 2016), like lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), psilocybin, and
mescaline, can enhance creativity (Baggot, 2015; Sessa, 2008).”. However, they add that “although there
has been much historical interest in the ability of psychedelics to enhance creative capacity, the scientific

literature is largely lacking.”. With new receptors in hand and with real-time brain imaging data from 60
individuals, the authors proceeded to quantify these anecdotal reports employing emerging models of
creative thought processes:
“Although arguably difficult to define, the creative process has been viewed as a dynamic
process (Manesh et al. 2020; Runco 2019), requiring shifting between different modes of thought
in order to reach an end result (Guilford 1967). These modes include divergent thinking (DT),
which consists of generating novel and original ideas, and convergent thinking (CT), the
subsequent evaluation of generated ideas in regards to their usefulness and effectiveness.”
The study was carried out at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands to test the hypothesis of
Kuypers (2018) who predicted that given previous studies which demonstrated “a decrement in the
functional connectivity in parts of the DMN… after administration of psychedelics (Carhart-Harris et al.
2012; Palhano-Fontes et al. 2015)… a consequence of this effect being enhanced cognitive flexibility and
creative thinking (Carhart-Harris et al. 2014).”
The authors’ conclusion forms a wonderful and compelling link from the anecdotal reports and early
studies to 21st Century, experimental neuroscience. Briefly, they found:
“…that psilocybin induces time- and construct-related differentiation of effects on creative
thinking, suggesting that psychedelics could be a novel tool to investigate underlying neural
mechanisms of the creative process (Girn et al. 2020; Kuypers 2018). In addition, these findings
add some support to the historical claims that psychedelics can influence aspects of the creative
process, reducing conventional, logical thinking, and giving rise to novel thoughts, but
emphasizes the distinction between spontaneous and deliberate creative cognition, as well as
acute and persisting effects of the drug.”
At the time of the writing of this chapter a clinical trial of LSD and creative thinking carried out at the
University of Campinas in Brazil was published (Wießner et al. 2022) suggesting that the return of the
study of psychedelically enhanced higher creative states is well underway.
WALKING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF GENIUS
In his book Origins of Genius (1999), Dean Simonton summarizes the characteristics of typical creative
geniuses from the accumulated literature as people who “[are] open to diverse experiences, display
exceptional tolerance of ambiguity, seek out complexity and novelty, and can engage in defocused
attention” (p. 87). Simonton goes on to state that such “creators” also tend to be more introverted than
extroverted, and can appear remote, withdrawn or perhaps antisocial, while oftentimes exhibiting a
rebellious, nonconventional independence. To make their breakthroughs and land them into products in
the world, creative geniuses are persistent in overcoming obstacles and setbacks and flexible in altering
their strategies, applying a great deal of concentrated hard work to problems. Of course, we might also
ask: what kind of creative intelligence are we considering here? Howard Gardner famously diverged from
the field of intelligence studies’ singular focus on cognitive abilities (problem solving) to propose a
Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Gardner, 2011). Gardner and Hatch (1989) argued that “while problem
solving is recognized as a crucial component, the ability to fashion a product, to write a symphony,
execute a painting, stage a play, build up and manage an organization, carry out an experiment is not
included, presumably because the afore-mentioned capacities cannot be probed adequately in short-
answer tests.”. To broaden the definition Gardner introduced eight different types of intelligences
consisting of: Linguistic, Logical/Mathematical, Spatial, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal,
Intrapersonal, and Naturalist. The details of each of these special capacities of gifted people will not be
taken up here, but should be considered as we seek genius beyond the furled brow of the mythical lone
thinker scribbling on their blackboard.

Charles Darwin, the instigator of my field of the origin of life as well as evolutionary biology itself, is
perhaps one of the greatest of scientific geniuses. Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Francis Crick, and many
others fit the bill for genius based upon the impacts they have had on their scientific fields, and on the
entire human enterprise. Technical geniuses who were well known for their flashes of insight leading to
world-changing innovations included Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, and more recently for the sheer
volume of transformative products, the design partnership of Steve Jobs and Jony Ive at Apple.
Mathematician Ralph Abraham, a longtime colleague and neighbor of mine is an exemplar of the
transformative power of psychedelics to redirect an intellectual career (and also a way of life). In an
article entitled Mathematics and the Psychedelic Revolution (Abraham, 2008) he describes his visionary
downloads enabled in part with high doses of LSD which launched a new branch of mathematics. He also
argues that psychedelics also influenced Silicon Valley’s technology innovators and their products of
which we would all agree are modern time’s epitome of sparks of genius which have lit up the world:
“There is no doubt that the psychedelic evolution in the 1960s had a profound effect on the
history of computers and computer graphics, and of mathematics, especially the birth of
postmodern maths such as chaos theory and fractal geometry. This I witnessed personally. The
effect on my own history, viewed now in four decades of retrospect, was a catastrophic shift from
abstract pure math to a more experimental and applied study of vibrations and forms, which
continues to this day.”
Technology journalist John Markoff covered this history in a wonderfully researched and widely read
book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
(Markoff, 2005). Starting in the vacuum tube and transistor era of the 1950s and ‘60s, he chronicles the
engineers and business leaders who were heavily influenced by what I would like to suggest in this
context we might call ‘elixirs of constructive vision.’ I personally explored this connection having
amassed one of the largest private collections of vintage computer hardware and documents in my
DigiBarn Computer Museum (Damer, 2011). In an adjacent room in my barn sits Timothy Leary’s extant
library, news archive, record collection and personal effects. I was deeded these materials in 2011 by
Denis Berry, co-trustee of Leary’s Futique Trust for my support in helping find a home for his core
archives at the New York Public Library. Hodges (2019) chronicled Leary’s foray into software including
his Mind Mirror series which I have in my collection alongside computers like those that Leary would
have used. In many ways, the tonnage of these archives speaks to the creative power of the combination
of silicon with the ‘dirty pictures,’ chemist Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin’s name for scribbled diagrams of
potent psychoactive compounds. Sasha, also based in the Bay Area of Northern California, was in a way
the digital age’s alchemist, synthesizing and testing compounds such as MDMA, 2CB and hundreds more
(Shulgin et al. 2011). Not surprisingly he recorded his work on early personal computers, the first of
which he donated to the DigiBarn.
Steve Jobs and Francis Crick along with Nobelist Cary Mullis (Mullis, 2000; Markoff, 2005; Fadiman,
2011) used LSD as a mind opening experience which forever changed their creative processes. Jobs
reported in (Isaacson, 2009) that LSD “reinforced my sense of what was important - creating great things
instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as
much as I could.”
TWO SCIENTISTS, TWO TALES OF FLASHES OF INSIGHT
Dean Simonton (2004) proposes a framework for genius which engages discovery within the zeitgeist of
the times when ideas are ripe to appear. He covers efforts to map variations of genius as analytical or
intuitive and the many theories of the cognitive action, including free and flat associative hierarchies
which characterize highly creative people. These individuals can move from convergent (focused mind)

