If you’ve ever captured an insect in a jar you’ll note the first thing it does is to find the jar’s outer wall. Then it climbs, and locates the highest point. This instinct is found not just in insects but in all animals. Above all else we hate confinement, the untold centuries of bloody warfare over the matter of personal freedom that fill our history books were high level expressions of this very low level instinct.
Instict drives a lot of what we do without our realization. Here's a good example. Our history of exploration has be guided, more than anything else, by this instinctive drive to locate the furthest bounds of our immediate environment, then to go up.
This primal desire found expression in mountain climbing, in aviation, and most recently in spaceflight. All compelled by a subconscious obsession with escaping confinement. That's well and good. Perfectly healthy even, or evolution would not have selected for it.
Some time around the age of 12, I exhausted all materials having to do with the space program up to that point. I was a space fanatic. But we'd only done so much, so there was a limit to how much I could gorge on before it ran out. This prompted me to seek out other equally satisfying fascinations.
At the same time, most people in the world better equipped to explore and make discoveries are all directed by the outward/upward seeking instinct. If I had any hope of discovering stuff that they overlooked, I would have to direct my explorations elsewhere. Instead of watching the skies, I turned my attention downward, and inward.
There are still remarkable discoveries to be made within the Earth, for example. Even many caverns known to speleologists are not yet fully explored due to the danger. Caverns, especially very deep ones, can have wildly varying internal conditions. Some of which are hostile to human life.
Many are already aware, for example, of the crystal cavern in Mexico. Gigantic selenite crystals formed here due to relatively rare conditions, producing some of the largest crystals known to science. The temperatures are also in excess of 136 degrees farenheit, with 90 to 99 percent humidity. It is an unsurvivable environment for humans requiring special cold air habitats and heat reflecting suits to safely explore the furthest reaches of.
Who would have thought we'd find such a thing? If you give it extended thought, it's really unexpected and remarkable. Caves full of gargantuan crystals are like something out of a sword and sorcery or scifi film, yet it really exists right here on Earth.
Of course not every discovery is so sensational. Most are mundane, but that only serves as a drab backdrop against which, by contrast, the occasional amazing discovery is made even more astonishing to us. There would be less pleasure in discovery I think, if everything we found day after day was amazing. Finding a diamond in a garbage dump is very exciting. Finding it in a huge pile of diamonds, less so.
However, not all incredible subterranean finds are naturally occurring. Consider for example the Temples of Humankind:
I could post endless photos of this place, but better to check them out on the website, there are just too many. Some of the most exquisite architectural beauty to be found anywhere and gorgeous panoramic murals. The entire facility was dug out of a mountain in the foothills of the Italian Alps, initially by one man but later by more and more as he let them in on the secret and they felt compelled to join the effort.
The result, 13 years later (the digging began in 1978) was a massive, mind bendingly beautiful cluster of themed temples 100 feet underground, unknown to anybody but the man who created them and his cohorts. Until the Italian Police caught wind of it. They were unable to find the entrance, it was so well hidden, until they threatened to dynamite the whole hillside. They were however good enough to grant the project retroactive permits, and now it is open to tourists.
There are also countless abandoned cold war bunkers out there. All with their own accompanying story, but that's outside the scope of this post. Likewise the Odessa catacombs in Kiev are amazing enough to warrant their own dedicated post, but that will have to wait. There are other forms of inward exploration I wish to discuss.
One of them is exploration of Earth's oceans. The percentage varies depending on how you define "explored", but while the topography of the seafloor has been thoroughly mapped out by satellite, less than 10% has been directly examined by manned submersibles or drones.
There is some truly weird stuff down there. If you're only interested in Lovecraftian aquatic megapredators, it's pretty much down to whales and giant/collossal squid. The oceanic ecosystem won't support any more truly huge predators, though some species of shark get pretty enormous like the whale shark, or the greenland shark.
The truly weird stuff doesn't jump out and smack you in the face, it looks much like any other marine life you've seen, and must be examined closer to discover its secrets. For example, the Xenophytophore, the largest known species of single celled organism:
You read that right. Single celled. What the hell, right? How can that possibly be true? But no matter how closely you look, it isn't made up of individual cells the size of our own. It has many nuclei but is not subdivided by cellular membranes. The only membrane is the exterior you see in the photo. When examined sufficiently closely it is made from proteins, amino acids and the other constitent organic chemical elements our own cells are. It's just really f'in huge for a cell.
