Patrick Hemstreet is a novelist, neuro-engineer, entrepreneur, patent-pending inventor, special warfare-trained Navy medic, standup comic, and actor. He lives in Houston, Texas with his wife and sons. The God Wave is his first novel.At Tor.com he named his five top books for the psychonaut--"psychonauts explore the vastness and depth of the mind"--including:
Cloud Atlas by David MitchellRead about the other entries on the list.
Cloud Atlas serves as means to whet the appetite for the psychonaut. David Mitchell’s ideas on reincarnation make for a great read, but they also open up an intriguing possibility for the psychonautically inclined. Consider that the mind does have multiple strata and these inhabitmultiple planes of existence as the mystics claim. Now further contemplate that one or more of those strata dwell outside of space-time, a notion also posited by gurus. This suggests the possibility that a portion or strata of our minds exists in many different beings simultaneously, our past and future lives linked at a higher level of consciousness.
If reincarnation is real, the only thing separating our multiple incarnations is time. The big question here is whether our supposed extra-temporal mental stratum can be accessed with enough practice? Imagine being able to tap the wealth of knowledge of multiple lifetimes within one’s own psyche. This could well be the mother of all goals in psychonautics. Throw in the possibility of multiverses and you’ve got one heck of a spider web.
Cloud Atlas is among the six books that changed Maile Meloy's idea of what’s possible in fiction.
--Marshal Zeringue
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