And, it's about time.

Synthesists are a rare breed – who teaches them? How ironic that most of us learn how to view the obvious by "accident".

I believe that intelligence is inherent in the universe. In some sense we are all information – long streams of zeroes and ones can account for all matter. I imagine the universe running on an unfathomably large computer that you might call god. And sometimes I think of life as a DVD that already has a beginning and end and the only way to experience it as separate moments is to "play it" from end to end.

It is indeed good that many of the astronauts have had that experience .

Though Augustine of Hippo was a very overrated theologian and on many points of doctrine he was quite murky, he did ,nevertheless, have a fascinating insight when (apparently in one of his writings…at least the quote has been attributed to him) he wrote that

a journey by ship was like a baptism .

With that sort of conception in mind , could it be that if a journey on the ocean with s sailing ship is like a baptism , might a journey through outer space by spaceship be even more like a baptism —in terms of it being like a numinous turning point event ?

Just a thought.

I mean, to be confined to Earth all of your life, then suddenly, you're drifting around space, looking at the very place from which life was given to you, has got to be a mind altering experience.

I wouldn't doubt that while one is in space, they are not somehow merging with unseen forces, still yet to be detected by any of our scientific instruments.

When we start using physics to explain our mental states, we will be on the right track. Until then, "may the Force be with you".

Well it obviously is. Read up on the research by Rupert Sheldrake for some interesting ideas.

Go to Erowid.org and read some of the experience reports listed for Salvia and DXM (among others). There's talk of a feeling of unfathomable vastness, of floating in an endless deep blackness, of feeling simultaneously ecstatically alone and integrated with everything.

I mention Salvia and DXM, specifically, for two reasons — 1. I've used them, so I tend to concentrate on them, and 2. they're both DISSOCIATIVE drugs. I can't think of a more dissociative feeling/environment than being above, literally EVERYTHING. Seeing an altered reality for the first time. Space travel, even this far into the game, even orbital travel, is BIZARRE and still nearly unprecedented in the history of both organic life and intelligent and self-aware higher animals.

I almost think what they're experiencing is simply the PHYSICAL MANIFESTATION of the feeling some psychedelic/dissociative drug experimenters experience. Space travel is not a "poor substitute" for a dissociative trip, it's the other way around! But the similarities are there, even down to some specifics. I recall a feeling of floating weightless on an infinite, dark, unbelievably empty sea while on DXM once…

Buddhist texts often say that to become 'enlightened', the brain needs to be 'shocked' out of its current state of operation and numbness, to in-a-sense wake up out of pre-conceived notions and though patterns. Hence, they often use koans (tripped out questions or statements such as the famous 'does a tree falling in the woods make a sound if nobody is there to hear it?') designed to shock the mind into awareness.

There can be little doubt that such states of awareness exist, not least because hundreds of millions of people around the world swear by it and base their entire religion on it, but also because scientific studies have also shown definitive evidence of trance-like and altered mind states in monks and those who have meditated for a significant amount of time.

So my point is, I can't really think of anything that may be more effective at shocking the mind out of its stupor and waking it up to the realities of the vast beauty and mystery of the universe than a trip out in space. Maybe they're onto something…

I also wouldn't be altogether surprised if it was similar in some ways to the feelings that arise in people who use psychoactive drugs such as LSD or MDMA. Many users often link the feelings produced by these with meditative or transcendent states. Maybe the underlying chemical mechanisms are similar!

No matter what though, I want to experience this for myself. Has to be awesome.

Cheers, Ian