thinking to divergent (mind wandering) approaches in which many associative variations can be tried,
increasing the odds of finding that one rare unique connection.
Fig. 1 David Deamer’s 1989 sketch of his flash of insight (left) which led to the invention of nanopore sequencing
(right), an important new medical technology. Images courtesy David Deamer and Oxford Nanopore.
One such example of a novel innovation arising from remote associations of rather different things
occurred to my colleague David Deamer one day in 1989. For months Dave had been playing with four
themes in his head: planar membranes (his specialty), ion channels across them, DNA and RNA nucleic
acid molecules, and the “Coulter” cell counter. He had set himself the task of figuring out how to get
DNA and RNA to pass through a membrane. While driving in Oregon these disparate things assembled in
a flash into a functioning molecular machine. Dave pulled over to the side of the road and sketched out a
specially shaped pore which forms a tunnel in the membrane through which a strand of nucleic acid is
being pulled, each base making up the strand pausing, and then moving on (Fig. 1, left). An electric
current across the membrane could record which base was transiently blocking the pore, yielding a
voltage interruption carrying the unique signature of which base it was. Dave knew it was truly something
novel, and sensed it was a viable design that would work well in practice. Like Einstein’s famous
utterance surrounding his vision of a man falling from a rooftop (Einstein, 1920) that led to General
Relativity, this was one of the “happiest thoughts” of Dave’s life. Fifteen years later the founders of a
company in Oxford, UK read his article on the idea and approached him to develop it into a new medical
technology, the nanopore sequencer. Today Dave’s flash of insight is embodied in a thousand-dollar gene
sequencing device you can hold in your hand, replacing a half million-dollar refrigerator sized cabinet
(Fig. 1, right).
It should be noted that Dave’s experience occurred without the ingestion of any substances at all, and
spontaneously arose while in the setting of a mundane private activity: driving through the countryside. In
his case, decades of previous training and laboratory experience created the setup for this beautiful, and
workable solution to appear seemingly out of the ether (Damer 2019).
As we continue this exploration of a few examples of states of high creativity in science and technology,
we can probably now offer a tentative reply to the question “what is the genie called genius?” Perhaps it
is a rare entity comprised of an admixture of innate ability, intelligence, and persistence, with extant
environmental conditions and some dumb luck thrown in. Hardly absent from this formulation is the
requirement that genius comes to “the prepared mind” (suggested in a personal conversation with the
author by neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt at ESPD55). Therefore, the arising of these
extraordinary outputs from the human intellect requires a substantial input from the societal surrounds and
personal preparation, the setup. Dave and I share the capacity for mind to generate spontaneous flashes of

insight and I will next detail my own experience which generated a possible scenario (and testable
hypothesis) for a big question in science- the origin of life.
HIGH TIME FOR A SCIENTIST
Around the age of thirteen I watched a TV biography of Albert Einstein and was fascinated by his ability
to mentally enter into an inner world of physics, experiencing highly visual journeys which led to his
proposals for the theory of relativity. He called these Gedankenexperimente (thought experiments) and
perhaps the most famous is Einstein’s description of “chasing a beam of light” at the age of sixteen
(Norton, 2013). In the early spring of 1976 while walking in the sagebrush-dotted hills near my family
home in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada I experienced what I interpreted to be my first scientific
thought experiment, and this was to guide me the rest of my life. Bending down to study a mariposa lily
emerging from the just-thawed ground, I was suddenly awestruck by the beauty of its trillium shape and
asked the question: how can such a complex thing emerge from a much simpler thing, a bulb in the soil
beneath? Standing up I looked out upon the sweeping river system that meets in our town, with all the
plants and trees extending from the pocket desert to the beginning of the northern boreal forest in the
distance. My mind tried to count up all of these emerging life forms and posed another question: where
did all of this come from, was there a common bulb, or seed somewhere deep in the past from which they
all sprouted? I probed back through time trying to travel to that origin point, smiled and felt excited that I
had found the question that really fascinated me: how did life itself begin?
I felt a deep sense of happiness descend upon me as I committed to work on this problem, sensing that it
might take a long time, perhaps as much as ninety years. Being then fourteen, I thought that could mean
that I might be over a hundred years old before a convincing solution emerged, but this was plausibly
within the realm of my lifetime. When I began to walk back toward my parents’ home I was suddenly
confronted by a vision, not from my imagination but arriving from somewhere else. A geometric
apparition was seemingly hanging in front of my eyes but yet clearly still operating from within my head.
It was a moving bundle of balls, connected by sticks, somewhat like the Tinker Toy sets I played with as a
younger kid. It was my first thought experiment, or “download”, just in time to guide my newly minted
life’s mission. I was a bit taken aback by its proximity and vividness but chose to just give it my full
attention. I first studied its movement, trying to “get inside it” and deduce what orderly process, such as a
gear box, might be driving its motion. My inquiry into its inner workings woke up the bundle and
prompted it to direct the following mental missive to me: “figure out how I made a copy of myself!”.
Taking this in, my mind went to the scene of an automobile factory, with cars moving along an assembly
line. I turned my attention back to the apparition with a bit of skepticism around its statement, offering: “it
seems to me that for copies of a machine to be made, you need a much bigger machine like a factory to
make them, and I don’t see a bigger machine anywhere, it’s just you floating there!”. I walked over to a
cliff and gazed out over into a deep creek-cut canyon. The bundle reappeared and gave me one more
nudge, offering a response to my challenge: “It’s a good point, but not the right answer, so work on it!” .
The apparition then winked out. I was grateful for its brief appearance and guidance and I looked forward,
feeling very contented to engage in the years and decades of inquiry that now lay ahead. Of course, as a
teenager I had no model for what has just happened, and no reason to be skeptical. I was open to the
possibility that such things could happen (and still am). Perhaps wisely, I did not share this experience
with anyone realizing that someday, after a long journey of inquiry, and with some solid results in hand,
that it might be time to share what had happened with the seeming entity with which I conversed that day.
Perhaps a new question we might all now want to ask of such apparitions is: “so, exactly where do you
come from?”
Setting Up

Decades later, after earning degrees in computer science, a first job coding an entire graphical user
interface, writing “artificial life” programs, hosting conferences on early life on Earth, helping organize
and innovate the first avatar-inhabited virtual worlds, and a decade of simulation and design projects for
NASA, I had worked on so many surrounding aspects of the origin of life question that I felt ready to
tackle it head-on. In 2008 I began work on a PhD, building and running an environment called the
Evolution Grid (or EvoGrid) to simulate complex interactions within diffuse atomistic soups. Searching
for ways to speed up bond formation, the EvoGrid was an attempt to computationally characterize how
things got complex in the universe. What our team concluded was that all of cosmic evolution (stars to
elements to planets, and then to life itself) might follow a mathematical formulation called stochastic hill
climbing in which objects become co-joined on one step and stay together long enough to reach higher
ones (Damer, 2011; Damer et al. 2012). I playfully refer to this as the “cosmic wiggle” harkening back to
Terence McKenna’s “cosmic giggle” which I personally heard him enunciate, setting the stage for our
creative investigations (described later in this chapter):
“To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of kazooistry begin to give off synchronistic
ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a
precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-
ball, a certain assumption that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what
Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an
archetypal power behind profane appearances.” (McKenna 1998)
All this preparatory work became much more grounded when in 2009 I met David Deamer, who became
my mentor and colleague and invited me to join his department at UC Santa Cruz. Dave has decades of
experience in a field called membrane biophysics and made some key discoveries including the
previously described nanopore sequencing, and another that membranes, the boundary structures of cells,
form from materials present in ancient meteorites which would have been delivered to the Earth four
billion years ago (Deamer, 1985). Dave and I began regular meetings for tea and discussions of origin of
life science in which he trained me and introduced the issues and personalities of this central field of
Astrobiology, and brought me into scientific meetings and organizations. Without his mentorship and
kind critiques of my “big picture” ideations, there would have been no path to transmute any of my
visionary downloads into plausible scientific scenarios with testable predictions. This is a clue to how we
can land the products of creative bursts in the real world, or whether they are destined for the dustbin (see
Genius Lost later in this essay). These years of tea times, reading hundreds of journal articles, struggling
with new terminology and methodology in a dozen fields, and a clear commitment constituted the “setup”
step for me which was a fecund feedstock for my next flash of insight.
The question of life’s origins has a 150-year scientific history, beginning with a sentence in a letter from
Charles Darwin to his friend J.D. Hooker (1871):
“But if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia
& phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity & etc. present, that a protein compound was
chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes [..]”
This Darwinian scribble is the source of the catchy phrase “warm little pond” which has entered into
public consciousness. It is the great scientist’s only known writing about the question of the origin of life.
Less well known is the second part of his sentence that a "protein compound" must form, “ready to
undergo still more complex changes.”. Proteins are one of the building blocks of life, composed of linear
chains of linked amino acids. Darwin intuitively understood that they were important, and that for life to
first begin, they must somehow be synthesized and then be able to undergo evolutionary cycles generating
longer, more complex proteins. In the 21st Century we describe this process as an away-from-equilibrium
chemical system. Darwin’s guess has until recently been largely overlooked in our field. It turns out to
have been extremely prescient and has guided the scenario we have developed working with colleagues
around the world. We situated a key stage in abiogenesis (another term for the origin of life) in an

