Many of our readers may be acquainted with The Gateway Process for achieving altered states of consciousness without chemical assistance, but with kids picking up on this maverick treatise Tom Hale reckons it deserves another look. In short it uses meditation, quantum entanglement, and science-y new-age topics that you can try at home! We recommend reading the version at The Black Vault since the CIA’s PDF is an unformatted wall-of-text. In a similar vein, there’s a wild theory of social contagious and mass hysteria leading to real illness and how social media might be a primary vector. Skeptical? Believing Is Seeing and Robert Bartholomew makes a very strong case for his thesis. But is this a case of well-meaning old people demonizing something popular with kids? Among other mind mysteries we’ve collected over the past week, Annaka Harris suggests Consciousness May Not Require a Brain. She’s not making a joke about celebrities and oligarchs here, rather she focuses on the idea of plant minds and how the gut is an important influence on human thoughts, beliefs, and emotions while making the questions “What evidence of consciousness can we detect from the outside?” and “Is consciousness essential to our behavior?” kinda prickly. (CS)
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