VGF Articles
On the Wider Application of the IIP-VGF Framework
How Everything is not a "Controlled Hallucination"
We tend to think of the world as consisting of things that already exist: people, sky, trees, particles, minds, societies, ideas, and so on. But how and why do any of these things ever come to exist in the way that they do, a way that is stable enough to be a “thing” or a "being" at all?
Sometimes it is said that it is all a dream. Edgar Allan Poe said it is a dream within a dream. The sleep dream that we are familiar with only happens because first we have a body. A body with a brain. It happens in the brain. The brain generates it. And today, in modern brain science, we know that the brain also generates the world we experience when we wake up from that. Which also requires the body, and the brain. So there is some similarity. Except that when we are awake this world that we experience, generated by the brain, is something that the brain constantly updates from incoming information through the senses. So our brain-created world that we experience doesn't exist in isolation from an objective world. This is true even if what we experience and understand as the objective world is a matter of the brain, and not a matter of the object objective world itself. Physicists might say that the objective world only really consists of "pointer states".
A current popular idea today, in 2026, inspired by modern brain science is that the world is a "controlled hallucination". A hallucination that the brain evolved to control, and that we could in principle somehow get back to the freedom of the psyche or hallucination material that it evolved to control.
But how did this body and this brain come about? Where did it come from? If it, too, is part of a dream, or a "controlled hallucination", as it is currently so popular to talk about, then how did that happen? Let's say it is a "controlled hallucination". One controlled by the brain. How come this hallucination is so stable that it is able to have this science, and this technology, that is changing what goes on in it? What gives it that stability in the first place? To enable science, and modern brain science, to come to be?
If it all started as free psyche, meaning that we could just somehow get back to that freedom, then why would it close up and stabilise into a world that is so objective, that science is possible in the first place? And not only objective, but objective in a way that is literally predictable, which is the undeniable fact about it that science exploits, why science works, and why science is successful.
These questions are questions that are not generally asked, by those who talk about a "controlled hallucination". Because if you want to talk about a "controlled hallucination", then you have to talk about who or what is controlling it, and why, and precisely how. And that requires somewhat more attention than the idea that the brain evolved to control it. And that the psychic fluidity we can experience under the influence of psychoactive drugs or psychedelics, is a kind of return to the psychic fluidity that we had to begin with, before the evolution of the brain.
Why? Because that idea is simply not scientifically tenable. The vast body of evidence of evolution, in fact, the evidence of the evolution of this brain, does not support the idea that we started with amazing psychic fluidity, and that the brain evolved as a way of controlling this.
It's much, much easier to spin a beguiling story by selectively putting together some scientific facts, in a way that doesn't really hang together, than it is to find the truth. It's a lot less effort.
And to many people, it has huge appeal to say that the brain is veiling an amazing psychic reality, that we only have to rediscover. And that we do rediscover a bit of it by taking psychedelics, as so many young people did in the 1960s. Especially since some such substances have entheogenic qualities. Which means they give rise to experiences of oneness, and even of God.
But then, you see, humans, in small numbers, have been having experiences of oneness, and of God, down through the ages, without having to take psychedelics or entheogens. Even though part of the long history of culture and spirituality does indeed involve some people taking such substances. It's just that if you want to have your mind opened up into possibilities that you do not normally experience, because the brain ordinarily constrains those possibilities, then it is easier to take drugs, than to engage in actual, spiritual practice with industry and patience, without doing that.
When we discover something of what is "underneath the lid" of the "controlling mechanism" of the brain, if you want to call it that, by loosening the "controlling mechanism", we are not looking at two things, a great sea of psychospiritual experience on the one hand, and a controlling mechanism called the brain, on the other. That's not what the science says. On the contrary. That great sea of psychospiritual experience is created by the brain itself. That's the scientific fact. And the brain evolved. That's another great scientific fact. It didn't evolve to control this great sea of psychospiritual experience. And it didn't evolve in order to create it, either, even though it does, when we learn how to release the constraint mechanism, by taking psychoactive drugs. Like Soma, the one prominent in the Vedas, and talked about in other Hindu scriptures. Whatever it actually was.