updated version of the warm little pond: a little hot spring pool subject to cycles of filling, drying and
refilling. A few years before we met, Dave and his graduate students had discovered that if they dried
down mixtures of the building blocks of another key polymer of life, nucleotides, they would stitch
together to form chains, or “polymers” of the nucleic acid RNA (Rajamani et al. 2008). Along with his
earlier discovery of membranous materials coming from ancient meteorites, Dave worked out that if these
meteoritic organics were deposited into a hot spring pool, dried down with nucleotides present, they could
self-assemble to form RNA -filled “protocells” the starting units which could be the earliest ancestors of
living cells.
Dosing Up
This is where the science stood in 2013, four years after Dave and I first started sharing tea together.
Protocells, each containing random sequences of RNA glowed with a fluorescent dye under our
microscopes. This was compelling but was only a first step toward life. It was time for another thought
experiment, this time reaching out into a truly yawning chasm of complexity. The question was: how
could a starting population of trillions of protocells, each one different, acquire the molecular machinery
in just the right sequence to give rise to the first living, reproducing cells? I intuitively felt that a visionary
flash of extraordinary proportions would have to materialize to move us to the next step. What came next
amounted to dosing up with a high-octane fuel able to boost my staid station wagon of a mind into a
neurological drag racer.
In late 1998 I hosted Terence McKenna and his son Finn, together with Ralph Abraham on a visit to my
property in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Terence’s interest was that I was then a “maven” of the medium of
multi-user avatar virtual worlds. I sat Terence and his compadres down in front of a computer connected
to the Internet by creepingly slow modem and toured them into vivid 3D landscapes, conversing with
users inhabiting these worlds and building their dream structures. Terence was sufficiently enthralled to
purchase a new PC and plan to host in-world fan gatherings from his new house in Hawaii. We set a date
to meet there in February, 1999 and I then mentioned to Terence that I was the grand old age of 36, yet
“inexperienced” in psychedelic realms. He kindly offered to help open a doorway for me into his own
version of very vivid psychedelic virtual worlds. Before traveling to Hawaii, I experienced my first
psychedelic trip on a high dose of mushrooms at a remote location in the southern Sierra Nevada in
California. Arriving on the Big Island and sitting with our smokes in his library, Terence and I compared
notes, contrasting the weird tryptamine worlds of the be-mushroomed psyche with the crude but
surprisingly immersive 3D landscapes of the early “metaverse” (Damer, 1999). Terence offered after we
concluded the “Virtual AllChemical Powwow” with forty of his fans touring tryptamine-inflected worlds
that these experiences were “not unlike DMT”. Our late-night discussions seeded his ideas of “novelty”
and the “cosmic giggle” into my future work to sprout into mathematics of the EvoGrid as the “cosmic
wiggle” and into chemistry as a testable scenario for the origin of life.
Over the next decade I continued to explore the full range of “classic” psychedelics, settling on a regular
practice with the jungle medicine ayahuasca. Journeying to take my first “dieta” in a remote location
north of Pucallpa, Peru in late 2011 I was inducted into what became the most healing, and intellectually
productive period of my life. Over the next five years I partook in three dozen sessions, each building on
the previous ones, and refining my relationship with the medicine. Surprisingly perhaps, I began to take
ever lower doses. On a return to Peru in October, 2013 I undertook a major personal goal, which was to
heal a “hard knot” of pain which I associated with a major life event: being given up at birth for adoption.
A growing body of research indicates that the risk of adoptees experiencing psychiatric disorders is in
some cases approximately twice as high as that of non-adoptees. Elevated risks of disorders included:
attention-deficit/hyperactivity, anxiety, depression, substance use, and psychoses (Behle and Pinquart,
2016). I would have certainly been diagnosed on the autism spectrum had pediatric psychiatrists been
looking for that in the 1960s! I was therefore burdened (or blessed) with a lifelong state of heightened
self-awareness and external sensitivity, but sometimes converting into states of anxiety. I coped with

some of the less pleasant aspects of my reality by focusing on multiple, diverse projects. In other words, I
was neurotypical of the personality type we now call “nerds”.
First the Healing, then the Revealing
Resolution of my presumed birth trauma came one night toward the end of our group’s time in the jungle.
I finally felt ready to face fundamental insights about how I was conceived. In an intense tryptamine-
driven stream of events, I experienced the journey of my personal sperm to its destined egg and my
moment of creation and embryonic growth in my birth mother’s belly. Perhaps most important for my
healing resolution was that I felt for the first and only time, a love connection with my birth mother.
Emerging, I experienced a peace and clarity that had never been present in my life, an unbroken line
stretching from my innards to my crown. I was now ready to follow Einstein’s example, to chase my own
beam of light: the spark that lit up the living world. Perhaps in this work what must come first is the
healing, then what becomes possible is a full opening to the revealing.
Our group leader called for a ten minute “no hustling, no bustling” period of silence and I realized that a
unique opportunity had arrived. I closed my eyes and pulled a mental lever which triggered the running of
a previously encoded endo-trip in which I visualized the sperm of my father which had created me
traveling in reverse. That sperm re-merged with his body which in turn was created by the sperm of my
grandfather, itself swimming backwards to his father and so on. I pulled the lever harder, traveling
through genus Homo, through our ape precursors, then all the land animals, fishes, simple multicellular
forms, and then passing into the great ancestral cloud of single-celled organisms. A breathtaking number
of join points were presented and I transited them in a blur as I checked my forehead for elevated brain
temperature. Too hot and this would signify I was way into the red in terms of neuronal activity and
should pull the rip-cord on the scientific endo-trip I was running supercharged within the framework and
chemical milieu of an ayahuasca exo-trip. A cool head prevailed and I passed through the cloud, emerging
into a vision of the beige skies of the Hadean Earth, over four billion years ago. In my high-speed chase
through the ancestor’s tales, I had run a mental reenactment of life in reverse to just before its beginning.
Beneath my soaring viewpoint now lay a volcanic island with smoke and ash rising from erupting cones.
The much fainter young sun radiated as a soft orange ball and meteorites and dust particles crashed and
flashed through the hazy atmosphere. Like a gigantic version of Saturn’s rings, the brilliant disc of
accretion material orbiting the sun was visible in full daylight stretching from horizon to horizon. Within
it was a rich flow of interstellar organics ready to impregnate new born worlds with the building blocks of
life. I pivoted my observer self into a free fall aiming for the place on the island I knew I had to reach to
address my question: how did the first protocells cross the enormous chasm of molecular evolution to
become living microbes?
A steaming field of pools, periodically filled by pulses from hot geysers, appeared on the flanks of a
volcano below my flight path. This was a best guess of an “urable” locality, a place where the spectacular
act of abiogenesis could happen. In scientific terms, it was a zone where away-from-equilibrium
chemistry could form the first populations of protocells and run them through untold numbers of cycles to
become living cells (Deamer et al. 2022). An instant later my observer was immersed in one such pool,
surrounded by silvery objects, the protocells Dave and I had witnessed so many times down the barrel of
our microscope. Peering into them much more closely than I could under a 400x lens, I noted that they
contained stringy forms, glowing like neon: the polymers. Glancing from protocell to protocell I noticed
one which hosted a much more complex interacting mesh of polymers than the others. I parked my
observer next to it and entered into a state of emptiness, asking into the ether for the next step, evidently
assuming there was some thing there to reply. From wherever the reply came, the instruction was simple:
“become it, become it now.”

