Cactus of Mystery

by Ross Heaven

  Despite feeling sick I began testing at 12:08 p.m. I would start the experiment with a dummy test run that would not form part of the official count, just to make sure I could function properly and do what was required. Attempts to use the Dictaphone left me overwhelmed by the fiddliness of technological endeavor required to actually get it to work and, feeling sick as a parrot, I abandoned it in favor of a written account.

  I closed my eyes and let the visions come. A swirling liquid cocktail of imagery poured through my mind, morphing and reforming before I could fully comprehend the scene, constantly coalescing and dissolving again, and then occasionally forming something I could hang on to and actually name. Every time an image formed that was distinct enough to describe linguistically I would open my eyes and write, though my descriptions were pretty much limited to primitive machine-gun grunts of nouns and occasional adjectives. “Ancient Greek scene. Eyes. (Visuals too vague and fluid). City at night on a lake.”

  Given that the mental imagery was getting quite diverse I opted to stop there. Turning to the laptop I then opened the folder for the dummy trial and played the first film clip, wondering what would come up. I leapt, somewhat startled, as the speakers suddenly let rip with a strange animal cry and the screen displayed a monster swinging a large club toward me. There was the sound of crushing metal as a warrior in a distinctly Greek helmet adorned with a plume of Mohawk-like stiff hair fell backward, his shield crumpling under the blow of a Minotaur’s mace. A fight to the death between the human-bull beast and the hero continued for an intense sixty seconds, ending quite abruptly just short of the decisive moment and recklessly derailing my utter absorption in the scene.

  I laughed rapturously as I suddenly remembered what my reason for viewing the clip had been, having been so completely engrossed for the last minute that I had totally forgotten during that time what my sense of purpose was. Oh wow! I really laugh. I will have to watch at least another 80 clips throughout the day, a mind boggling thought.

  I then watch the other three dummy clips and write “12:22, test run complete, very engrossed in clips, laughing at how lost I am when the clip ends.” Looking back at what I had originally written I also see that although the “city at night by a lake” was absent from any clips, the “ancient Greek scene” fitted perfectly with the first clip and this gets me excited enough to almost make the nausea worthwhile. I didn’t bother to run the randomizer to see if this was the target this time, this being just a dummy run.

  Into the Magical Realm:

  Skeletons in Space on the Great Mechanical Star

  Now it’s time for the first proper trial. I make a note of my increasing nausea and the fact that my fingertips feel odd and press on. Eyes closed, I dive into the swirling vortex of imagery again and fish around for something tangible. “12:32 p.m., rotating, like [heli-]copter blades, space, more mechanical stuff, spacecraft, space skeletons.” A pause in imagery occurs, then “water, submarine, big rig but underwater.” Quickly then I complete the measures for gauging my state of consciousness, noting merely that I was 28 percent of the way between being “normal” and “extremely altered,” and that my closed-eye mental imagery was somewhat increased compared to normal.

  Turning now to the video clips I begin the judging phase of the first trial. Clip one starts. Enter Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia in the classic escape scene from Star Wars. Luke and Leia have gone through a doorway onto a ledge overlooking a large drop inside the Death Star. “How do you get the blast door closed?” asks Luke. “They’re coming through” shouts Leia and shuts the blast door. They are suspended on a ledge inside the huge machine that is the Death Star. They look around to try to find a way across the huge vertical chamber in front of them. Suddenly laser fire comes in from the front and slightly above. Stormtroopers have appeared at an open doorway across the chamber and are firing on our heroes. Luke shoots one of them and they back off for a moment.

  “Here, hold this” says Luke, handing Leia the gun. He then pulls out a small metal device on a string from his utility belt as Leia engages the Stormtroopers above in a gunfight. Luke pulls out more and more string from his belt as the blast door behind them begins to open a crack at the bottom. “Here they come!” shouts Leia.

