Alcohol and humanity's evolution

"The world is full of magic things, waiting for our senses to grow sharper" - Y.B. Yeats

This article was originally published on The Naked Hedgie in June 2021.

Over the years and almost against my conscious will, my body has been rejecting alcohol. For someone who used to love wine, there is a regrettable side to this rejection. But there’s also a mystery about it, perhaps relevant to our collective evolution – a process that’s likely happening even as you read these lines.

The drunken excesses of youth

I started consuming alcoholic drinks when I was 14. At that time my friends and I began to socialize in bars and night clubs. There was no age related restrictions in former Yugoslavia so it was easy for us to get drunk as badly and as often as we wanted to.

I remember well the first time I got drunk. It was during the summer of 1984. Already in June that summer, four of my friends and I went to my parents’ summer house on the island of Pag. As soon as we got there, we were keen to go out hoping to meet some girls, but it was too early in the tourist season and all the joints were virtually empty. After our first disappointing evening out, we returned home where we had a bottle of Vecchia Romagna brandy. We sat down around the kitchen table and started pouring ourselves the drinks. We had great fun getting drunk, all with riotous laughter. We finished the bottle and as far as I can remember that was it – a few dumb jokes were told and then we all went to sleep. But from that time, going out at night invariably included drinking.

During the summers when school was out, we made a habit of getting at least a little bit drunk almost every evening. If the money was tight, we knew which bars were the cheapest and which booze gave the best bang for the buck. Our parents were vaguely aware of all this, but it was never an issue – we were all good students, we all had extra-curricular activities and led balanced, productive lives. But when we went out at night, we drank and partied hard. Below is a spontaneous reenactment from 2018 in a somewhat controlled environment:

With years, we outgrew the excesses of our teenage years and in our 20s we tended to enjoy beer or wine socially over meals and long conversations. I became quite fond of good wines and in my 30s even fancied myself as a bit of a connoisseur, read books about wine and spent quite a bit of money with a wine merchant in France. But some ten years ago I began noticing that I was losing my taste for wine and for alcohol in general.

Rejecting alcohol

Today I can barely finish a glass of wine, and if I go out to a pub with friends, half a pint of beer is about all I can handle. Even at that, I’m reluctant to drink any alcohol at all. A few years ago I read about the health benefits of resveratrol which is abundant in red wine and decided that I should treat myself to the healthy and pleasant ritual of having a glass of red wine with dinner every evening. It was an appealing idea but that didn’t stick either: I’d force myself to have a few sips but I simply couldn’t enjoy it anymore. Having poured a few expensive bottles down the drain I realized that my rejection of alcohol was for real and that perhaps my body was telling me something I should heed.

Is there a significance?

In the last few years I met a few people who told me similar stories about going teetotaler for no particular reason which made me wonder if there was some significance to it all. Then two years ago, while reading “The Holographic Universe” by Michael Talbot I came across this sentence:

“Valerie Hunt discovered that her experimental results were affected by the presence of individuals who had been drinking alcohol and thus won’t allow any such individuals in her lab while she is taking measurements.”

Valerie Hunt’s research

I’d never heard of Valerie Hunt before, but now I was intrigued. Hunt was a physical therapist and professor of kinesiology at UCLA. Her original research involved the study of human muscular movement. She used electromyograph to study the electrical activity in muscles (EMGs). Doctors routinely use electrocardiographs to measure the electrical activity of the heart (EKG), and electroencephalographs measure the brain’s electrical activity (EEGs). The normal frequency range of the electrical activity in the brain is between 0 and 100 cycles per second (cps), with most activity occurring between 0 and 30 cps. Muscle frequency goes up to about 225 cps, and the heart goes up to about 250 cps.

But Hunt discovered that electromyograph could pick up another field of energy radiating from the body, much subtler and smaller in amplitude than the traditionally recognized body electric fields but with frequencies that tended to range between 100 and 1600 cps, and which sometimes went even higher. But instead of emanating from the brain, heart, or muscles, this field was strongest in the areas of the body associated with the chakras. “The results were so exciting that I simply was not able to sleep that night,” said Hunt. “The scientific model I had subscribed to throughout my life just couldn’t explain these things.“

Frequencies, abilities and mysticism

Through further studies, Hunt found that certain abilities in people seemed related to the presence of specific frequencies in a their energy field; that when the main focus of a person’s consciousness is on the material world, the frequencies of their energy field tended to be in the lower range around 250 cps of the body’s biological frequencies; that people who had psychic or healing abilities also had frequencies of roughly 400 to 800 cps in their field. When people went into trance and apparently channelled other information sources through them, they operated in a narrow band between 800 and 900 cps.