It's not that there is no connection between this great sea of psychospiritual experience, and the spiritual domain that is the subject of the great contemplative traditions, and the great religions. But they are not the same thing.
This great sea of psychospiritual experience that can be accessed by taking drugs, wasn't there to begin with, just waiting for the brain to evolve to "control it". On the contrary, it evolved together with the brain. It's a product of evolution, and the fact that the evolution of intelligence on this planet involves the evolution of consciousness de facto.
That doesn't mean that the evolution of intelligence, which can be explained in evolutionary terms, "explains" consciousness. Intelligence doesn't equal consciousness, as now, at last, the arrival of artificial intelligence demonstrates. Although there are still plenty of people around who don't understand that. There will always be someone who thinks artificial intelligence is conscious. Because they know very little about it.
So they are indeed connected, this great sea of psychospiritual experience whose potential is under the bonnet of the brain, and the spiritual domain as addressed by the great contemplative traditions and the great religions. But they are not the same thing. Because the great sea of psychospiritual experience that the brain can produce is produced by the brain, and the spiritual domain is not dependent on the brain. Because the brain is a "thing" that belongs to biology, or neuroscience, or anatomy, but not to theology, or the great spiritual traditions. Even though they first require the brain, in order to come to be.
The same is true of consciousness-as-such. Or pure awareness if you want to call it that. For human beings to know anything about it in the first place, it first requires the brain. But it is not the same thing as brain activity. Which is why modern neuroscience speaks of "neural correlates" of consciousness, and not of neural activity being consciousness.
Evolution, the brain, neuroscience, conscious psyche, and the spiritual domain, do all fit together and are all connected, but not by collapsing all those registers of human experience and understanding into just one of them. That doesn't give any real understanding at all. So to take the sea of psychospiritual experience that can be discovered by releasing some of the constraint mechanisms of the brain through the ingestion of psychoactive drugs, and trying to collapse everything else into that, is no understanding at all.
If you want to reduce everything to the scientific register, then you can, and it will produce better understanding, but it won't produce a spiritual understanding. If you want to reduce everything to the spiritual register, then you can, but it won't produce scientific understanding. And if you want to reduce everything to selectively taking bits and pieces of scientific evidence and collapsing them into psychic phenomenology, then you can. But it won't produce any understanding at all.
Understanding comes from keeping the registers separate, and seeing how they fit together. You don't make a jigsaw puzzle up by fusing all the pieces together. You come to see the picture by putting the pieces together.
There is a reason why all these pieces of our understanding are separate. They do all fit together, because they have all been generated in the first place, through the same generativity. But you can't just fuse them together, by collapsing registers. There is a reason why things in our world are separate, to begin with. There is a reason why it is a world of separation, and distinction. And the experience of oneness doesn't come by fusing everything. It goes hand-in-hand with seeing how everything fits together, and why.
We live in a world of things. But we also live in the world of phenomenology, which is the "first person" experience of conscious experience from the "first person" point of view. That's the nature of the consciousness we experience, provided through the brain. And if you lift the constraints on that provided by the brain, then you can have extraordinary experience that might even undermine your idea of who you are. Which is why that can be destabilising.
It's very vaguely destabilising in the modern world to be told that the world we experience is a controlled hallucination, or perhaps a dream. Even though Hinduism has been saying for thousands of years that it is Maya. But it's not enough to destabilise the idea of who you are. Once you start destabilising that, you can very easily get into mental illness.
The world we live in, isn't unstable in that way, though. On the contrary, it's very stable. In fact, it's objective. Which is how, and why, science, which studies this objectivity, and works with it, is able to work. It is phenomenology that can become unstable, very easily. Not the world, the world studied by science, the material world in which we live. The whole balance between what we know, and what we don't know, is all about the balance between stability and instability. When someone takes psychoactive drugs and experiences extraordinary phenomenology, the stability of the world is not affected.
