altered states

What I’m Working on in 2024

~ David Biddle ~ 4 Comments

[Note from 2026: A lot happened to prevent the proper publication of Sound Effect Infinity until February 2026, where this note is coming from. Click the links where you see them, and you’ll find the book posted to Amazon as a special edition hardcover offering. If you read below, you’ll see where things were, but not where they are now]

I already feel like a jerk. The only thing that is going to keep me from being selfish and single-minded here in 2024 is if I need surgery or get diagnosed with cancer or just don’t wake up some morning. A solid, working draft of my third novel for The Story Plant is due in December of 2024. The title we’re operating with right now is Notes on the Golden Country. I spent much of 2023 doing research and making notes for this year’s efforts. By late August I had started up on a first draft. As 2024 gets uncaged, I am about 120 pages in to Part I of three parts. I’m going to be a selfish jerk the rest of this year until I’m done. Meaning, I don’t want to come over to your house, go on a long walk, or anything else that will muddle my focus on writing this very odd story.

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The Powers of Mind: An Introduction to the Mystery of the Cosmic Egg

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

My introduction to how mysterious and seemingly magical the human mind is came from a reading of POWERS OF MIND, at one time a national bestseller written by Adam Smith (a pseudonym for George Goodman, a high-end journalist and editor). I read this book in the mid-1970s.

Powers of Mind was basically a long set of straightforward descriptions of everything from biofeedback and memory quirks to meditation, rolfing, and psychedelics. I was 17 at the time. From there I devoured books by Carlos Castenada, Aldous Huxley, John Lilly, and Ram Daas. My favorite — then and now — was THE CRACK IN THE COSMIC EGG, by Joseph Chilton Pearce.

Needless to say, like so many people back then, I did my own experiments with consciousness, going as far as I felt comfortable on the outskirts of Mind and Reality. This experimentation lasted about six years. By the time I was 22 I just didn’t have the emotional strength and intellectual stomach to run around on the frontier of psychology anymore.

That said, I’ve never stopped thinking about and questioning the mysteries of the cosmic egg and the human spirit. Through most of those days of exploration and then for several decades after, I took the route that a lot of folks do with this stuff. I wanted to know what the underlying mechanisms were. I wanted to know the chemistry of altered states and the physics of energy flows and the cosmological explanations for things like precognition, remote viewing, and ESP. I tried reading books like Jung’s SYNCHRONICITY and the McKenna brothers’ INVISIBLE LANDSCAPES and followed neuroscience and psychology closely (at least as close as a layperson can).

But around the time my first son was born, and then extending out through raising him along with his two younger brothers, I came to the conclusion that understanding the science and math behind the power of the mind is a fool’s game. For some folks, perhaps, it is necessary to get at what is really going on during, for instance, an explosive DMT encounter, or with someone who can communicate with the dead. But for me, the real power of the mind comes from the mysteries that it can behold…just simply behold.

Some people seek profound transformative connections with the cosmos (or God…or whatever). Some understand so much more than I ever will because they practice meditation regularly. Some folks seek that all elusive thing called Enlightenment. And, I dare say, mathematicians, physicists, and neuroscientists may one day chart the full scientific logic of every altered state and mind power we have cataloged. I wrote about that recently HERE.

For me, though, there is a real and astounding magic that can be discovered in so many different aspects of just living on the earth. It is clear to me that the power and magic of the mysteries of life is that they will never be understood adequately. Reason and faith both seem to miss the point.

Encountering the mystery of life not just in the ecstatic or profound moment but in the quiet moments and the hidden corners of my little world is often dumbfoundingly satisfying. As a fiction writer, artistically and poetically, my stories are always about some mystery — whether a middle-aged man is wondering about his sanity or a woman is struggling with enjoying her sense of loneliness. Sometimes the question is bigger, like what are the implications of telepathy, or if the psychedelic experience is real, how is that related to the idea of a higher consciousness?

I’m intrigued most in life by the conundrum of romance. Related to that, I am fascinated with the strangeness of love that dies. I’m also amazed at how hard it is for people to get along and to be rational when it’s so obvious that not getting along and being irrational makes life dangerous and stressful.

Writing about these things, letting my mind wander into regions that are hard to get at, playing with words to create fiction about human realities that we have no language to understand, somehow there is an aesthetic process that goes deeper than intelligence. Writing takes the author and the reader into a realm where both art and emotion have tremendous possibility.

The greatest mysteries, of course, are: the question of God; what happens when we die; and how is it this physical existence actually came to be? Those three mysteries can make you crazy if you try to be rational about them. Thankfully, they will always be impossible for science to grapple with. They should, in fact, make us all humble. Very, very humble. They should shine a light on how limited we really are (even those who are supposedly Enlightened!). But that’s a good mystery too — how is it that so few of us are humbled by such profound questions until it is too late?

It is oddly satisfying to be at peace with these big questions. It is also strange to realize that the power of the mind becomes virtually infinite when you stop groping for answers and just let the beauty of the puzzle of life be what it’s supposed to be — the mind at play, beholding the mysteries, and giving your love to the world.

[Written under the influence of an endless stream of songs by Beach House and Frou Frou]

Mind Maverick: Check out David Jay Brown

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

David Jay Brown covers the far edge of consciousness research. I stumbled into his work while reading a weekly report on entheogens at Reality Sandwich. Brown recently did a piece for the Santa Cruz Patch on telepathy and precognition studies performed on subjects under the influence of LSD. You can read that article HERE. 

