News Report / Profile
Mário Simões - In an expanded state of consciousness
"That portrait is called "Personal Myths". I'm in a Manueline room, and I'm going from a room with light to another room with even more light. I'm accompanied by my totem, my favourite animal, the eagle. I'm carrying a staff in my hand to help me walk, but it also helps me defend myself and points the way forward. And I'm crossing a room where all the slabs are very organized and marked by several centuries; supposedly I had been in those centuries, one time or another as a traveller from the future and then back to a past century. Possibly, I myself have travelled in time. And here in front of me everything is disorganized, the slabs of my footprints are misaligned...the past, what has happened to me in my life, is "precipitated". There was a consciousness that precipitated a potential for success and can no longer be altered. (In Quantum Physics, the Double-Slit Phenomenon shows that if there is a consciousness that precipitated a phenomenon, it can no longer be altered, it is precipitated as a particle.) There is a path to a place that is yet unknown, but I'm in a room where the walls disappear and I can see a starry sky; this room is the planet Earth. The room symbolized the planet where I'm conducting life experiments. In this sky, something suggests a constellation, Orion, and the Three Sisters are there in its belt; in some traditions they correspond to the pyramids of Egypt or to the belt of a boy called Orion. He was a village boy, a hunter, who was unaware of some of the rules that people wanted to impose on him, he lives in contact with nature and has the sense of discovery. Here I find many personal myths to which I relate".
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This is how Mário Simões introduces himself, in a painting by Margarida Cepêda.
He welcomes me at the LIMMIT - Laboratory of Mind-Matter Interaction with Therapeutic Intention - funded by the Bial Foundation in 2012, but which began operating in 2015, when it was given its own space. It is a scientific research laboratory dedicated to the science of consciousness, namely the mind-matter interaction. The LIMMIT is based in the Faculty, which lies at the origin of its training and profession.
Assistant Professor with Aggregation in the Subject Area of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon, Mário Simões gave his last lecture in October.
He had left a post-it on the LIMMIT's door, "please knock, I'm inside". A host par excellence, he welcomes us with an unusual humility, as if his home was more the others' than his own; that's how he had welcomed the guests of his last lecture on Extended States of Consciousness. He gives us a guided tour of all the nooks and crannies, harmoniously organized and maximized. He explains the logo of the LIMMIT, inspired in the shen of ancient Egypt, and mentions that various posters on the wall, which advocate the schools of thought in which he believes. At the entrance there is a framed thank-you note to Luis Portela, a great promoter of the funding and these areas; the coffee machine given by Commander Nabeiro, and the various machines that, in different ways, reflect the "force fields" that each person emanates. All this tells us a little bit about Mário Simões, a respected Psychiatrist who, in addition to being a Professor and researcher, also worked as a Graduate Hospital Assistant at the Santa Maria Hospital, without ever abandoning the private practice of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy.
He fascinated many anonymous people with topics related to hypnosis, showing that trips to the unconscious could reveal unthinkable stories about every human being. It was the subject of important news features, a case of popularity and controversy. Along the way, he had so many patients looking for him that he had to refuse first appointments; amidst long waiting lists of people who wanted to hear him, he researched and wrote, and his 5 books reflect this work and thought.
He was born on October 24, 1948 in Lisbon, but his adopted city is Figueira da Foz, where he spent his childhood and adolescence. When he was in high school he lived by the sea and loved to see the harbour, so he knew by heart the name of all the ships that came and went. The dream of becoming a Marine Engineer, inspired by his city and the nearby shipyards, gave him the first sign that the universe had intentions for him that he had never even thought about. When he failed the geometric drawing exam, despite being a good student in all the other subjects, he realized that he could never become an Engineer. Listening to those around him and those in the universe of sciences, he realized that he should study Medicine. He entered Medicine in Coimbra and he stayed there until the 3rd year, when he says he received another sign. When he studied Anatomy and had to dissect a human hand for an exam, something went wrong and he felt that he did not identify himself with that path. So, how about if he became a "surgeon of the mind" and was not required to perform surgeries? He thought about it. He became interested in Psychology and started to look at it more closely. But leaving Coimbra was inevitable with the academic crisis and his disagreement with some ideological currents.
