The Esalen Institute is a cluster of meeting rooms, lodging facilities and hot tubs all nestled into a stunning craggy coastal outcrop of the Pacific Ocean in Big Sur, Calif. In his 1985 book, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”, the Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman recounts his experience in the natural hot spring baths there, in which a woman is being massaged by a man she just met. “He starts to rub her big toe. ‘I think I feel it,’ he says. ‘I feel a kind of dent — is that the pituitary?’ I blurt out, ‘You’re a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!’ They looked at me, horrified … and said, ‘It’s reflexology!’ I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.”

With that as my introduction to the Mecca of the New Age movement, I accepted an invitation to host a weekend workshop there on science and spirituality. Given my propensity for skepticism when it comes to most of the paranormal piffle proffered by the prajna peddlers meditating and soaking their way to nirvana here, I was surprised the hall was full. Perhaps skeptical consciousness is rising!

It was in the extracurricular conversations, however, during healthy homegrown meals and while soaking in the hot tubs, that I gleaned a sense of what people believe and why. Once it became known that Mr. Skeptic was there, for example, I heard one after another “How do you explain this?” story, mostly involving angels, aliens and the usual paranormal fare. But this being Esalen — ground zero for all that is weird and wonderful in the human potential movement — there were some singularly unique accounts.

One woman explained the theory behind “energy work,” a combination of massage and adjusting the body’s seven energy centers called chakras. I signed up for a massage, which was remarkably relaxing, but when another practitioner told me about how she cured a woman’s migraine headache by directing a light beam through her head, I decided that practice and theory do not always match. Another woman warned about the epidemic of satanic cults. “But there’s no evidence of such cults,” I countered. “Of course not,” she explained. “They erase all memories and evidence of their nefarious activities.”

One gentleman recounted a lengthy tantric sexual encounter with his lover that lasted for many hours, at the culmination of which a lightning bolt shot through her left eye followed by a blue-light-being child entering her womb, ensuring conception. Nine months later friends and gurus joined the couple in a hothouse, sweating their way through their own “rebirthing” process before the mother gave birth to a baby boy. The father then told him that he would need to become an athlete in order to get into college; two decades later this young man became a professional baseball player. “How do you explain that?” I was asked. I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.

People have and share such experiences and impart larger significance to them, because we have a cortex big enough to conceive of such transcendent notions and an imagination creative enough to concoct fantastic narratives. If we define the spirit (or soul) as the pattern of information of which we are made — our genes, proteins, memories and personalities — then spirituality is the quest to know the place of our essence within the deep time of evolution and the deep space of the cosmos.

There are many ways to be spiritual, and science is one in its awe-inspiring account about who we are and where we came from. “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself,” began the late astronomer Carl Sagan in the opening scene of Cosmos, filmed just down coast from Esalen, in referring to the stellar origins of the chemical elements of life. “We’ve begun at last to wonder about our origins, star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness … Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”

That is spiritual gold.

A review of Robin Waterfield’s Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis.

In the early 1980s I began a personal odyssey into altered states of consciousness. Because I thought I might like to use my brain again, I eschewed mind-altering substances and instead opted for a sensory-deprivation tank (a sound- and light-proof container of warm salt water), sleep deprivation (once enduring 83 straight hours), and even undergoing a series of sessions with a professional hypnotherapist who trained me to go in and out of alpha-wave land at will.

In the water tank I experienced only modest visual hallucinations — dim blotches of color — but nothing to rival the reputed effects of LSD. By contrast, my sleep-deprived brain — the result of racing a bicycle nonstop from Santa Monica to Nebraska as part of the 3,000-mile transcontinental Race Across America — became convinced that the members of my support crew were aliens from another planet attempting to abduct me into their spacecraft. And for a television segment on my preparations for the race with my hypnotherapist, I was so far “under” that she could not bring me out with the usual “awake” command, causing a moment of concern for an anxious Wide World of Sports camera crew.