Fig. 2 Simplified sketch of the author’s October 2013 flash of insight of a protocell in the process of budding.
I took this to mean become that protocell. But I asked myself, how do you become a protocell? The scene
then began to fade to black and I felt I was losing consciousness. “What is happening?” I thought, and the
reply, was “you must die to experience your own birth.” An unknown duration of time passed and I
breached back into consciousness in a “scream” which lit up a new scene. I was now immersed in the
illuminated interior of the protocell, my body had now become a pulsating membrane-bounded sack. All
around and within me surged a molecular-energetic storm. The scream centered my attention on a tearing
action, a ripping of the membrane some distance from my observing center. As I glanced toward that
point my observing camera passed by an undulating string of polymers (Fig. 2). Turning to focus on this,
I noticed points of motion signifying some sort of action within its chain-links. It was as if the keys of a
piano were being played by an unseen hand. My attention was grabbed again by the ripping action, a
compartment was budding off, of “me”, my body was fissioning! The compartment was small, and within
its volume were no illuminated polymers, just blackness. As the compartment blebbed, separated and
drifted off, seemingly totally inert, the membrane that defined my boundary closed up, I suddenly felt
more alive. What did this all mean? There were more questions than answers. Our leader clapped his
hands and the ten minute break was up.
I rocked back on my haunches in amazement and stunned happiness. The entire session had been
manifested on an exogenous micro-dose of ayahuasca potentiating a presumably more powerful macro-
dose of “endo,” my home grown endogenous visionary practice. I had finally learned how to merge the
two in a type of alchemical symbiosis I came to call “winding the vine.” Returning to my little tin-roofed
tambo hut in the rainforest I lay for hours replaying the scene. A completely novel class of technical
questions and scenarios were now roiling in my brain. These questions contained clues and a logical chain
of reasoning slowly emerged: “the action of the polymer was somehow connected to the budding off of
the compartment, it was controlling it” but “the results were not viable, the budded protocell was not yet
living, it was stillborn.” I entered a deeper inquiry: “how can a protocell ‘learn’ to divide into two viable
daughter cells?” and concluded that “the protocell must try and try again until the encoded polymer
instructions successfully carry out the duplication and division.”. In other words, it seems that “death
writes the code of life” even at its very beginning. But how could a relatively simple protocell, floating
on its own in a pool, carry out complicated attempts to divide itself? Surely this would be too risky, and
not even plausible! This act would be akin to you or me jumping into a swimming pool and slitting

oneself from head to stern hoping to birth a pair of twins. One misstep could lead to the dissolution of the
entire protocell and loss of all that had evolved and accumulated to that point. It just did not make sense.
Landing a Solution
Fig. 3 Sketch of the author’s conception of the “coupled phases scenario” envisioned in December 2013 which
became the basis of a novel proposal for life’s origins on Earth.
Three months later, on December 30, 2013 I was at a family relation’s house on a hilltop overlooking Los
Angeles engaged in a morning set of stretches and a practice of breathwork. I often find that breathwork
opens me to a flow state in which inspiring thoughts appear more easily so I was not surprised by what
came next. Months of cogitation around the mystery posed by the vision in the jungle had prepared the
way. That morning the trigger thought for the download began with me posing a new question: “how can
we best construct a laboratory chamber to simulate real hot spring pools, complete with a mineral basin,
injectors, and a rocker system to subject the mineral basin’s edge to wet-dry cycles?”
Suddenly, I felt the oncoming takeover of my particular brand of thought experiment, and a full-on endo-
trip unfolded as I fell headlong into this design for a laboratory hot spring. There I witnessed, without the
aid of psychotropic substances, protocells forming in their trillions by budding off from the dry layers of
lipid into a refilling pool, each protocell containing complex mixtures of polymers. The protocells floated
freely into the bulk of the water, some popping and losing their contents, some staying stably in one
piece. The pool began to dry down and the surviving protocells with their polymer cargoes aggregated
together at the pool bottom, forming a gelatinous mass. The protocells dried down further and their
membranous compartments began to fuse together. As each fusion event happened, a flush of polymers
flowed, mixing together with those of adjacent protocells. Protocells fused and fused, forming vast
layered lipid sheets. Between the sheets seething populations of polymers and innumerable other

molecules moved like the busy automata from Conway’s early bio-inspired computer program “the Game
of Life” (Gardner, 1970). Complex interactions occurred, sunlight and sources of chemical energy were
captured, polymers competed for building blocks, broke up, and grew longer in a nod to Darwin,
undergoing “still more complex changes”. A flush of water again raised the pond level, and dried films of
membrane were submerged, budding off trillions more protocells, each carrying new cargoes of now
more complex polymers. The polymers were “coupling” between dry, wet and an intermediate moist
phase. They were circulating within the “glassware” of semi-permeable membranes and able to undergo
selective changes away from thermodynamic equilibrium. What was emerging was truly novel in the brief
history of the young Earth, and perhaps in the entire universe.
I took another breath, as the endo-trip was continuing to roll forward. An untold number of cycles poured
protocells into the pool, with colonies forming and growing along different shores and bays. Each colony
grew as organics accumulated, membranes formed, and were stabilized by initially random polymers.
Gradually each separate colony assumed a distinct character. There was something emerging in each that
differentiated it from the others. The protocells seemed to be taking on different colors. Looking closely
at these rainbow colonies there were sets of specific polymers engaged in tasks. Some colonies were
stagnant or decreasing in size until rafts of protocells from other colonies reached them, merged in with a
new color and then the combined colony grew with increased vigor. The circuits of life were lighting up:
first, passive pores formed through membranes, allowing nutrients in and other molecules out. Catalysts
picked up the nutrients at the entry point of the pores and cycled to produce more catalysts and other
products into existence. Those products diffused and joined into other chemical circuits. Amidst it all,
little undulating segments of polymers were templated, read and rewritten, beginning to exert control over
the circuits. Those information-carrying polymers clumped together into sets, along with other molecular
origamis. Budding protocells picked up bigger toolsets of polymers on each round and began to retain
them indefinitely through subsequent cycles. Then, one day, after thousands, or millions of years of
cycling across a whole landscape of interconnected pools, a protocell executed the instruction to bud off a
smaller compartment, and then another, and another. This could only happen while protocells were
surrounded by the protective and supportive matrix of other protocells as they aggregated together as the
pool was drying down. Protocell division attempts could happen again and again, and even if they failed,
all the precious molecular cargoes would be conserved and recycled into the communal matrix. So, this is
how protocells would be safeguarded from their own dissolution even as they were driven to attempt their
own fission. A chemical economy of mutual support, division of labor, and resource sharing enabled this
final step to life. The amorphous, sharing community of protocells had lifted some of their members into
singular identity as living cells and birthed billions of years of future lines of descendants.
I sat back, as the download was done. Mulling it over, what I had witnessed I later realized was the
“progenote” predicted by the great microbiologist Carl Woese (Woese and Fox, 1977) and which I then
later developed in my first sole author publication (Damer, 2016). This was the proposed environment
which could support that final reproductive step to cellular life, and every other step leading up to it. The
progenote is the deepest ancestor of microbial communities and booted up within the substrate we now
term the “progenitor,” a veritable womb enabling fragile inanimate protocells to traverse the
combinatorial chasm to life (Deamer et al. 2024). Indeed, death did write the code of life, but perhaps
more fundamentally is perhaps that life began in a very different way than the Victorian notion of the
strict competitive regime of “survival of the fittest.” Through this discovery in this era of the Internet, we
might be able to re-cast life’s beginnings and subsequent evolution in the terms of networked emergence
powered by cooperation sustained by sharing relationships, yet till driven by innovation-compelling
competition and selection. This refiguring could instigate an important philosophical and societal
revisioning of life, and our place in it. What a morning reverie! I immediately sketched the scenario (Fig.
3) while it was still fresh in my mind and wrote several pages of notes to my colleague David Deamer. I
knew, however, that the concept was still very much in the “hand waving” territory, until it was
developed into a scientific proposal which included testable predictions.

