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Chapter One gaze.... After several attempts, and seemingly by magic, a remarkably deep stereogram sprang out of the page that I was holding in front of me. It showed a dolphin leaping in the waves. As soon as I focused normally on the page, the dolphin disappeared, along with the waves in front of it and behind it, and all I could see were muddled dots again. (pp. 45-46) We do not know how our visual system works. As you read these words, you do not really see the ink, the paper, your hands, and the surroundings, but an internal and three-dimensional image that reproduces them almost exactly and that is constructed by your brain. The photons reflected by this page strike the retinas of your eyes, which transform them into electrochemical information; the optic nerves relay this information to the visual cortex at the back of the head, where a cascade-like network of nerve cells separates the input into categories (form, color, movement, depth, etc.). How the brain goes about reuniting these sets of categorized information into a coherent image is still a mystery. This also means that the neurological basis of consciousness is unknown.”* This highlights the fact that, if we don’t even really know how we see things that we term “three-dimensional reality”, how can we begin to conceptualize how we will perceive something as strange as the ideas of 4th density? It seems to be so that when a person hallucinates there is no “external source” of visual stimulation. This is seemingly proved by the fact that cameras cannot record hallucinations. The “enigma of hallucinations” can be reduced to a primary issue: are the hallucinations originating inside the human brain as the “3rd density” scientific studies suggest, or from outside as the shamans declare? All around the world shamans of different pathways tell the same stories and see many of the same visions. And these visions nearly always include serpents which inform the percipient that they are the Dr. Narby concludes his study by hypothesizing that the serpentine images are representations of DNA. To sum up, DNA is a snake-shaped master of transformation that lives in water and i is both extremely long and small, single and double. Just like the a 4. NAN Mircea Eliade has shown that these different images form a common theme that he called the ‘axis mundi,’ or axis of the world, and that he found in * Narby, (1989); p. 48. See also: Crick (1994, pp. 24, 159) on the visual system, and more broadly Penrose (1994) and Horgan (1994) on the current limits of knowledge about consciousness.) ana 202 Narby next brings up some interesting things about cognition. creators of the human race. cosmic serpent. (p 93). He then remarks: