THEY SHIMMER WITHIN 574 Pages: B&W with 35+ Illustrations Release Date: March 2018 This book is now available direct from the booksellers below. |
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:: Read a preview of chapter 1 here (PDF format) :: ABOUT THIS BOOK The use of psychedelic drugs and visionary plants, such as ayahuasca, D.M.T., salvia divinorum and 2-C.I., is rising within Western society, and with this use are emerging an increasing number of mind-blowing reports narrating encounters with otherworldly ‘elves’, shadow people and visionary beings. Contemporary approaches to these shimmering discarnate entities in psychedelic thought have tended towards the literal, the archetypal or the imaginal, while the wider scientific community tends to dismiss them as overly bizarre or seemingly inexplicable experiences. However, the relatively new fields of the cognitive science of religion and evolutionary psychology may be able to provide novel and meaningful insights into such visions, which are at the very least statistically significant psychological phenomena worthy of further study. The cognitive suggestion that invisible supernatural agents found in all religions spring from arrays of deeply-founded, innate but non-imagistic mental processes is one that can be applied to encounters with beings during intense visions, while the evolutionary idea that such cognitions are often easily triggered, difficult to inhibit, and emerge most prominently during emotive periods of high mental or physical demand is also applicable to visionary experiences and altered states of consciousness. This wide-ranging book explores how our oldest and deepest mental processes predispose us as humans to believe in invisible supernatural agents - and find them emotively meaningful - even though we live in a universe which lacks them, and presents a new hypothesis of how these same cognitions facilitate the emergence of those agents to become suddenly, dazzlingly and emotively visible when psychedelic drugs and visionary plants are ingested. Bruce’s holistic approach, in which visionary beings are considered in the same manner as all other psychological experiences, leads to the conclusion that such discarnate entities shimmer within as profound and awe-inspiring, but ultimately mysterious, products of the mind, an existential paradox of simultaneous knowing and unknowing which rests at the heart of what it is to be human. This is an academic text, but concepts and theories are explored in an accessible way for the general reader. It is also the third in a series of explorations towards a more holistic system of thought, perception and experience, entitled Visionary Humanism. |
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements Three Million Years Ago Introduction Part I: Of Wild Spirits & Little Vision Tricksters Part II: A Cognitive Model of Visionary Beings |
15. Social Intelligence Part III: Questions, Meanings and Dreamings Neurocosmic: A Vision Notes & References |
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