Publish and Test, and Test Again
This process took just over a year for the vision to be landed in the scientific language of a hypothesis, an
article to be drafted, proceeding through peer review, and first appearing in print in (Damer and Deamer,
2015).
Fig. 4 Final rendition of the composite figure describing the “hot spring hypothesis” for an origin of life (left);
Scenario depicted on the cover of the journal Astrobiology (right) which published the full hypothesis article in
April, 2020. Images courtesy Bruce Damer and Ryan Norkus, Mary Ann Liebert Inc. Publisher.
For the next several years, Dave and I presented the scenario to colleagues around the world who had
been unsatisfied with the longstanding hypothesis that life must have begun in the oceans at hydrothermal
vents. We also began to take our science from the lab to the field, performing prebiotic chemistry at hot
springs on three continents which were analogs for volcanic hydrothermal fields on the early Earth. With
additional evidence accumulating, the conjecture morphed into a matured hypothesis which began to be
tested by multiple laboratories. Dave and I then derived a more extensive scenario, broadened our testable
predictions, and made a new case for the third, moist phase, in which we believe the first metabolic
circuits might arise. Colleagues from multiple disciplines contributed to a “composite figure” (Fig. 4, left)
which formed the explanatory core of our next publication: The Hot Spring Hypothesis for an Origin of
Life (Damer and Deamer, 2020). This article was supported by a very nice cover image in the April 2020
issue of the journal Astrobiology depicting protocells cycling in a hot spring on a Hadean landscape, four
billion years ago (Fig 4. right).

Fig. 5 Testing the hypothesis at Fly Geyser, Nevada, USA in December 2021 (left); Slide showing dry-down films
of silica, lipids and nucleotides from Fly Geyser experiments (right). Images courtesy Kathryn Lukas and Bruce
Damer.
There is no substitute, and no other route to land the hypothetical products of visionary conceptions in
science than patient hard work in close collaboration with specialists, and being ever ready to receive
criticism and respond to potential falsification from the data. Since 2020, increasing numbers of teams
around the world have adopted the wet-dry cycling method pioneered by Dave Deamer and our group.
Other stages of our end-to-end scenario have also begun to be tested. One of these is the recent
confirmation that organics recovered from two sample return missions to asteroids did contain some of
the organic compounds that would have been falling into our ancient hot little cycling pools (Yada et al.
2022). We have continued our field work as well and (Fig. 5 left) shows me performing cycling
experiments at Fly Geyser in Nevada, USA with visual confirmation of films of silica, lipids and
nucleotides drying down on our slides (right). When analyzed, samples like this show long strands of
RNA, and even DNA which can become encapsulated in protocells (Hassenkam and Deamer, 2022).
From my first “endo trip” thought experiment at the age of fourteen, through a long string of visionary
downloads over half a lifetime, followed by two decades of psychedelic experimentation as an admixture
for the creative process, I am convinced that a well-crafted “endo & exo” creative practice can work
wonders for problems in science, engineering and even the complex challenges faced by leadership.
TAKEAWAYS FROM A SCIENCE HIGH
Distilling decades of the pursuit of creative solutions, I feel some confidence to offer the following
anecdotal extract of the practices that have worked in my case. None of this is yet grounded in
neuroscience or models of cognition, yet they might be informative to formalize a future, better-defined
practice. Seven distinct methodologies around set, setting and setup come to mind:
1. Holding the Kernel of Commitment
Key to the start of my creative journey was a kernel storing my commitment and abiding passion
for the pursuit of the problem. This kernel lives in a part of my psyche where has been held for
forty years almost as a sacred trust. Even in times when the dream of working on the problem
seemed very remote, I held to the question, patiently waiting for the right for the problem to be
tackled.

2. Paying Attention, Picking up Probabilistic Marbles and Taking Action
At periods throughout my life, proverbial probabilistic marbles of opportunity would roll my
way. Paying attention to their arrival, picking them up, and taking the actions they proscribed was
always the right move to push my creative agenda forward. For example, in the late 1980s I was
writing code to create a document design environment. One day, a Scientific American issue
arrived on my doorstep with a special issue titled “artificial life” (A-Life). I picked up the code
from one article and, as I had on my desk an early computer with a bit-mapped display, I could
program that environment to run in high resolution. For months I studied fields of mobile,
pixelated herbivores devouring virtual plants. I picked up the A-Life thread again in the late
1990s when I founded a working group called Biota.org and hosted a conference at the famous
Burgess Shale fossil deposit in the Canadian Rockies. A speaker at that meeting, ecologist Tom
Ray, demonstrated his Tierra A-Life environment. This interest and connection led to a meeting
with renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins who was also working with A-Life. This
in turn led to my PhD work on the EvoGrid and meetings with physicist Freeman Dyson, some of
whose suggestions resulted in a stronger theoretical underpinning for the work with David
Deamer on the hot spring hypothesis. Failing to notice or pick up each of these and hundreds of
other such lovely marbles would have likely irrevocably altered my course on this quest.
3. Embracing Youthful Endo-trips and Nurturing them into Adulthood
In my experience, endo-trips and their “downloads” can arrive spontaneously without an engaged
practice or exogenously ingested substance. During childhood and my early teen years these
downloads, along with a great deal of daydreaming, were part of my mental media landscape.
With the social and intellectual challenges of middle and high school stacked up with hormonal
changes, the frequency of such reveries became reduced. From my first endo-trips as a very
internal, probably Asperger spectrum kid, I determined to keep this “secret inner landscape”
alive. Starting to draw at age 12 was one technique paired with imagining entire worlds while
walking in my neighborhood. After thousands of full color renderings of these worlds, I felt that I
could visualize the moving parts of complex environments, including a board game I designed
and ran in my head before fabricating the whole thing out of cardboard and glazed clay pieces.
This was a form of self-training that became the foundation of all my adult career, from software
development to science. Thus, the core practice of endo-tripping became baked into my creative
practice and was well online before I added a psychedelic overlay in my late 30s. In fact, I believe
that a non-psychedelic “endo” core dwells at the center and synthesizes my best insights in the
free-association storm of a psychedelic melee.
4. Techniques to Pre-load, Run, and Shut Down Endo-trips
Endo-trips are not something new-fangled. I suggested earlier that they are well-chronicled in all
manner of creative individuals and that Albert Einstein’s thought experiments are perhaps their
most famous example in science. I believe they are different from imaginative rumination,
nighttime dreams, or lucid dreaming states. They have been described to me by others as wide-
awake takeovers of conscious awareness; in most cases, the recipient being swept away into
another world. They can come on after months, or years of pondering a problem, having pre-
loaded one’s mind with questions, clues, designs, data and notions. The better the quality and
extent of pre-loading the more likely the endo-trip will produce a viable product. I find that for
endo-trips to wend their way into my waking consciousness, I must be undisturbed, and
unconcerned. Whether it be walking in the forest, mowing a lawn, engaging in breathwork or
yoga, or lying in bed, a neutral and quiet state sets the stage. These trips take on a softer character
than a full-blown psychedelic exo-journey, but can reach an impressive attention-grabbing
intensity that for me can last from a few minutes to up to an hour. Their run rate seems to travel
on an arc and when the endo-trip is running out of juice, I find it is best to gracefully let it go,