What does it mean to be “under” in hypnosis? The standard answer — an altered state of consciousness — explains little for a simple reason: we don’t really know what consciousness is, making it difficult to explain what an altered state of it means. Of all the methods of plumbing the depths of consciousness by altering its normal awake state, hypnosis has the longest and most checkered history, with a correspondingly massive and confusing body of literature. Hidden Depths, by British scholar and writer Robin Waterfield, masterfully encapsulates that history and literature through a delightful work of reportage and successfully navigates the treacherous straits between acolyte sycophancy and dogmatic skepticism.

To explain what hypnosis is, Waterfield begins with a discussion of what it is not. Hypnosis is not a state of sleep or unconsciousness. It is not like meditating or being in “flow.” It is not a paranormal or satanic phenomenon. It is not limited to weak-willed or gullible people. It is not a lie detector or memory retriever. It cannot cure disease or guarantee weight loss. It cannot turn people into assassins (ala the Manchurian Candidate) or make them commit acts they would not normally perform (hypnotizing someone to engage in sex). Through a judicious use of history and breezy storytelling, Waterfield demonstrates that it is easier to show what hypnosis is not than what it is. Since Franz Anton Mesmer popularized hypnosis as “animal magnetism” in mid-eighteenth-century France, it has been variously described as monoideism (single focused thought), a form of sleep, passive suggestibility, active selective attention with reduced planning, hysteria, dissociation, Oedipal love of the hypnotherapist (Freud’s theory, of course), a state of inhibition between sleep and wakefulness, task-motivation, imaginative response to test-suggestions, goal-directed fantasy role-playing, and activation of the implicit memory system.

With this obfuscating potpourri of theory, and no definitive experimental test to lead us to a singular consensus, Waterfield wisely concludes: “All of the current theories may be wrong, or none of them may be wrong, while all giving a partial picture.” Even the theory that hypnosis doesn’t exist compels because “no one really knows what hypnosis is.” In the end, “Faced with this welter of definitions, it has to be borne in mind that nothing about hypnosis is uncontroversial, and that these various definitions depend on various theories of what is going on, psychologically and neurologically, and these in turn depend on the approach taken by the particular researchers.”

Still, one cannot write a book about nothing (or everything), so Waterfield offers his readers this concise definition: “Hypnotism or hypnosis is the deliberate inducement or facilitation by one person in another person or a number of people of a trance state … in which a person’s usual means of orienting himself in reality have faded, so that the boundaries between the external world and the inner world of thoughts, feelings, memories and imagination begin to dissolve.”

It is in that borderland between reality and fantasy where the power and mystery of hypnosis lies. Although Waterfield remains relatively neutral in his summary of the various theories and recapitulation of their fascinating histories, he does conclude that hypnosis — whatever it is — is real and serves as empirical evidence of something called mind, distinct from the brain. Here he will find support from many, but skepticism from those of us who believe that mind is nothing more than a product of neuronal activity. The notion of the “ghost in the machine” (the mind in the body) is a chimera, a product of scientific ignorance on par with 19th-century philosophers speculating there was a homunculus (little man) in a sperm cell.

Waterfield contends, for example, that “inexplicable things happen in everyone’s lives” (true enough) and thus it is a fact that “we have all experienced telepathy” means that “anyone with an open mind” should “pause before dismissing the whole domain as fantasy and rubbish.” Wrong. Just because we do not yet have an adequate neurophysiological model to explain hypnosis, or other mental mysteries such as apparent telepathic events, does not mean they are inexplicable, or that they represent metaphysical entities. Here Waterfield distinguishes between paranormal powers (such as ESP, of which he is mostly skeptical but not completely) and supernormal powers (such as the power of hypnosis to attenuate or eliminate pain). “We all have supernormal powers locked up inside our minds; we are all capable of miracles.”

This is sloppy thinking in an otherwise careful analysis. Calling unexplained mysteries supernormal or miraculous explains nothing. In point of fact, there is no paranormal or supernormal, or even supernatural; there is only the normal and the natural and mysteries we have yet to explain. Hypnosis is one of those mysteries that, while real, remains elusive for predatory scientists bent on capturing all mentality in a scientistic net. And we are closing in. Brain scans of hypnotized and unhypnotized subjects, for example, show distinctly different patterns when performing the same task. What this means is not precisely clear, and thus far no specific brain module has been found that regulates the hypnotic state. Nevertheless, at the end of the day neuroscience is where an adequate theory of hypnosis will be found.

