The Internal Trust Attractor

Note 31. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969). Turner’s communitas describes intense social bonding emerging when ordinary social structures temporarily dissolve — not an organized structure but an undifferentiated mode of human relatedness arising in liminal spaces.

Note 32. Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann, Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers (1979). Foundational ethnobotanical survey documenting independent discovery and ceremonial use of psychoactive plants across cultures worldwide. That cultures without contact found and ritualized the same plants suggests, on the author’s reading, that the altered states themselves are not cultural inventions, even though the ceremonies built around them differ.

Note 33. Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind (2018). Synthesis of the psychedelic research renaissance emphasizing the critical role of integration work — the therapeutic processing that transforms a temporary altered state into lasting psychological change.

Note 34. Carhart-Harris, R.L., et al., “The entropic brain,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014): 20; and “Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (2016): 4853–4858. The 2014 paper proposed the entropic brain hypothesis; the 2016 imaging study reported that LSD reduces the integrity of the default mode network and the segregation between brain networks, consistent with a more entropic brain state.