The idea that we can undo the stability of the world, and take it back into some kind of psychic freedom, is an idea based on not knowing how this stability of the world comes about in the first place. But it's appealing, and beguiling, because it hints at something very deep. Which is that the stability and very objectivity of the world itself, is part of our phenomenology, and is not objective on the basis of being separate from it. Because it is not separate from it.
If you are under the influence of psychoactives and believe you can fly, and jump off a cliff, you will still fall to the ground. That's the objectivity of the world. But it's not there, this objectivity, by virtue of some separation of the world from us. On the contrary, in quantum physics itself we now know that the objectivity of the world in which we live, is not a matter of separation, but a matter of a principle called redundancy.
So our understanding of our constitution and situation as human beings, is changing. The world we experience is the construct of our brain function. But it's also objective. Understanding how that fits together isn't as simple as saying "It's a controlled hallucination". On the contrary. It begins by understanding the nature of stability. Stability itself has more than one register. In the scientific register, it's the stability of the objectivity of the world. In the register of conscious experience, or phenomenology, it's about the stability of the experience of self, and the idea of "who I am".
In contemporary spiritual teachings, especially when importing ideas from Buddhism, there may be neglect of the importance of understanding stability and instability, and their relation. This is important in a quest to transcend self or ego, or, indeed, if you are going to take drugs. Because then, the stable path is one with instability on each side of it.
The principle matters in science also because many of the most important questions we face involve the relation between instability and stability. How does the physical universe become structured? How do living systems maintain themselves? How do minds form coherent experience? How do societies preserve identity across generations? How do ideas, traditions, and institutions outlive the individuals who carry them?
The IIP–VGF framework does not reduce all these domains to one another. It does not say that physics, biology, psychology, and culture are “really” the same thing. Rather, it shows how similar patterns of stabilisation appear across different domains. In each case, something open, dynamic, and unstable gives rise to something more stable, durable, and communicable.
This relation of stability to instability is important too, on the spiritual path. Even the most stable religions become unstable, and split. And for individuals there is a fine line that is not very well understood at all, between psychosis and spirituality. Between spiritual emergence, and spiritual emergency.
Stability is never free. A stable thing survives by reducing the openness from which it came. This is what the IIP-VGF framework calls the Stability–Fidelity Law: stability is gained at the cost of fidelity. What persists is not the whole depth of what gave rise to it, but a reduced and stabilised version capable of surviving. Evolution is the evolution of stability. That stability is always bought at the cost of fidelity to generative origins. And that's why evolution is a process of ongoing decoherence. The Stability-Fidelity law applies as much to spiritual phenomenology as it does to material evolution. But very few people know about it, or how it works. Let alone how to express it, in terms compatible with science.
In the framework, behind the exist existential evolution of the brain which de facto embodies the evolution of our conscious experience as human beings, is trace memory. Trace memory is a structural and dynamic component of what happens when structure stabilises from infinite iteration, or self-recurrence. It belongs within this larger picture. In a field of recursive generativity, previous stabilisations do not simply vanish. They alter the conditions under which later formations occur. The past does not need to be stored as a perfect copy in order to matter. It can persist as a tendency, pathway, bias, constraint, or affordance. Actually, Buddhism already has its own language for this, but not one that intersects well with the scientific register.
That is why trace memory is important. It explains why evolution and the fossil record are historically layered, whilst at the same time, geological time in which the fossil record of evolution is preserved, is nested. Iterative processes produce nesting. And geological time is nested. In evolution, what has formed before, influences what can form next. But it's an iterative process. Despite any appearance of linearity. It is the same with time itself. Evolution is not merely a linear succession of isolated events; it is an accumulating field of stabilisations, residues, and inherited possibilities, stabilised out of iterative generativity.
In terms of the framework applied to the phenomenology register, this is precisely how evolution has produced the field of psychospiritual experience we can discover underneath the stabilising influence of the brain, when that influence is lifted. But it wasn't there before the brain. The evolution of the brain created it.
For millennia, human beings accessing the human psyche through the human psyche, through symbolic intelligence still identified with it, interpreted psychical phenomena such as we might experience very potently under the influence of psychoactive drugs, as a descent from transcendental consciousness. A descent from the spiritual domain. And in terms of the spiritual register, in one sense it is. But the scientific fact is that this psyche isn't separate from evolution. The psyche evolved.
Sometimes it is said that it is all a dream. Edgar Allan Poe said it is a dream within a dream. The sleep dream that we are familiar with only happens because first we have a body. A body with a brain. It happens in the brain. The brain generates it. And today, in modern brain science, we know that the brain also generates the world we experience when we wake up from that. Which also requires the body, and the brain. So there is some similarity. Except that when we are awake this world that we experience, generated by the brain, is something that the brain constantly updates from incoming information through the senses. So our brain-created world that we experience doesn't exist in isolation from an objective world. This is true even if what we experience and understand as the objective world is a matter of the brain, and not a matter of the object objective world itself. Physicists might say that the objective world only really consists of "pointer states".
A current popular idea today, in 2026, inspired by modern brain science is that the world is a "controlled hallucination". A hallucination that the brain evolved to control, and that we could in principle somehow get back to the freedom of the psyche or hallucination material that it evolved to control.
But how did this body and this brain come about? Where did it come from? If it, too, is part of a dream, or a "controlled hallucination", as it is currently so popular to talk about, then how did that happen? Let's say it is a "controlled hallucination". One controlled by the brain. How come this hallucination is so stable that it is able to have this science, and this technology, that is changing what goes on in it? What gives it that stability in the first place? To enable science, and modern brain science, to come to be?
If it all started as free psyche, meaning that we could just somehow get back to that freedom, then why would it close up and stabilise into a world that is so objective, that science is possible in the first place? And not only objective, but objective in a way that is literally predictable, which is the undeniable fact about it that science exploits, why science works, and why science is successful.
These questions are questions that are not generally asked, by those who talk about a "controlled hallucination". Because if you want to talk about a "controlled hallucination", then you have to talk about who or what is controlling it, and why, and precisely how. And that requires somewhat more attention than the idea that the brain evolved to control it. And that the psychic fluidity we can experience under the influence of psychoactive drugs or psychedelics, is a kind of return to the psychic fluidity that we had to begin with, before the evolution of the brain.
Why? Because that idea is simply not scientifically tenable. The vast body of evidence of evolution, in fact, the evidence of the evolution of this brain, does not support the idea that we started with amazing psychic fluidity, and that the brain evolved as a way of controlling this.
It's much, much easier to spin a beguiling story by selectively putting together some scientific facts, in a way that doesn't really hang together, than it is to find the truth. It's a lot less effort.
And to many people, it has huge appeal to say that the brain is veiling an amazing psychic reality, that we only have to rediscover. And that we do rediscover a bit of it by taking psychedelics, as so many young people did in the 1960s. Especially since some such substances have entheogenic qualities. Which means they give rise to experiences of oneness, and even of God.
But then, you see, humans, in small numbers, have been having experiences of oneness, and of God, down through the ages, without having to take psychedelics or entheogens. Even though part of the long history of culture and spirituality does indeed involve some people taking such substances. It's just that if you want to have your mind opened up into possibilities that you do not normally experience, because the brain ordinarily constrains those possibilities, then it is easier to take drugs, than to engage in actual, spiritual practice with industry and patience, without doing that.
When we discover something of what is "underneath the lid" of the "controlling mechanism" of the brain, if you want to call it that, by loosening the "controlling mechanism", we are not looking at two things, a great sea of psychospiritual experience on the one hand, and a controlling mechanism called the brain, on the other. That's not what the science says. On the contrary. That great sea of psychospiritual experience is created by the brain itself. That's the scientific fact. And the brain evolved. That's another great scientific fact. It didn't evolve to control this great sea of psychospiritual experience. And it didn't evolve in order to create it, either, even though it does, when we learn how to release the constraint mechanism, by taking psychoactive drugs. Like Soma, the one prominent in the Vedas, and talked about in other Hindu scriptures. Whatever it actually was.
It's not that there is no connection between this great sea of psychospiritual experience, and the spiritual domain that is the subject of the great contemplative traditions, and the great religions. But they are not the same thing.