It is with hypnosis in particular that I depart ways from many of my skeptical colleagues who argue that it is nothing more than fantasy role-playing, or worse, pure fakery. From my personal experiences with altered states of consciousness, whatever they are, their effects are dramatic and real. The aliens really did speak to me in my sleep-deprived state of mind, an experience as real as the voices of suggestion while in a hypnotic altered state. There are natural explanations for these apparently supernatural phenomena, of course, but that does not in any way attenuate the reality of the experience, even if that reality exists only in the mind.

(Brunner-Routledge, 2003, ISBN 041594791X)
This review was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

Five centuries ago demons haunted our world, with incubi and succubi tormenting victims as they lay asleep. Two centuries ago spirits haunted our world, with ghosts and ghouls harassing sufferers during all hours of the night. This past century aliens haunted our world, with grays and greens abducting captives and whisking them away for probing and prodding. Nowadays people are reporting out-of-body experiences, floating above their beds. What is going on here? Are these elusive creatures and mysterious phenomena in our world or in our minds? New evidence adds weight to the notion that they are, in fact, products of the brain. Neuroscientist Michael Persinger, in his laboratory at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, for example, can induce all these perceptions in subjects by subjecting their temporal lobes to patterns of magnetic fields. (I tried it myself and had a mild out-of-body experience.)

Similarly, the September 19, 2002, issue of Nature reported that neuroscientist Olaf Blanke of Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland and his colleagues were able to bring about out-of-body experiences through electrical stimulation of the right angular gyrus in the temporal lobe of a 43-year old woman suffering from severe epileptic seizures. With initial mild stimulation, she felt she was “sinking into the bed” or “falling from a height.” With more intense stimulation, she said she could “see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk.” Another trial induced “an instantaneous feeling of ‘lightness’ and ‘floating’ about two meters above the bed, close to the ceiling.”

A related study is cited in the 2001 book Why God Won’t Go Away. In it, Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center and the late Eugene D’Aquili found that when Buddhist monks meditate and Franciscan nuns pray, their brain scans show strikingly low activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, a region the authors have dubbed the orientation association area (OAA). The OAA provides bearings for the body in physical space; people with damage to this area have a difficult time negotiating their way around a house, for instance. When the OAA is booted up and running smoothly, there is a sharp distinction between self and nonself. When the OAA is in sleep mode — as in deep meditation or prayer — that division breaks down, leading to a blurring of the lines between feeling in body and out of body. Perhaps this is what happens to monks who discern a sense of oneness with the universe, or nuns who feel the presence of God, or alien abductees who believe they are floating out of their beds to the mother ship.

Sometimes trauma can become a trigger. The December 15, 2001, issue of the Lancet published a Dutch study in which 12 percent of 344 cardiac patients resuscitated from clinical death reported near-death experiences, some having a sensation of being out of body, others seeing a light at the end of a tunnel. Some even described speaking to dead relatives. Because the everyday occurrence is of stimuli coming from the outside, when a part of the brain abnormally generates these illusions, another part of the brain interprets them as external events. Hence, the abnormal is thought to be the paranormal.

These studies are only the latest to deliver blows against the belief that mind and spirit are separate from brain and body. In reality, all experience is mediated by the brain. Large brain areas such as the cortex coordinate inputs from smaller brain areas such as the temporal lobes, which themselves collate neural events from still smaller brain modules such as the angular gyrus. Of course, we are not aware of the workings of our own electrochemical systems. What we experience is what philosophers call qualia, or subjective states of thoughts and feelings that arise from a concatenation of neural events.

It is the fate of the paranormal and the supernatural to be subsumed into the normal and the natural. In fact, there is no paranormal or supernatural; there are only the normal and the natural — and mysteries yet to be explained. It is the job of science, not pseudoscience, to solve those puzzles with natural, rather than supernatural, explanations.