At 70 years of age, it is with an expression of fascination on his face that he says that he found his masters - Barahona Fernandes, Tomé Vilar, Ducla Soares, Belo Moraes, Almeida Lima or Fernando Pádua - in Lisbon, in the Faculty of Medicine. His grades were rising exponentially and he stood out, particularly in the areas of Neurology, Psychiatry and Medical Clinic. At the end of the 6th year, together with the assistant psychiatrist Carlos Alcântara, he started learning the first hypnosis techniques in the library of the Júlio de Matos Hospital. He says that "flying across the mind" was his great challenge, because imagination is not restrained by rules or limits. But in 1973, and despite the fact that people were using hypnosis, it was an uncommon and somewhat controversial practice.
Then came the clinical internship, when he began to stand out as the "Psychiatrist" of his group and worked in small towns across Portugal. At the time, he decided to apply for Psychiatry scholarships abroad; Switzerland, Germany and Austria were his destinations of choice. He had a recommendation from Professor Barahona Fernandes, who had greatly encouraged him to pursue an international career. The first reply came from Switzerland, but the truth is that, shortly after that, he received positive replies to all his applications. In Switzerland he was offered a position at the Burghölzli Clinic, in Zurich, where both Eugen and Manfred Bleuler (father and son, devoted to the diagnostic of Schizophrenia), and Carl Jung had worked. For two years, Mário Simões dedicated himself to his thesis on the Portuguese emigrants' adaptation process, arguing that those who emigrated proved to be the bolder ones (risk taking), able to adapt to any environment and surviving "almost everything". This thesis was used to obtain equivalence to the Master's degree in Psychiatry in Portugal.
But Switzerland gave him more than the knowledge about the resilience of the Portuguese emigrants; he had the opportunity to engage with people who were researching psychoactive drugs and altered states of consciousness, very close to the study of hypnosis. He returned to his country with these new researches on altered states of consciousness, achieved by using plants (mushrooms, cacti and fungi, respectively psilocybin, mescaline and LSD), to recreate the model of psychosis, a classical disease known as schizophrenia.
Then he carried out another study in Germany, in Freiburg, where he perfected his knowledge on Scientific or Laboratory Parapsychology. And there he studied the phenomenon of Poltergeist and others, such as the paranormal transfer of information.
And with the scholarship he had received together with the other ones, he went to Austria. In Vienna he learned about Psychoanalysis and Logotherapy. There he met Viktor Frankl, who was still lecturing at the University at the time.
He has been performing hypnosis for 40 years, publishing papers and pursuing parallel researchers that open multiple windows into the unconscious of other people and his own. He still hasn't been able to prove all that he believes in, he knows that, in the environment in which he works, he is looked upon with suspicion and some benevolence associated with the detachment of those who often tried to discredit him intellectually. Slowly, discreetly, on tiptoes and with his heart open to others, as he describes himself, he followed his path and wrote everything he wanted in academic and clinical history. And, with or without the approval of his peers, the fact is that many people weren't able to attend his last lecture, because the room was packed to hear him talk about Expanded States of Consciousness, in a session that ended with a loud and prolonged standing applause.
Why is it important to alter the consciousness of a human being? To be able to go deeper into the person's ego?
Mário Simões: The person is in a state of wakefulness that allows the active areas of the brain to proceed with the maintenance of life, by planning and organizing it. In these altered, or rather, modified states, we go through a differentiated wakefulness, we remain awake, but other areas, which are usually not working because they are associative areas, are functioning. We achieve this by closing our eyes and relaxing; in hypnosis we use only a word and that gives us access to the whole of the momentary psychic life reflected in the word and symbol AUM (Hindu word).
And everything is there. We will have access to the reality outside of us, to thoughts that only disseminate when we talk about them; we will have access to dreams that are usually locked, as well as to something that has a veil that is only lifted when our consciousness is altered.