This great sea of psychospiritual experience that can be accessed by taking drugs, wasn't there to begin with, just waiting for the brain to evolve to "control it". On the contrary, it evolved together with the brain. It's a product of evolution, and the fact that the evolution of intelligence on this planet involves the evolution of consciousness de facto.
That doesn't mean that the evolution of intelligence, which can be explained in evolutionary terms, "explains" consciousness. Intelligence doesn't equal consciousness, as now, at last, the arrival of artificial intelligence demonstrates. Although there are still plenty of people around who don't understand that. There will always be someone who thinks artificial intelligence is conscious. Because they know very little about it.
So they are indeed connected, this great sea of psychospiritual experience whose potential is under the bonnet of the brain, and the spiritual domain as addressed by the great contemplative traditions and the great religions. But they are not the same thing. Because the great sea of psychospiritual experience that the brain can produce is produced by the brain, and the spiritual domain is not dependent on the brain. Because the brain is a "thing" that belongs to biology, or neuroscience, or anatomy, but not to theology, or the great spiritual traditions. Even though they first require the brain, in order to come to be.
The same is true of consciousness-as-such. Or pure awareness if you want to call it that. For human beings to know anything about it in the first place, it first requires the brain. But it is not the same thing as brain activity. Which is why modern neuroscience speaks of "neural correlates" of consciousness, and not of neural activity being consciousness.
Evolution, the brain, neuroscience, conscious psyche, and the spiritual domain, do all fit together and are all connected, but not by collapsing all those registers of human experience and understanding into just one of them. That doesn't give any real understanding at all. So to take the sea of psychospiritual experience that can be discovered by releasing some of the constraint mechanisms of the brain through the ingestion of psychoactive drugs, and trying to collapse everything else into that, is no understanding at all.
If you want to reduce everything to the scientific register, then you can, and it will produce better understanding, but it won't produce a spiritual understanding. If you want to reduce everything to the spiritual register, then you can, but it won't produce scientific understanding. And if you want to reduce everything to selectively taking bits and pieces of scientific evidence and collapsing them into psychic phenomenology, then you can. But it won't produce any understanding at all.
Understanding comes from keeping the registers separate, and seeing how they fit together. You don't make a jigsaw puzzle up by fusing all the pieces together. You come to see the picture by putting the pieces together.
There is a reason why all these pieces of our understanding are separate. They do all fit together, because they have all been generated in the first place, through the same generativity. But you can't just fuse them together, by collapsing registers. There is a reason why things in our world are separate, to begin with. There is a reason why it is a world of separation, and distinction. And the experience of oneness doesn't come by fusing everything. It goes hand-in-hand with seeing how everything fits together, and why.
We live in a world of things. But we also live in the world of phenomenology, which is the "first person" experience of conscious experience from the "first person" point of view. That's the nature of the consciousness we experience, provided through the brain. And if you lift the constraints on that provided by the brain, then you can have extraordinary experience that might even undermine your idea of who you are. Which is why that can be destabilising.
It's very vaguely destabilising in the modern world to be told that the world we experience is a controlled hallucination, or perhaps a dream. Even though Hinduism has been saying for thousands of years that it is Maya. But it's not enough to destabilise the idea of who you are. Once you start destabilising that, you can very easily get into mental illness.
The world we live in, isn't unstable in that way, though. On the contrary, it's very stable. In fact, it's objective. Which is how, and why, science, which studies this objectivity, and works with it, is able to work. It is phenomenology that can become unstable, very easily. Not the world, the world studied by science, the material world in which we live. The whole balance between what we know, and what we don't know, is all about the balance between stability and instability. When someone takes psychoactive drugs and experiences extraordinary phenomenology, the stability of the world is not affected.
The idea that we can undo the stability of the world, and take it back into some kind of psychic freedom, is an idea based on not knowing how this stability of the world comes about in the first place. But it's appealing, and beguiling, because it hints at something very deep. Which is that the stability and very objectivity of the world itself, is part of our phenomenology, and is not objective on the basis of being separate from it. Because it is not separate from it.