Individuals who had frequencies above 900 cps were what Hunt called ‘mystical personalities,’ and the frequencies in such individuals extended well beyond the bands she associated with those capabilities. Using a modified electromyogram, Hunt measured frequencies as high as 200,000 cps in the energy fields of some individuals, which was intriguing as mystical traditions have often referred to highly spiritual individuals as possessing a ‘higher vibration’ than normal people.

I tend to be sceptical about studies involving frequencies and mysticism, not because I disbelieve them by default, but because I’m weary of embracing appealing but false beliefs: I think we are all susceptible to becoming infatuated with certain ideas because we wish them to be true. However, Valerie Hunt’s work did correspond with my personal experiences as well as information I encountered from other sources.

Neurogenesis

Relatively recently, scientists discovered that our brains are capable of neurogenesis throughout our lives. The earlier ‘settled science’ held that we only have that capability in our youth. Today we know that the hippocampus in adult brains generates hundreds of new neurons each day. Importantly, the process is not random: the new neurons migrate to specific areas of the brain where they deploy for specific functions.

We may not understand what those specific functions are any more than a caterpillar could understand the process by which his body transforms into a butterfly. The caterpillar simply follows his inner compulsions and the changes unfold spontaneously, driven by a process that’s not consciously willed. Perhaps our own compulsions similarly further changes that are that are outside our conscious will.

Synchronicity and telepathy

In this sense my compulsion to reject alcohol has led to certain changes: it has coincided with a number of experiences that seem very extraordinary to me and could qualify as paranormal. The experiences I am speaking of could perhaps be labelled as synchronicity. In that, they wouldn’t be quite so extraordinary: I think most people can easily relate to synchronicity and many instances of it have been described by various writers, most notably perhaps by Carl Jung. But some of my experiences were unquestionably instances of telepathy. I had already shared two of them on my blog so you can judge for yourself whether these were coincidences or my own flights of fancy. The links are below:

“Blown away!” – my older son, when he was 8 years old, drew a picture of a tornado ripping a book out of my hands one day after my book Grand Deception was banned by Amazon, even though I never shared the news with anyone at that time and Ehtan was spending his summer vacation 800 km away from me.

“Merica“– my younger son, 7 at the time, inquired about the meaning of a word he’d never heard spoken but which I pondered about after reading about it in a book.

These are two out of more than 20 similar episodes I have recorded over the years. To me they are significant because they point to a nonverbal mode of communication and the existence of connectedness among individuals which is outside of our conscious will and deliberate control. Then there is another phenomenon I have repeatedly observed.

They say that night brings counsel

Of late, I also had several remarkable experiences that confirmed the old saying that the night brings counsel. On a few occasions I had significant dilemmas that had been bouncing around in my mind for weeks, but I was unable to resolve them because I did not fully understand the problem matter. But at night – this would happen just before waking time – these dilemmas became resolved definitively and with complete clarity.

Each time, at that moment of clarity I felt that all the relevant information and arguments were present to my mind. They seemed clear and compelling, and the picture was complete with no remaining doubts or ambiguities. However, almost as soon as I would wake up, all this clarity vanished and I could no longer explain to myself how my dilemma was resolved or what those convincing arguments and information were. But the conviction did remain – about that I had no doubts; I only found myself unable to recall or articulate any explanation for how or why that happened.

Of course, if the night gifts you with answers you can’t explain, you might end up doubting those answers even if you had no doubts upon receiving the gift. But then again, perhaps there’s something very real and important to this mystery. Here’s how Nikola Tesla put it: “My brain is only a receiver. In the universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”

Karl Pribram spoke of a “frequency realm from which our brain mathematically constructs its reality.” Many anthropologists have documented native tribes claiming to derive knowledge from the spirit realm – a claim that’s hard for modern science to accept, except that some of these natives’ knowledge seems too sophisticated and unlikely to have come from just random discoveries.

In “Holographic Universe,” Talbot writes about the 12^th century Persian Sufis who used deep meditation in order to visit the land of the spirits. They claimed that this other realm was a dimension populated by many spiritual teachers and called it “the country of the hidden Imam.” They held that it is a world created solely out of the subtle matter of alam almithal, or thought. The Sufis apparently devoted a good deal of their writings to the clarification of this point and explained that this country of the hidden Imam was a plane of existence created by the imagination of many people, and yet one that still had its own corporeality and dimension, its own forests, mountains, and even cities.