There really is a lot of movement going on out there in the world of psychedelic and entheogen research. It’s surprising how dramatically things are changing but how quiet this research still is. Brown probably covers this information better than anyone with his Catch the Buzz column, and has been called “the altered statesman.” 
What he’s best known for is his in-depth and intelligent interviews with consciousness visionaries. He is the author of at least 8 books, many of which are compendiums of his interviews with everyone from Deepak Chopra and Allen Ginsberg to Terence McKenna and Jerry Garcia. His web site, Mavericks of the Mind, is like a hall-of-edge-of-everything wisdom that you don’t mind getting lost in because you can’t stop learning about the meaning of life and human consciousness. 
To give you a taste, and because it’s germaine to much of what Beyond the Will of God is all about, read a snippet from Brown’s interview with Garcia. This gives you an idea about how thought-provoking he is, and how disarming he seems to be in getting his subjects to really open up with their ideas. We’ve strayed so far from trying to legitimately understand the mind over the past 20 years or so. It’s a good thing David Jay Brown is still on the case. If you don’t believe me, read this.
Excerpt of Jerry Garcia Interview:

Rebecca: How do you feel about the fact that you enjoy such a divine-like status in the eyes of so many of your fans?
Jerry: These things are all illusions. Fame is an illusion. I know what I do and I know about how well I do it, and I know what I wish I could do. Those things don’t enter my life, I don’t buy into any of that stuff. I can’t imagine who would. Look at David Koresh. If you start believing any of that kind of stuff about yourself, where does it leave you?
David: What about the subjective experience a lot of people talk about that there’s a group-mind experience that occurs at your shows?
Jerry: That’s been frequently reported to me. In fact, even more specifically of direct telepathic connection of some kind.


Rebecca: Do you experience that yourself?
Jerry: I can’t say that I do, because I’m in a position of causality. So, I don’t look at the audience and think, I’m making them do what I want them to do.
Rebecca: I’m thinking of it more as a spontaneous non-causal experience which is being mediated by something greater than either yourself or the audience.
Jerry: You might think of it as a kind of channeling. At the highest level, I’m letting something happen – I’m not causing it to happen. We all understand that mechanism in theGrateful Dead and we also know that fundamentally we’re not responsible.
We’re opening a door, but we’re not responsible for what comes through it. So in that sense, I can’t take credit for it. We’re like a utility, like a conduit for life-energy, psychic energy – whatever it is. It’s not up to us to define it or to describe it or to enclose it in any way.
Rebecca: It’s rumored that the Grateful Dead can control the weather, can you shed any light on this? (laughter)
Jerry: (laughter) No. We do not control the weather.
Rebecca: You’ve heard those rumors though ?
Jerry: I’ve heard them, of course. Sometimes it seems as though we’re controlling the weather.
Rebecca: But that is synchronicity?
Jerry: It’s synchronicity, exactly.
Rebecca: So what is the relationship dynamic like between you and the audience when you’re on stage?
Jerry: When things are working right, you gain levels – it’s like bardos. The first level is simply your fundamental relationship to your instrument. When that starts to get comfortable the next level is your relationship to the other musicians. When you’re hearing what you want to and things seem to be working the way you want it to, then it includes the audience. When it gets to that level, it’s seamless. It’s no longer an effort, it flows and it’s wide open.
Sometimes however, when I feel that that’s happening, that music is really boring. It’s too perfect. What I like most is to be playing with total access, where anything that I try to play or want to happen, I can execute flawlessly – for me that’s the high-water mark. But perfection is always boring.
Rebecca: I’ve heard that musicians using computer synthesizers are complaining that the sound produced is so perfect that it’s uninteresting, and that manufacturers are now looking to program in human error.
Jerry: Right. I think the audience enjoys it more when it’s a little more of a struggle.
David: What is it that you feel is missing in that case?
Jerry: Tension.
David: Tension between what and what?
Jerry: The tension between trying to create something and creating something, between succeeding and failing. Tension is a part of what makes music work – tension and release, or if you prefer, dissonance and resonance, or suspension and completion.
David: Joseph Campbell, the renowned mythologist, attended a number of your shows. What was his take?
Jerry: He loved it. For him it was the bliss he’d been looking for. “This is the antidote to the atom bomb,” he said at one time.
David: He also described it as a modern-day shamanic ritual, and I’m wondering what your thoughts are about the association between music, consciousness and shamanism.
Jerry: If you can call drumming music, music has always been a part of it. It’s one of the things that music can do – it can transport. That’s what music should do at it’s best – it should be a transforming experience. The finest, the highest, the best music has that quality of transporting you to other levels of consciousness.
David: Do you feel sometimes at your shows that you’re guiding people or taking people on a journey through those levels?
Jerry: In a way, but I don’t feel like I’m guiding anybody. I feel like I’m sort of stumbling along and a lot of people are watching me or stumbling with me or allowing me to stumble for them. I don’t feel like, here we are, I’m the guide and come one you guys, follow me. I do that, but I don’t feel that I’m particularly better at it than anybody else.
For example, here’s something that used to happen all the time. The band would check into a hotel. We’d get our room-key and then we’d go to the elevator. Well, a lot of times we didn’t have a clue where the elevator was. So, what used to happen was that everybody would follow me, thinking that I would know. I’d be walking around thinking why the fuck is everybody following me? (laughter) So, if nobody else does it, I’ll start something – it’s a knack.
>>Snip
You can read the entire interview at his web site, HERE.