  Lots of smoke now and more laser fire. Leia shoots one of the Stormtroopers above. Luke steps forward and hurls his metal device and string into the air and we see a small grappling hook consisting of three metal blades on a metal stem as it spins around a pole above and secures the end of the string line. Luke pulls the string tight, Leia grabs hold of him with her free arm, gun in the other, and kisses him quickly “for luck” as he looks at her somewhat shocked. They launch into the air as the Stormtroopers behind them start to come through under the blast door on their bellies, shooting as they emerge. Luke and Leia glide across the large chamber on their impromptu string swing just in time and land safely in another doorway on the other side, casually tossing the string aside as they run to safety amid a hail of laser fire . . .

  Wow! The clip ends. I must have whooped with excitement a couple of times watching the clip even though I had seen it many times before over the years. George Lucas sure knows how to pack a lot of adventure into sixty seconds—a duration that actually seemed timeless as I had once again been utterly transfixed.

  The next two clips were much less intense: a cartoon sequence of hippos dancing a ballet, followed by a clip of a flock of seabirds flying across a brown-orange sky. Then finally a clip from the film Legend of a large blue and ugly hag emerging from a swamp and proposing to eat our armored hero (a very young Tom Cruise), who cowers behind his shield and tries to flatter the hag out of killing him. “You don’t intend to eat me do you?” he asks. “Oh indeed I do,” replies the hag. This last one I found particularly intense but as it ended I dragged myself out of my absorption in the story and back to the experiment.

  I begin to review and rate the four clips in light of my prior mental imagery and rank them in order of their similarity to my visions. It’s then that I realize how closely my imagery matches the first clip, thematically at least, and quite literally in some ways too. “Rotating, like [heli-] copter blades, space, more mechanical stuff, spacecraft, space skeletons. Water, submarine, big rig but underwater.” Certainly the association with space, spacecraft, and “space skeletons” was completely obvious with the Star Wars clip, and writing now I see how the Stormtroopers themselves have helmets that look like futuristic skulls—all white save for the black eye patches and the thin black mouth. Indeed the completely white and chunky uniform gives them a real sense of being some kind of techno or space skeletons, and I now see that this was probably a guiding principle in their ultimate cinematic design when the film was made.

  It doesn’t get any better than the Death Star either in terms of a place where space skeletons might hang out or in terms of the “more mechanical stuff ” as the whole thing is supposed to be one big mechanical planet. As for the “rotating, like [heli-]copter blades” Luke’s metal grappling hook even looked like helicopter rotors.

  This was pretty convincing for me and even though clip one was also like a big rig and somewhat like a submarine, I didn’t need to find a match for the other bits of my visualization. I happily ranked this clip number one with some sense of confidence (42 percent). The final elements, “water” and “underwater” tied in with the hag emerging from the swamp clip, which I ranked number two, and the hippo emerging from a paddling pool, which I ranked number three. Having virtually no correspondence with my previous mental imagery, I ranked the birds clip fourth.

  Now began the moment of truth. I had recorded my choices and now had to randomly determine which was the actual target clip. I opened the randomization program on the computer and ran the automated selection of a number between one and four, corresponding to clip 1, 2, 3, or 4, respectively. The computer presented number one as the target so Star Wars was the target clip! I had got it right and against the odds had successfully selected
the correct clip. I then watched the clip again so that my viewing of it might echo back in time and help my past self reach forward in time and select the right clip in the future—a kind of paradoxical confidence trick symmetrically across time to ensure that my past self would select the right one.

  Riding the increasing wave of nausea—and also now the exaggerated sense of meaningfulness and oddity that I was feeling—I was pleasantly surprised and pleased at my performance. Unfortunately, guessing just one clip in a batch of four does not really convince anyone that it was just due to psi though, so I continued the whole process another nineteen times, finally finishing the experiment eight hours after ingesting the first inedible mouthful of purgative powder. This was to be a long and strange trip indeed.

  PUTTING THE CORK BACK IN THE BOTTLE

  I won’t describe the entire experiment or the details of the results—that will be published in a scientific journal—but suffice to say that the experiment was a success in the end.

  By the end of the twenty trials I had successfully selected the target in advance eight times out of twenty, which equates to a 40 percent hit rate compared to a chance hit of 25 percent. This figure is slightly better than the average 32 percent hit rate found with the Ganzfeld altered state classically used to experimentally test for psi (e.g., see Radin, 2006), but although my score is better than chance it is not particularly extraordinary based on just twenty trials.

