The Effects of Sleep Deprivation on a Psychedelic Experience

‘Set’ – what you as an individual bring to a psychedelic experience – plays a significant role in how a specific trip will turn out. This one half of ‘set and setting’ (the latter encompassing environmental factors) is often framed as your mood and emotional state going into an experience. Do you feel positive and…

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Xenoglyphs and Asemic Writing: The Joy of Creating Alien Symbols

For several years, I have found myself drawn to the practice of asemic writing (artistic, meaningless writing, which has the appearance of a genuine language). However, I didn’t know there was a specific term for the practice – or that it belonged to an artistic trend – until quite recently. When drawing, or just mindlessly…

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How to Distinguish Between a Religious Experience and a Psychotic Episode

There are possibly many ways in which we can define a religious experience. We need to ask ourselves: What features should such an experience exemplify? There is also the issue of trying to ascertain whether a certain experience is pathological in nature. For reasons which will become clear, I will be using the term religious…

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Schizophrenic or Shamanic? It Depends on the Cultural Context

An individual can display certain symptoms, but whether they are an indication of schizophrenia or shamanic abilities depends largely on the cultural context. By cultural context I mean the collective beliefs, values, expectations and responses of the community which shape the mentality and behaviour of the individuals within that community. Mental illness is heavily influenced…

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An Explanation for Our Aesthetic Appreciation of Geometry

Humans have been attracted to geometric shapes and patterns for thousands of years. Geometry has not only been used for the description of physical reality – from the time of Euclid’s Elements to string theory today – it has also been imbued with a sense of the mystical and the beautiful. Sacred geometry, for example,…

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