shut down the process, and not yield to the temptation to let imagination grab hold and try to
stretch it out.
5. A Cautionary Tale of Mixing Endo and Exo
From an early age, and possibly from my status as an adoptee, a kid on the spectrum and my
particular arrangement of psychic parts, I was perhaps pre-adapted to enter and navigate the
world of endo-trips. Having encountered paranoid schizophrenia in my family (and in my wife’s
family) I can offer caution around the fine line between constructive endo-tripping and harmful
delusional or psychotic ideation. Perhaps endo-tripping is not possible for everyone and may
require a specific neurotype and a home environment to nurture it. Waiting until I was in my late
30s before adding the overlay of psychedelics was an indication of my sense of the fragility and
possible destabilization of my cognitive system. For the first few years of experimentation with
psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, and other substances, I took what I felt to be a mental housekeeping
step of “setting up a firewall” to protect my purported endo-tripping neuronal machinery. This
may be a completely made-up notion on my part but I felt that even during high-dose experiences
I should and could safeguard and shut down my so-called “envisionary consciousness.” I recall
the moment in 2013 in Peru on a low exo-dose of ayahuasca when I first “powered up” the endo-
system within a psychedelic surround. That moment of merging these two modalities was
significant for me as I could run an A/B comparison of how endo and exo manifested behind
closed eyes. At the time I was attempting to obtain confirmation that endo-tripping was made
possible by a flush of endogenous DMT by comparing the visual effects with an introduced low-
dose of exogenously-sourced plant DMT (and other compounds). The decision to enable endo-
tripping within the framework of a low-dose ayahuasca trip was instrumental in the healing and
scientific breakthroughs described earlier. I would like to caution, however, that this interweaving
of endo and exo practice may not be for everyone, and that my predilection for this may be
unusual. However, it might be that psychedelics can augment ordinary waking consciousness in
the absence of a capacity for endogenous reveries. This is grist for the mill of future research,
which might start with the collection of experience reports to build a historical anecdotal
understanding of what is going on out there?
6. Operating the Endo Observer, Recorder Camera, and Questioner
Given that you self-identify as experiencing productive endo-trips, or that you have entered into a
creative visionary state on a psychedelically enabled exo-trip, or some combination of the two,
what is the best way to operate your mental control panel during the download phase? From an
early age, when an endo-trip took control of my cognitive stick-shift, I decided to both fully
immerse in the ride, but maintain my own, separate observer which would neutrally watch and
record the journey. I have later learned that the holding of an observer is widely promoted in
Buddhism, especially in meditation and other practices. This observer view is especially
important in healing practices such as IFS (Internal Family Systems) therapy. One of the jobs of
the observer is to provide a safe platform so that the trip does not completely take over the view
of self, of time, and of the world. If awareness joins with the parts of oneself and falls into the
trip, the tripper might begin to believe that this is their only reality and enter into a state of panic
or despair. Another job for the observer is to operate what I called a high-speed visoneering
camera to record the entire “endo-movie”. In some intense hourlong experiences my observer has
made it possible for me to “pause” the trip itself, open a notebook, draw and take notes. Closing
my eyes again I found that the movie of the trip had advanced into a new scene but I was still able
to dive back in. Lastly, the observer can listen to conversation, and mediate questions into the
space of the endo-trip. For instance, I could pose questions like: “why are we in colder, darker
water, what is happening here?” and the endo-machinery would visually deliver an answer, in that

particular case showing stable protocells merging, illustrating a possible early chemical form of
sexual recombination.
7. Rendering and Post-processing Endo Deliveries
As the storm of an endo-trip recedes, I let it go gracefully, keeping the mind empty and in many
cases reaching for a notebook and pencils to draw some of the visions, often capturing their
cinematic nature frame-by-frame. A few scribbled points can scaffold a longer essay where in a
stream of words the experience is laid down like a studio track. I strive to not embellish the
memory, but to capture the images and feelings as faithfully as possible, even if there are bizarre
or incomplete elements. If the vision came with a psycho-spiritual personal insight, I often “re-
trip” the experience from still-fresh memory by making an audio recording, voicing the emotional
content to its fullness. These practices serve not only to transcribe the experience but also to re-
render it such that subsequently, even years later, the endo-trip can be recalled and re-run. I have
found that building up a remembered library of “trip-takes” provides something extraordinary: the
ability to engage in multi-stage problem solving. By appending experiences together like chapters
in a book, and re-tripping them later as a single-story stream as I did with my time-reversal
journey through life’s ancestry, the next chapter has a much higher probability of emerging. This
method works for multi-stage problems or ones containing subsumed detail that must be revealed
like the peeling of an onion. Complex scientific solutions like the standard model of particle
physics, or a plausible scenario for an origin of life require such a multi-stage, multi-layered
approach. The class of highly challenging problems facing Humanity from climate change, viral
pandemics and the complications of our psyches might just fit the bill for this approach. I hope
that the practices I have tested and reported here might be adapted by others to tackle these
existentially important challenges.
Dusting off my drawings and notes a decade after they were first sketched, I am struck by how
fresh they all still appear. By not embellishing or drifting from these visions, instead keeping
them preserved like insects in amber, they can continue to be a source for new directions, and
new science. For example, in the ayahuasca vision, my attention was grabbed by the mysterious
budding, dark vesicle and I only briefly focused on the motion of an undulating polymer. This
year, a new student joined our group at UC Santa Cruz and the BIOTA Institute and is returning
to the question posed by that polymer, taking up the first steps of testing templating of RNA
instructions from DNA in hot spring conditions. I will take a new trip to visit that part of the
original protocell division experience to see if there are clues for our next laboratory approaches
to uncovering mechanisms leading to the origin of genes.
AN AGENDA FOR PSY-SOLUTIONING?
I hope that the above anecdotal sharing of my own experiences might provide some input for future
colleagues who could truly formalize hypotheses and approaches around the role of psychedelics in high
states of creative problem solving. Moving forward with an agenda and some next steps, perhaps we
could first adopt a stand-in term for this endeavor, perhaps “psy-solutioning?”
Harman and Fadiman (1970) summarized their 1966 pilot study with a follow-up review “Selective
Enhancement of Specific Capacities Through Psychedelic Training” providing three key questions which
might move a psy-solutioning agenda forward in the 2020s:
1. Can the psychedelic experience enhance creative problem-solving ability, and if so, what is the
evidence of enhancement?
2. Can this result in enhanced production of concrete, valid, and feasible psy-solutions assessable by
the pragmatic criteria of modern industry and positivistic science?