And that state of relaxation can be induced by the plants you were talking about earlier?
Mário Simões: Plants, music, a simple drum - the sound, the mere frequency of a sound can be used as a curative frequency, as in music therapy. There are so many ways to achieve it. By lifting the veil we all have (at the top of the AUM image where there seems to be a star), we can reach the spiritual world. But this spirituality had to do with the human dimension, and not with something strange, or scary. It comes from our early days, when we used dolmens and it has to do with the belief in an afterlife or in the contact with beings that are no longer here; or even with beings that are not human and take on other dimensions. The point is that all this leads to topics that are not so usual in the Western world. These ideas were commonly found in the so-called primitive societies, which in fact were not primitive at all; they already had their doctors or shamans that put them in contact with these dimensions. This dimension is known in the Western world as soul or spirit.
When you were talking about Poltergeist earlier, you were telling me that you studied a case in Portugal. Does the difficulty in asserting these studies as scientific evidence lie in the fact that these phenomena do not happen repeatedly and "at a set time"?
Mário Simões: The so-called paranormal phenomena are somewhat problematic, because they are hard to replicate. Science requires reproducibility under the same conditions to create laws, but paranormal phenomena are usually exceptional, which doesn't mean that they don't exist, they just don't manifest with the same regularity. So what we are going to get in the laboratory is data that tell us that they go beyond what one would expect from chance, that they are very well controlled phenomena where there are no tricks or simulations. They are phenomena that, in most cases, are very likely to be reproduced in the laboratory, but not always; however, they go beyond chance. Telepathy, thought transfer, communication of information about the future in a dream, among others, exist but are not continuously happening. And they have a very strange characteristic, which is that the more we try to "catch" them, the more they slip away. That is why, due to the difficulty reproducing these phenomena in the laboratory, it still isn't considered as a Science, but rather a scientific discipline that uses methodologies from other sciences, whose phenomena touch more than one matter.
You also studied Anthropology. Does it help explain some of these less tangible issues?
Mário Simões: Yes, it does. Once I finished my Medical degree, I realized that these phenomena were better explained by anthropology, that they had animistic grounds, i.e., explanations related to the soul. I wondered how they explained diseases, for example. So I studied and read. Here I found more grounds to explain such phenomena. And if it didn't provide an explanation, at least it made me understand a phenomenology I saw in Psychiatry, when I examined delirious people. Delirium shows us cases of people who are unable to argue based on logic and, as such, are unable to distinguish right from wrong. They don't accept our arguments and justify everything they know with the voices they hear; they live in this world and believe in it. So I thought I had to enter into these worlds to try to help them. And that's why I decided to become a Psychiatrist.
Let me go back to the image of the AUM and the veil and that fit into these clinical examples you are giving us. Why do you want to lift the veil and get to the spiritual side of people? To help them in a more effective way?
Mário Simões: For two reasons. The first one is that I had to understand this world and that I would only be able to help patients by being close to them.
The second one is a personal search for a spiritual dimension.
Are you saying that these people shouldn't be considered crazy just because they have delusions?
Mário Simões: No. More and more people refer to the contact with these paranormal phenomena. There are many studies today that say that hearing voices, or believing in certain thoughts, with multiple thinking schemes, does not make a person crazy or fanatical. Look at the Daesh; they are not sick, they want, among other things, to impose a caliphate on the Iberian Peninsula; that is not a disease, that would allow them to be forgiven, possible deemed incompetent to stand trial; what they have is overestimated ideas. Or cases of people who hear voices and feel a call to something, even to a religious life. Are all these people sick?
Let's talk about Religion. Religion is an enemy of these researches on paranormal phenomena, right?
Mário Simões: Usually, yes. Because these convictions challenge dogmas and an authority that was not questioned and it seems to me that they have a certain fear of losing power and that some fundamentals are shaken. While the Western religions say that life is a valley of tears we have to cross, the East justifies everything with karma, i.e., you pay for the wrongdoings of past lives in this life. So, you see, Religion always has an answer to everything. Science tries to understand these things and say that there are other possible answers.