Now, who thought we'd ever find such a thing in the ocean? New fish species, sure. Some new jellyfish. But something like this? It was unprecedented, as was the discovery of hydrothermal vents in the 1970s. Prior to that it was believed all life ultimately gets its energy from the sun. Chemosynthetic life which subsists entirely on the heat and chemicals emitted by hydrothermal vents proved that wrong, and gave us hope of finding similar life around the hydrothermal vents of Europa.
There's also a rich history of human beings building manned undersea stations in which to live and carry out useful scientific work. I won't cover that here because I did so extensively in a prior article. I also won't cover the industrial and economic uses of the ocean as I did that here and here.
This brings us to exploration into your own mind. There are plenty of ways to do this, ranging from the cheaper end like meditation, up to more expensive options like float tanks and VR. I'll cover three which I have found powerfully productive.
Float tanks are one of those things which, upon trying it, you wonder where it's been all your life. Day to day, our senses are inundated. Overwhelmed with stimulus, most of it irrelevant. Float tanks allow you to shut your senses off from all stimulus for hours on end, recalibrating them. Like wiping off the dirty lens of a camera.
You float in a body temperature solution of water and epsom salt, mixed in a ratio which renders you effortlessly buoyant. Besides well documented beneficial effects of salt treatments for your skin, this removes as completely as possible tactile sensations, and the insulated chamber blocks out sound and light. This leaves you utterly alone with your thoughts.
It is commonplace, an hour or two in, to begin experiencing mild hallucination. In the absence of outside stimuli, the brain begins to fabricate its own. These visions are often life changing. People who regularly float swear by it. If there is a float center near you, I highly recommend you give it a shot. Prices range from $50-$90 for an hour, though often if there is nobody after you and you're courteous, they will let you stay in much longer.
Some combine psychedelics with float tanks. I personally have not, though I have done it underwater. To me, combining psychs with float tanks almost seems like overkill.
That said, psychedelics in general are among the safest controlled substances known. There are caveats, like how to avoid/prevent bad trips and not to use them if you have a history of schizophrenia, but for most people with some coaching and a warm, comfortable setting, psychedelics are a powerful tool for introspection and healing.
It's important to realize that the brain fabricates what we see, hear and otherwise experience. It does not reach us directly from our senses but is instead processed by the visual cortex. Interpreted, filtered and adjusted before it becomes the seemingly direct experience of reality familiar to us.
This means that the human brain also has the power to concoct false realities just as realistic and convincing as actual reality. The staggering processing power of the brain makes possible the simulation of an endless variety of environments and experiences. That's what dreaming is.
Oneironautics is another topic which drastically exceeds the scope of this article. Sufficed to say that when you turn inward during rem sleep, there is a whole universe within your mind that you may explore. Freely even, should you master lucid dreaming.
But the true significance of the brain's ability to fabricate realistic experience, which psychedelics rejigger to fundamentally change how you experience reality, is that it means you are always in a sort of natural VR. There's real, concrete sensory data coming in, but what you actually see and hear is what your brain puts together from it.
This brings me to VR. It is by itself about the apex of introversion, to block out the outside world and ingress into another world made only of light and information. It can be pretty transformative and revealing by itself, but I have on many occasions combined it with psychedelics to stunning effect.
Besides reducing your suspension of disbelief, your inhibitions are also reduced allowing you to more readily believe and engage with the virtual world in a more natural, unassuming and un-self conscious way. A decent amount of weed also has this effect. You forget the technical aspect of it, the contraption on your head and how it works, instead becoming absorbed in the sound and imagery it's feeding into your brain.
It could accurately be said that VR is just one machine lying to another: The computer fabricating apparent reality, then feeding it to the brain, which further processes that input before you experience it.
The take away from this article is that there is no wrong direction in which to explore. (that's another topic I didn't touch on here, the microscopic world!) We live in a universe which is rich with detail on every scale you examine, with baffling secrets to be found even in places you wouldn't normally look to think.
Do not be afraid to subvert your outward and upward seeking instinct. You need not abandon it, but taking breaks from it will permit you to delve into depths of one sort or another. Often uncharted territory. There you will find things about the Earth and about yourself which cannot be found any other way.