If you are under the influence of psychoactives and believe you can fly, and jump off a cliff, you will still fall to the ground. That's the objectivity of the world. But it's not there, this objectivity, by virtue of some separation of the world from us. On the contrary, in quantum physics itself we now know that the objectivity of the world in which we live, is not a matter of separation, but a matter of a principle called redundancy.
So our understanding of our constitution and situation as human beings, is changing. The world we experience is the construct of our brain function. But it's also objective. Understanding how that fits together isn't as simple as saying "It's a controlled hallucination". On the contrary. It begins by understanding the nature of stability. Stability itself has more than one register. In the scientific register, it's the stability of the objectivity of the world. In the register of conscious experience, or phenomenology, it's about the stability of the experience of self, and the idea of "who I am".
In contemporary spiritual teachings, especially when importing ideas from Buddhism, there may be neglect of the importance of understanding stability and instability, and their relation. This is important in a quest to transcend self or ego, or, indeed, if you are going to take drugs. Because then, the stable path is one with instability on each side of it.
The principle matters in science also because many of the most important questions we face involve the relation between instability and stability. How does the physical universe become structured? How do living systems maintain themselves? How do minds form coherent experience? How do societies preserve identity across generations? How do ideas, traditions, and institutions outlive the individuals who carry them?
The IIP–VGF framework does not reduce all these domains to one another. It does not say that physics, biology, psychology, and culture are “really” the same thing. Rather, it shows how similar patterns of stabilisation appear across different domains. In each case, something open, dynamic, and unstable gives rise to something more stable, durable, and communicable.
This relation of stability to instability is important too, on the spiritual path. Even the most stable religions become unstable, and split. And for individuals there is a fine line that is not very well understood at all, between psychosis and spirituality. Between spiritual emergence, and spiritual emergency.
Stability is never free. A stable thing survives by reducing the openness from which it came. This is what the IIP-VGF framework calls the Stability–Fidelity Law: stability is gained at the cost of fidelity. What persists is not the whole depth of what gave rise to it, but a reduced and stabilised version capable of surviving. Evolution is the evolution of stability. That stability is always bought at the cost of fidelity to generative origins. And that's why evolution is a process of ongoing decoherence. The Stability-Fidelity law applies as much to spiritual phenomenology as it does to material evolution. But very few people know about it, or how it works. Let alone how to express it, in terms compatible with science.
In the framework, behind the exist existential evolution of the brain which de facto embodies the evolution of our conscious experience as human beings, is trace memory. Trace memory is a structural and dynamic component of what happens when structure stabilises from infinite iteration, or self-recurrence. It belongs within this larger picture. In a field of recursive generativity, previous stabilisations do not simply vanish. They alter the conditions under which later formations occur. The past does not need to be stored as a perfect copy in order to matter. It can persist as a tendency, pathway, bias, constraint, or affordance. Actually, Buddhism already has its own language for this, but not one that intersects well with the scientific register.
That is why trace memory is important. It explains why evolution and the fossil record are historically layered, whilst at the same time, geological time in which the fossil record of evolution is preserved, is nested. Iterative processes produce nesting. And geological time is nested. In evolution, what has formed before, influences what can form next. But it's an iterative process. Despite any appearance of linearity. It is the same with time itself. Evolution is not merely a linear succession of isolated events; it is an accumulating field of stabilisations, residues, and inherited possibilities, stabilised out of iterative generativity.
In terms of the framework applied to the phenomenology register, this is precisely how evolution has produced the field of psychospiritual experience we can discover underneath the stabilising influence of the brain, when that influence is lifted. But it wasn't there before the brain. The evolution of the brain created it.
For millennia, human beings accessing the human psyche through the human psyche, through symbolic intelligence still identified with it, interpreted psychical phenomena such as we might experience very potently under the influence of psychoactive drugs, as a descent from transcendental consciousness. A descent from the spiritual domain. And in terms of the spiritual register, in one sense it is. But the scientific fact is that this psyche isn't separate from evolution. The psyche evolved.