3. Working with a non-clinical population and with a non-therapy orientation, would there
nevertheless result demonstrable long-term personality changes indicative of continued increased
creativity and self-actualization?
At the ESPD55 meeting I took the liberty of suggesting the following for the anatomy of a psy-
solutioning session. This straw-person protocol is based upon my own experience and should only be
taken as a starting point.
Prepare the mind, pose the question, engage in extensive reading in the subject area, but also off-
axis into other fields which might have a bearing. Take up other activities with nothing to do with
the problem, adopt a problem-tackling approach like the one put forward in Zen & the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig, 1999).
Patiently await the right moment as an endo-trip may spontaneously occur after some months, or
solutions may arise during an endo-exo experience. Also important is the “digestion and rest
time”, which cannot be rushed.
Practices during the trip (post-peak intensity of an ingested substance)
• Surrender, quieten the mind, pay attention.
• Allow endo to meet exo in a free association storm.
• Anneal the insight, receive, record, re-trip and draw, write or otherwise render a record of
the downloaded vision.
Translate the download into the language of science, engineering, or leadership and then share
with peers for a quality critique.
Develop a serious proposal, collaborate, publish, and then test the proposed hypotheses, product
designs or organizational methodologies in the real world.
Iterate and wait, propose, publish and iterate again.
If this is not the end of the story, or the fullest exploration of the hypothesis, return to the
question, re-trip previous endo-experiences, consider a new carefully planned session with the
intention of adding new chapters and develop a next stage for testing.
Be prepared for an ever-deepening level of exploration. Sometimes these inquiries can touch on
the infinite.
This article called for the opening of a “fourth path” in psychedelic research and practice in: altering
states for creative breakthroughs in technical fields. Given that the first three paths could be
understood as: indigenous and cultural use; personal growth and expression; and therapeutic
applications, how can a community be catalyzed around this next path?
I might suggest that we have some idea of who the “clients” or “practitioners” might be but who
would be the overall stakeholders? Does the constituency for psy-solutioning include a wide swath of
society or a narrow one? Could this research be broadly carried out amongst scientists and
technologists in labs and startup companies, Fortune 500 firms, students and professors at colleges
and universities, and also within government agencies? The “psy-curious” abound in these worlds,
together with a strong need for creative, out-of-the-box thinking. Would psy-solutioning clinical trials
such as those carried out by Harman, Mason, and by future workers fall inside or outside of existing
psychedelic therapeutic research into treatments for trauma, anxiety, PTSD, and other conditions?
Would an objective be to eventually staff “psy-solutioning clinics or retreats?” To get started, could
psy-solutioning sessions be added as a module in the latter stages of government sanctioned

psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy? Who would regulate this space and what would constitute legal
and normative practices? And last, but not least, who would the financial backers be?
Next Steps?
Might we best begin this initiative by sponsoring an open and anonymous survey to invite psy-
solutioning practitioners to file their own experience reports and establish a body of historical data for
the practices, and the eventual science?
I’d like to conclude by calling for collaboration and the formation of a working group of advisors,
commentators, experts, students and those with practical experience to take the next steps toward
validation and valorization of psy-solutioning as a worthwhile endeavor in society.
RECKONING WITH THE EXTREME ENDS OF GENIUS
We are all familiar with the productive contributions of genius to society throughout our history.
However, some of the behaviors of highly creative persons can veer into the territory of psychopathology.
The popular idea that “madness and genius are often close bedfellows” is borne out by studies in which
“creative people and people suffering from mental disorders appear to share some common personality
and cognitive traits” (Fink et al. 2012). Two extreme ends of genius in society are worth noting as more
proposals to engage in clinical studies and promote the use of psychedelics in highly creative, yet possibly
problematic individuals.
Genius Lost
We are all familiar with impassioned and bright solo individuals proposing their own “theory of
everything.” We find them isolated and quiet or perhaps more public, transforming themselves into
storytellers or even gurus of a sort. They may have pounded on the doors of the Academy to then be
somehow rejected, or never sought education beyond a few years at college, or lacked a mentor or
collaborator to help shape their thinking. Without the “hazing” of defending one’s PhD thesis to a tough
review committee, the brutal knocks of grant writing and rejection, the discipline and grit of pulling long
hours at the bench or breaking rocks in harsh locations, the hopeful dreamer cannot be transformed into a
productive scientist. With no peer review, and no testable experiments proposed, their life’s work is
destined to be ignored and lost, or worse, converted into a form of quasi-religious system, similar to those
chronicled in Manly P. Hall’s epic encyclopedia The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1973).
Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies,
encountered such individuals first hand. For a time, she hung out a shingle as “as a hired consultant to
autodidact physicists” (Hossenfelder, 2016). Dozens of self-taught individuals contacted her for
consulting sessions. They were uniformly lacking in the tools of the trade (especially mathematics),
understanding of current science, and put forth proposals emerging from isolated ideation, often
expressed as elaborate colored drawings with a smattering of equations. The demarcation between real
science, scientists and serious work, and these pseudoscience proposals was quite stark. This was not a
formal study and none of Hossenfelder’s clients were reported to have derived their visions using
psychedelics. It might well be that the increasing use of psychedelics in the general population will
produce new harvests of pseudoscience and their close cousins, conspiracy theories.
Regardless of the source of any insight about the workings of reality, it must run the gauntlet of formal
training and testable hypotheses and vetting within a scientific community of peers. Without structure,
mentorship and other guidance, institutional support, translation of their insights into serious proposals for
funding, and follow-through (and in some cases, mental health support) many potential “genius level”
producers are lost to society, and often to themselves. Even within academic environments, potential

genius can be snuffed out through politics or misunderstanding. It is likely that perhaps only a few percent
(or less) of those capable of major technical or scientific breakthroughs are ever able to express their
potential gifts. In this time of major challenges to Human civilization, of complexity beyond the capacity
of day-to-day coping strategies, of planetary ecosystems entering into convulsions, can we afford to waste
any potential genius in our ranks? Perhaps these individuals should be sought out, resourced, and if
appropriate, given access to the healing, and the revealing powers of psychedelics.
Evil Genius
As the 1960s wound down, so wilted the rose of a psychedelically fueled Eleusinian return so colorfully
described by the chronicler Patrick Lundborg (2012). An archetypal dark figure from this time was
Charles Manson who, through his followers, effected a half dozen grisly murders in Los Angeles in 1969.
Recent revisiting of case files and new extant evidence established a link between Manson’s use of LSD
and these events, possibly provided through a program supported by the US Government (O'Neill, 2019).
LSD researcher David Smith reported that the change in Manson's personality "was the most abrupt
[another researcher] Roger Smith had observed in his entire professional career" (Smith, 1971).
Subsequently Manson began preaching a philosophy surrounding a coming race war based on a
conspiratorial mashup of the science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, the Bible, Scientology,
Dale Carnegie, and the Beatles (Guinn, 2013). This garnered him the cult following that would later
execute the widely publicized murders.
Psychologists Paulhus and Williams (2002) have proposed a “dark triad” of personality traits “three
conceptually distinct but empirically overlapping personality variables… Machiavellianism, narcissism
and subclinical psychopathy [which] often show differential correlates but share a common core of
callous-manipulation” (Furnham et al. 2013). Perhaps this dark triad is a likely marker for potential “evil”
practitioners who pluck poisoned fruits from the verdant tree of psychedelic inspiration. Charles Manson
may be an exemplar and a warning of what can happen when the dark triad meets the ego-amplification
and delusion-enhancing capacity of psychedelics.
Before psychedelics hit the local pharmacy, we might ask: “can we afford to vastly expand the population
of evil geniuses walking the streets, running companies and leading countries?” Personality maps and pre-
session screening as well as introspective training are already being developed within protocols for
MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Methodologies such as IFS have been selected (Whitfield, 2021) to
permit patients a deeper introspection on what Michael Mithoefer (2013) calls the “multiplicity of the
psyche.” It seems our minds are not unitary but made up of “parts,” also referred to in psychiatry as
“dissociation,” “sub-personalities,” “selves,” and “complexes.” At the extreme manifestations of
multiplicity, we find dissociative identity disorders and other pathologies. When deeply suppressed parts
do emerge, a state ensues that healers and shamans throughout history have named a “possession” by
demons, angels, or animal spirits.
Perhaps IFS and other preparatory practices can cushion the full shock to the system of “what shows up”
for the psychedelically naïve and guide even those carrying the burdens of the dark triad to navigate
toward positive outcomes. The recent implementation of several school-based anti-bullying programs
(Ferguson et al. 2007) have valorized the norm that it might just be OK to “screen and intervene” for
those capable of future grave misdeeds within society. From vast human casualties caused by strongmen
demagogues to school shooters, untreated psychopathy and traumas call to us from the headlines to
consider psychedelics as critical tool for such intervention. Our very survival as a civilization and species
may depend upon their widespread therapeutic use especially among those who, through innate traits of
personality, might be destined to become our future leadership.
RE-IGNITION