  However, the method by which I had planned in advance to analyze the data is slightly more refined. This method considers the rank assigned to each clip in relation to the probability of assigning that rank. In this way it would be expected that, out of a range of between one and four, the target would be ranked as 2.5 on average according to chance. The actual average target rank of all twenty trials was 2.0, indicating that my overall score was safely above chance. The important bit for scientists is that the probability of getting this score is less than 5 percent, or looking at it another way, less than 1 in 20, which is the standard level at which scientists accept that the results are meaningful.

  This means that if I had selected my targets merely by chance we would only expect to get these results if we ran the entire experiment twenty times. The thought of that makes me feel quite queasy, anticipating that nausea for hours on end again another twenty times. So chance must take a back seat to improbability and the results as they are must be considered to be what scientists call “statistically significant”—that is, the experiment, this time at least, must be accepted as successful in demonstrating precognition.

  One problem, however, is that we cannot be certain that it was San Pedro that caused these significant results, because perhaps I have reliable precognitive abilities anyway even without San Pedro. This is a possibility, of course, but it should be noted that my ability to visualize a scene in my mental imagery was definitely enhanced by the cactus and it was the relationship of this visualization to the clip that led to my accurate choices.

  A better experiment would have had an identical series of comparison tests where I didn’t take San Pedro but rather a dummy version of it—this is what we call a placebo-controlled condition. But a placebo study is just wishful thinking because it really isn’t easy to fake a San Pedro experience with a nonpsychedelic substance. Sure, I could have eaten something to give me stomach cramps, but how to induce the sense of meaningfulness and the increased mental imagery? I would surely have known that the placebo was bogus.

  One possibility, almost never used in research, would be to use deep hypnotic suggestion to artificially reinduce the same psychedelic state without the use of the cactus, combined with a suggestion to make me think that I had actually taken the cactus rather than being hypnotized. This kind of hypnotic reinduction of psychedelic states has been demonstrated experimentally at least once (Hastings et al., 2000) but inducing selective amnesia requires especially suggestible participants. This approach has other problems as well, but I won’t continue with this line of attack because all scientific research has its limitations, and there are always methodological issues to surmount. What is really required is that somebody else replicates my research findings, otherwise, currently, they can only be considered preliminary at best—but, nevertheless, very promising.

  For me, stepping away from the endless scientific debate that could engulf the experiment I have described and talking in a purely nonscientific way, the sense of awe and surprise at getting many of the targets correct speaks directly to my sense of truth. It’s not just getting them right either, because improbable statistics alone do not convey much meaning, but rather the degree to which my mental imagery under the influence of San Pedro repeatedly matched the specific target for the trial.

  The Star Wars example is typical of the hits I had, but to give another example, on one occasion I wrote “desert, dunes, sands of time” and the actual target, which I had also chosen, showed a sidewinder snake elegantly traversing the sand dunes of a desert in its unique and perplexing sideways motion: A parable perhaps for the equally sideways movement through time and space that is embodied by psi.

  One of the oddest things, though, was that on several occasions I would visualize an image of something that I would write down in a simple form, such as “broken body,” and then three or four of the clips would all have elements clearly related to that specific imagery. On these occasions I tended not to pick the target directly as was hoped, but nevertheless it seemed as though I were visualizing all four of the coming clips in some oddly synchronistic and codified way. What this strange twist means I am still in the process of digesting.

  One thing that is clear is that the mind is certainly a maze to get lost in. And from my own experience I am amazed at the apparent accuracy of some of my imagery and that which can be found in the literature from those healers that work with plants as a way of life. I am no shaman or healer, I am just a scientist, but the personal significance to me of this research leaves me indebted to those curanderos, healers, vegetalistas, and shamans who have kept these interspecies relationships alive for millennia in the name of their community and for the sake of their environment (Krippner and Luke, 2009).

  It would serve us well in the West to remember that science is only one path to truth and that thankfully there are many others, because, as the saying goes, the universe is not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine.

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