So what’s all that got to do with alcohol?

Alcohol is one of the major inhibitors of neurogenesis and my “paranormal” experiences might have been the result of a neurogenesis-driven evolution of new capabilities or, more probably, an enhancement of what was, or should have been already there. They all happened in the recent years, after I stopped consuming alcohol. The answers gifted to me at night all happened in just the last few months.

If my hunch is correct then my rejection of alcohol could have uninhibited an enhancement of these mysterious faculties. Incidentally, other inhibitors of neurogenesis are disease, trauma, fear, anxiety, poor nutrition, lack of exercise and lack of good sleep, so it’s possible that other kinds of toxins and/or medicines might also play a role. Conversely, other substances and activities like meditation could stimulate these abilities.

What of premonition?

I haven’t had any memorable experiences of premonition, but I know people who claim that they did. Stories about this frequently appear in the press and in literature. In the Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described one of his cell mates, a young man from Kiev named Valentin:

“There is no doubt that he had the gift of precognition – perhaps only in his then current state of excitement. More than once, he went around the cell in the morning and pointed: today they are going to come for you and you. I saw it in my dream. And they came and got them. … the very individuals he had pointed out. … On July 27 Valentin came up to me: ‘Aleksandr! Today it is our turn.’ And he told me a dream that had all the characteristics of prison dreams: a bridge across a muddy stream, a cross. I began to get my things together. And it was not for nothing either. He and I were summoned after morning tea.”

Another fascinating account was shared by Paul Stamets on one of Joe Rogan’s podcasts: Stamets shared the story related to a mushroom trip he had as a young man. After an un-remarkable trip, he went to bed and had a lucid dream during which he saw thousands of dead cattle rotting in a field under the sun. He told his buddies with whom he shared the mushrooms. They joked that Paul had predicted the end of the world and marked the ‘due date’ for it on the calendar.

Then, a few days later there was a massive snowfall in the area followed by a rapid temperature rise resulting in a flooding in the area. Stamets drove to his cottage in the mountains to recover his research – he was worried that it could get destroyed by the flood. He got there in time but was unable to return as the roads got closed. He had to stay at his cottage for a few days. When he was finally able to return it was a warm, bright sunny day. On his way back, after a bend in the road, Stamets came upon the scene of hundreds of dead cattle in the field in front of him – the scene he saw in his lucid dream. Stamets’ own interpretation of this incident was evidence that there are parallel universes and that during his lucid dream he visited one. What Stamets called a parallel universe could be the spirit realm referred to by native tribes or the country of the hidden Imam that those Persian Sufis spoke of.

What’s this evolution then?

It seems to me – and I know I am not alone in this – that humanity is at an important crossroads in our evolution. At the individual level, these changes could be very subtle and impossible to comprehend. A seed can’t know what kind of tree it would ultimately become. It only ‘knows’ it has to grow.

Everything I wrote in this article should be easy to dismiss by the well-educated types who are only moved by evidence in the form of randomized, double-blind controlled trials published in peer-reviewed academic literature. But I do believe that the evolution and the changes we feel are real and that the ‘paranormal’ faculties I had glimpsed are likely our birthright, something every healthy human is or should be capable of.

If we are small puddles, what’s the great ocean?

My hunch is that they should manifest most powerfully at the collective level. The Tantrists thought that most people are unaware that they possess these capabilities because the average human mind functions like “a small puddle isolated from the great ocean.” But perhaps today these puddles are coming together and to me it seems that they are. The Sufis believed that the country of the hidden Imam was a plane of existence created by the imagination of many people – possibly this is just the ocean that unites all the “puddles.”

At the individual level, perhaps we only need to follow our inner compulsions, keep good physical and mental hygiene, reject alcohol and fear, and inasmuch as possible steer clear of trauma, anxiety, bad nutrition, bad medication, etc.. We should instead engage more in experiences and activities that truly gratify us and that we long for. In the process, as our senses grow sharper we should be discovering all the magic things in the world that Yeats alluded to. This should bring us closer to having a more gratifying experience in living and fulfilling our potential, whatever it may be, both as individuals and as a collective.

Alex Krainer – @NakedHedgie is the creator of I-System Trend Following and publisher of daily TrendCompass investor reports which cover over 200 financial and commodities markets. One-month test drive is always free of charge, no jumping through hoops to cancel. To start your trial subscription, drop us an email at TrendCompass@ISystem-TF.com

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