The psychedelic renaissance is considered by many to be something very newborn, of and for our time.
Yet the use of psychoactive substances likely suffused of all human history and has underpinned much of
our spiritual, and intellectual development even well before antiquity. Perhaps it is we who are myopic to
its presence all around us, despite the absence of these practices for a half millennium in the West and
other parts of the world. The forces that led to the end of ancient mystery schools, shamanic practices, and
the healing arts of women, temporarily scrubbed our memories of the pivotal role of trance states and
their attendant potions. Brian Muraresku (2020) built on the earlier works of Wasson, Hoffman and Ruck
(1978, 2008) reporting on new evidence that the great mystery school at Eleusis in Greece provided
psychedelic visionary rites to many who went on to fashion civilization in the Mediterranean. If this is the
case, along with Plato and other initiants present in the Telesterion temple sat the engineers who
conceived of grand aqueducts, the geometers who calculated the diameter of the Earth, and the political
architects who created the first representative governments of the Greek and Roman worlds.
In concluding this exploration, one of the most remarkable subject reports from the Harman study came
from an architect and is worth repeating here to understand the indisputable potential of these tools.
Sometime following his peak experience and after taking up his psychedelic creativity session, he
reported:
“I looked at the paper I was to draw on. I was completely blank. I knew that I would work with a
property 300 ft. square. I drew the property lines .... Suddenly I saw the finished project. I did
some quick calculations .... it would fit on the property and not only that . . . it would meet the
cost and income requirements . . . it would park enough cars.., it met all the requirements. I
visualized the result I wanted and subsequently brought the variables into play which could bring
that result about. I had great visual (mental) perceptibility; I could imagine what was wanted,
needed, or not possible with almost no effort. In what seemed like ten minutes I had completed the
problem . . . I was amazed at my idealism, my visual perception, and the rapidity with which I
could operate.”
Harman and colleagues then offered this reflection (with my emphasis):
“Bertrand Russell once remarked that in the discovery of the theory of relativity, Einstein began
with a kind of mystical or poetical insight into the truth which took the form of visualizing the
totality of the law in all its ramifications. The Gestalt view conceives creativity as an action
which produces a new idea or "insight" full-formed; it comes to the individual in a flash.
Similarly, the illuminating flash of insight in which the completed solution is grasped in its
entirety constitutes the most distinctive feature of Rugg's ‘transliminal experience’ and Maslow's
‘peak experience.’”
As the psychedelic community reignites this inquiry so wrongly and forcibly abandoned a half century
ago, we will mine rich veins of philosophy, forge a theory of mind fully baked with a novel modern
mysticism, and speak again in the poetry of transcendental states. Perhaps through new initiatives that
might be undertaken by you, dear readers, we can ignite a psychedelic culture in which the medicines of
healing can also serve as the elixirs of discovery.
AFTERWORD: LEST WE FORGET!
In my experience, and perhaps yours as well, the pragmatic products of visionary reverie must cross a
liminal boundary from majestic whole-cloth realization to become transmuted into a more plain and
oftentimes pedantic form. The transcendent beauty of an equation that defines the structure of the
universe, or a chemical cycle that has the power to initiate life must land in the proscribed, bland language
of peer-reviewed journal articles and testable hypotheses. To reify the products of genius in our world,
their original grand conception is destined to be whittled down and reinterpreted into the language of

science, engineering, and business. Yet, if we hold in our minds a carefully preserved record of the
original vision of their conception, we can retain a connection to the source of their being. This is
precious as it provides water for the long trek across the desert of implementation, and at the end of that
long road, gives us buttoned-down technocrats our own private feast of spiritual sustenance. I find that as
I revisit carefully stashed reveries, they provide a ready supply of unexplored avenues for my ongoing
scientific work. In other words, a careful and faithfully filed visionary entry into our mental media library
can remit a long-term annuity.
This is the path some of us choose, to take a ride on the mystical side and manifest its magic into working
widgets in our day-to-day reality. Perhaps many more of us can become liminal surfers on the wave
between the fully witnessed essence of the psychedelic light and the brilliant incarnations of science and
technology. For me, there is no irreconcilable gap between these two great magisteria. We encounter their
pure forms in visionary experience, each flowing into the other with equanimity. Perhaps then, one day
the “mystic scientist” will gaze into a mirror, give a wink to the “scientific mystic” peering back, and go
on to fearlessly and lovingly remake the world.
All of this said, there is an ineffable elephant patiently drumming his trunk in our psychedelic drawing
room: the extraordinarily otherworldly reality of the full-blown psychedelic peak state, which Sasha and
Ann Shulgin referred to as a “Plus 4” experience (Shulgin and Shulgin, 1995). Often, these peak states
cannot be “Englished” in the words of psychedelic raconteur Terence McKenna (who may nonetheless
have successfully “Irished” them). After we experience Terence’s “death by astonishment” we draw a
breath and slide off the peak, oftentimes hardly remembering that we had just merged with some version
of the totality of the universe. The products of endo-exo visionary renderings may nonetheless join us on
the downslope off the peak, or later as we come to rest in the far hills of integration. The products are
gifts of, but in no way can fairly represent the enormity of that place from whence they emerged. So
perhaps, we should take a moment honor the elephant, lest we forget its presence. It may provide the
gravitas and the mind manifesting dissolution we need to return as humbled yet hopeful children of the
cosmos, seeking to do something in our short lives to return the favor of our remarkable existence.
The elephant has been touched by innumerable blind men and women who offer their own description of
what it actually is, but this tribute by George Andrews, excerpted from his full poem Annihilating
Illumination from the Psychedelic Reader (1965), hints at the true ineffable depths and scale of its genius
(and ours):
“I am alive within the living God
I throb unique among the infinite variations
and so what if all the evolution of consciousness only leads to the knowledge
that I am a germ in the guts of a greater being
I am older than creation, older than all beings
the stars revolve within me
I voyage through the inner space between my atoms
I take space ships to the different parts of my body
each organ becomes a constellation as I spread across the sky
wheeling through the zodiac, weaving the fate of future races
I conceive a cosmos where life does not need to kill to live

create a system free from pain
And in the spawn and seethe of the primeval ocean
out of chaos I pass the current
immortal diamonds shimmering on the foam of the instant now”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank Dennis McKenna and the entire McKenna Academy for their kind
invitation to participate in the ESPD55 meeting and my wife, Kathryn Lukas-Damer for her support in
this very personal telling of my story. Additional thanks go to Rebecca Lazarou for her kind hand in
helping to edit this novel synthesis.
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