Observations placeholder
Masters and Houston - Split consciousness
Identifier
015544
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
One of the things you can do in a computer is creating two copies of the same program. They can then write to the same database – the log. Imagine – making it easier to visualise - that you have two cameras recording a scene and furiously behind the scenes some poor editor is trying to splice the film together coming from these two cameras, to make some semblance of sense. Things would undoubtedly go wrong.
It would seem that in certain strange instances especially drug induced visions, two copies of the functions are produced each writing to the same log. The person effectively really does have a split personality as they flip from one copy to the other. When this happens their whole perception of time goes haywire, as the first copy of their ‘soul’ may record thoughts in the log, then the first copy comes to it and cannot understand where the thoughts come from, or the log recording is resumed at the wrong point in the log and the events get out of sequence. This aberration seems to be induced primarily by drugs.
A description of the experience
The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience – Dr Robert Masters and Dr Jean Houston
There are other more baffling experiences where it seems to the subject that events of the session are known before they happen, so that the actual occurrence seems out of sequence. Here a second dissociated consciousness may live through events A B C D E before these events are experienced by the first consciousness which remains with the body, communicates with other persons and fulfils the usual tasks of the normal consciousness.
Then when the events experienced by the second consciousness are later experienced by the first, the former knows exactly what will occur because it has already experienced these events. Or the subject may 'turn around in time' a series of events so that events A B C D will exist in memory as having occurred in the order D C B A.