Ten Zen Questions

Exploring the Mind from Within

Susan Blackmore Ph.D.

‘No guru …’ poem by John Crook

Letting Go Is Hard

The remote Welsh farmhouse where I learned to meditate 40 years ago, will have no more retreats. Saying goodbye was hard, but then much of what we learned was about letting go.

DMT Idea

Illusions of Self and Consciousness Explored With DMT

DMT has the strangest, most variable, psychedelic effects. We should combine personal experiences with neuroscience to understand how it upends our illusions of self and the world.

Susan Blackmore

Psychedelics and Consciousness

Are psychedelic experiences a fount of marvellous insights or nothing but the ramblings of a poisoned brain? I think they could be both.

Painting by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

Psychedelics and the Out-of-Body Experience

Can psychedelics induce a classical out-of-body experience, or OBE? A new film and online debate from the psychedelic society suggest they can, but what does the evidence tell us?

Has Boris changed for the better?

Was Boris Johnson Changed by a Brush with Death?

Coming close to death can make people more loving and compassionate. Could Boris Johnson have been transformed?

COVID-19, Near-Death Experiences, and Boris Johnson

After nearly dying from Covid-19, Boris Johnson is said to be a changed man. We know that close brushes with death can cause deep life changes, so could it be true?

These fast-changing times make a great test for psychics’ claims.

Can You Predict Next Week?

The pandemic is changing our lives so fast that we can no longer rely on familiar assumptions. Writing down my predictions is fascinating — and teaching me a lot.

Susan Blackmore "just sitting"

Attention, Attention, Attention

Do illusionist theories of consciousness find the same illusions as those discovered in Zen meditation? A new theory suggests they might.

Ken Ring and Sue Blackmore at an NDE conference in Flora, Norway in 1989

In Praise of Psychedelics

Near-death experience researcher Ken Ring describes how an LSD trip changed his life and inspired his pioneering research.

One Famous Actor's Out-of-Body Experience

Actor Stephen Graham describes doing a monologue on stage, with his parents watching, only to find himself looking down and watching himself performing.

Popular ideas like this ‘iceberg’ view of the mind may be entirely misguided.

Can You Have Two Thoughts at Once?

Common sense psychology is false’ claims a new theory of consciousness. We have no hidden depths of thought, desire, or fantasy; the surface mind is all there is.

Susan Blackmore: 50 years on from the OBE

Out-Of-Body Experiences: Mine Is Finally Explained

I return to my own out-of-body experience to show how every feature now makes sense. The whole experience was perfectly natural.

The traditional idea of an OBE is that something leaves the body but maybe this is only how it feels.

Out-of-Body Experiences: All OBEs Are Natural Phenomena

Classic accounts of astral projection all show signs of bodily distortions. So even these are best explained by neuroscience and not by something leaving the body.

‘What is it?’

Consciousness and Those Questions

A new review of a consciousness textbook is full of praise but still falls for many common assumptions about consciousness the authors try so hard to undermine.

The Old Hag, one of many sleep paralysis myths.

Out-of-Body Experiences: The Monster Under The Bed

Have you ever been sure there’s an invisible someone, or a scary entity, in the room with you. Was it a ghost, poltergeist, evil spirit or what?

Three full-body illusions. Solid lines show where the person seems to be; dotted lines show a second self.

Out-of-Body Experiences: More Full Body Illusions

You probably feel entirely sure you are inside your own body and move with it. But in the disturbing experience of heautoscopy people are unsure where they are.

Four types of full body illusion

Out-of-Body Experiences: Bodily Illusions

Disturbing our body schema produces not only out-of-body experiences but other weird states including Doppelgängers, changes in size, and duplicated bodies.

Landers' tweet about Bem

How Not to Find Evidence of Psychic Phenomena

As if parapsychology doesn’t have enough troubles, one of its famous proponents encouraged massaging data until one gets the ‘right’ answer.

The Own Body Transformation task. Is the grey glove on the left or right hand?

Out of Body Experiences: A Neuroscientific Explanation

At last out of body experiences make sense. The spot in the brain that induces them is responsible for maintaining our body schema.

Look at the stripes for about 10 seconds. Do you see colours, flickering or movement? If so, you may have a more active cortex

Out-of-Body Experiences: A Hyperactive Brain?

Some of us have especially active brains and this affects which unusual experiences we are likely to have.

Out-of-Body Experiences: Interpreting the God Spot

We now know which brain area induces OBEs and mystical experiences, but what does this tell us?

The arrow marks the spot on the brain that Blane stimulated to induce an OBE.

Out-of-Body Experiences: The Breakthrough

In 2002, a Swiss neurosurgeon accidentally discovered how to induce OBEs by stimulating a special spot in the brain. Does this solve the mystery?

Out-of-Body Experiences: The Psychology of Seeing Auras

Some psychics claim Kirlian photography proves the existence of the human aura. It does not. But seeing auras is linked to other human capacities, especially to having OBEs.

Out-of-Body Experiences: The Human Aura

Psychics often claim to see a ghostly, coloured aura surrounding other people. After my OBE I saw and felt one too. What could this aura be?

William Rushton

Out-of-Body Experiences: Seeing With Astral Eyes

I once thought the theory of astral projection was the obvious explanation for OBEs, but how can astral bodies see without eyes?

Our seven bodies according to Theosophy

Out-of-Body Experiences: Into the Astral?

How could I explain my OBE, with its thrilling travels and wonderful visions? Astral projection seemed the obvious place to start, but can this theory really explain it?

Had I left my body?

Out-of-Body Experiences: Far Beyond the Body

In my previous post I described an unexpected OBE I had as a student. After two hours I tried to get back to reality but then some even stranger travels began.

My student days at Oxford

Out-of-Body Experiences: Leaving the Body?

As a young psychology student, I had a long and dramatic out-of-body experience that made me question my entire understanding of the world. How could I explain what happened?

Mapping Altered States of Consciousness

Lucid dreaming seems far closer to waking than to deep sleep but what does this mean? Could we ever map states of consciousness and understand the relationships between them?

Does Your Baby Like Music?

Do you know what music your baby likes best? Can you even find out? We invented a way to let our babies choose music for themselves and it even helped them sleep better.

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