The possibility of changing Consciousness was discovered in the orient 2,500 years ago at least, probably it is older than that but techniques were discovered to quiet the mind, pacify the mind, remove emotional compulsions, and these were organised into the science of yoga. Yoga is the science of the East, as science is the yoga of the West.

The scientific worldview grew up in the West between 1,500 and 1,750, largely due to mystics who were known as Hermeticist’s. This Hermetic scientific revolution saw theology as its enemy, and there was no conflict between hermeticism and science, they were both based on experiment – find out what happens if you do this – and they both opposed to the authority of the church.

Shortly after 1,600 this began to split, and the hermetic tradition began to faded into the background and we developed for the first time in history a science that had absolutely no connection with anything except from pure reason.

The hermetic tradition was that is no such thing as pure reason, you have to first work on your perceiving apparatus to correct your prejudices, and the scientist is not seperate from what the scientist observes, and the general yogic attitude that you are the master who makes the grass green. Western science lost that insight, and from Newton onwards we had the idea that it doesn’t matter who you are, if you follow scientific procedure you will find the truth.

This began to break down after 1,900 due to Sigmund Freud who pointed out that even scientists are human beings and may have neuroses, and that scientific theories maybe elaborate rationalisations for neuroses.

And the influence of Karl Marx who pointed out that no matter what you’re theorizing about, its a mirror of your economic status, and what you’re economic goals are. So science began to have data to look at science itself critically, thats how intelligence increases; when intelligence looks at intelligence critically.

So due to psychoanalysis, anthropology, Marxism and other shots, we got to the point where we can look at science, and say science is the product of people, people are doing this, and their prejudices are getting into it. And its not just enough to say ‘I will be objective’, you’ve got to learn to change yourself from the inside out before you can even begin to approximate toward objectivity.

Well, how do you do that? that was a hard one and took a while to begin to find answers to that. The big change-over came when Albert Hoffman after accidentally ingesting LSD, went through a profound experience in 1942, which he did not put into words until 1982.

He was educated as a classical chemist with a classical scientific background and assumed that there was such a thing as an objective observer and so on, so it took him 40 years to figure out what LSD meant.

And in 1982 he wrote an essay on the 40th anniversary on the discovery of LSD, in which he says the main thing I have learnt from LSD is that there is no objective reality separate from us, all there are .. are the realities that our nervous system construct out of the signals they receive.

This became obvious to others due to the things that happening in quantum physics from 1,900 on, and in the doubling of knowledge between 1,900 and 1,950, physicists discovered that the atomic World is just not describable in terms of Aristotelian logic. For one thing you can’t describe anything on the quantum level accurately unless you include the observer in your picture.

So quantum physics turned out to be saying exactly the same thing that the psychedelic revolution was saying; that there is no objective reality seperate from us, all we know is the reality that we are co-creators of, the reality perceived, conceived, created, put together by our nervous systems.

At this point it becomes obvious that intelligence can be raised, Consciousness can be altered, nothing is static, all we gotta do is to learn how to change our nervous systems and we can go to wider and wider reality tunnels, and bigger and bigger levels of perceptions and so on.

And so there was a great deal of drug research and people getting a lot of radical ideas. And so the government made it illegal. Which is the natural thing to do if you’re a politician, the last thing you want is an intelligence increase.

There was also research in drugs the government hadn’t forbidden and along came XTC (ecstasy) and psychiatrists all over the country were curing dam near everything with it, and there was wild enthusiasm and the sixties started to be repeated all over again, so the government made that illegal too.

Meanwhile, we are learning more and more about how these various techniques work, and different approaches to them. There are floatation tanks in almost every large American city now, on that hasn’t been made illegal yet.

Nobody has made pranayama illegal yet, because it would be impossible to enforce, you just have to read a book on yoga and breathe through alternative nostrils until you find you go into an entirely different consciousness state.

Then you go back to your ordinary consciousness state, and think about that state, and then go back into that state and think about your ordinary Consciousness, and already you’re in IQ squared, you’re in intelligence studying intelligence, you’re finding out how your nervous system works.

So with each decade since the 1960s we are moving more and more to the place where we can change our nervous systems, change our reality tunnels and make bigger and bigger reality tunnels.

Once you look down at your reality tunnel, whether your reality tunnel is Ohio Methodist, New York Jewish, Marin County Hippy, Tokyo Capitalist Zen Buddhist, or Iranian Muslim Fundamentalist, once you get to the level where you are outside your reality tunnel, looking down at it, you can compare reality tunnels, and then you are on a higher level of intelligence already, because you’re no longer a conditioned mechanism just following the reality tunnel that was accidentally imprinted or conditioned, and you can start choosing between reality tunnels.