But, on the other hand, we can't say that Science is an ally of these researches you pursue... Some people look at your descriptions of expanded states of consciousness as if they were witchcraft.
Mário Simões: Yes, it's true. Many people see them like that. We are almost in the realm of magic realism. In other words, we are talking about situations that exist and occur, that are taken to the laboratory; we're often unable to reach 100%, but they go beyond chance. But there's rationality, there is an explanation for that. And Sciences needs rationality. I would say that the last frontier that has been crossed has been the acceptance of acupuncture. Now... we're still trying to understand why the paranormal phenomena exist and what is their purpose. But they do exist! And those who say they don't are totally uninformed.
Or are they afraid?
Mário Simões: Some people are afraid, in a way. All this undermines our conception of the world. For everything that happens we have to have a tangible, reachable cause. Notice how we are always looking for the cause of everything. Carl Jung was "doomed" because, when he moved away from Freud, he wanted to say that there is more than one way of explaining the cause of things. He mentioned, for example, a circumstance that was seen as very strange - Synchronicity. For example, I'm thinking that I'm going to meet with you, but I don't know which office you are in; so I'm walking and I'm carrying this thought inside me; along the way I meet a person I don't know and ask her "do you know where Joana works?" and she says "of course I do, she's right beside me." That is synchronicity. There seems to be a causal relationship here. Jung explains that there is something inside me (the information I'm looking for) and the other person (the information she has), while not knowing what I'm thinking about, coincides with me and that brings us together. But what is the reason for that? There is none, it just happens.
That's the problem. Because there's no reason for it, it's refuted...
Mário Simões: Science, as well as human beings, has the need of wanting to control the reasons behind things. When a boy bangs his head against a window that is open, he reacts by banging on the window again. He felt the need to assign a cause, in this case to the intention of wanting to hurt him. Throughout our lives, we live with this attitude. Because, in our minds, if something happens to us, there has to be a cause, something to blame. And Science imposes this causal situation.
With regard to causality there is a very provocative phrase by Peter Atkins (Chemist, retired professor of the University of Oxford and author of several books) who said that "When Science explains the origin of the universe, God will no longer be necessary".
Mário Simões: (Laughs) When we find that answer, we will probably ask a new question, something along the lines of "then who created the first idea of creating the Universe?" Whenever we find an answer, we feel the need to come up with a new proposal for research. It will not end there. We always get to the point where we ask "and now what?" That is why I believe that there will always be some kind of mystery to meet the human need of trying to understand things. I believe that if we don't alter our ordinary consciousness, logic stops here... Based on reason alone, we get to a point where we have to stop. Science itself, in general and within my area in particular, hasn't found almost anything new over the past few years, except in technology. As Luis Portela and other authors say, do we have extra-cerebral memories and can that be a new path for finding explanations?
Give me an example of an extra-cerebral memory.
Mário Simões: A child who does not feel integrated into the family where he was born and who has memories from other times, other contexts and, when the matter is confirmed and studied, it is found that the stories are true, even when they happened thousands of kilometres away. In other words, they are memories that are not related to the brain we have. Ian Stevenson, a colleague of mine, studied cases like this one in children. They told stories that had nothing to do with their real contexts, but with places where they had never been, and these stories were confirmed.
But we can also consider as an hypothesis that these people, adults or children, are imagining things.
Mário Simões: But then they have an imagination that goes beyond everything we currently know about imagination. And that's knowing things that never crossed their minds. It's a wealth of details that go beyond what we would get via our imagination alone. These children have information that was not in their brains. And then we start thinking, isn't our consciousness a product of the brain? And does our mental life use the brain to express itself, using it almost like an operating system?
Is there an energy that is much stronger than our physical selves?
Mário Simões: It's an energy, consciousness or instance that uses my body to express itself and to obtain more information, and more paranormal information, and that is what allows capturing future, unpredictable situations in a natural way, or anticipating an event. This is a hypothesis. Obviously, the sum of all these hypotheses eventually calls into question the foundations of Science that say that matter produces mental life. Then other currents say that consciousness is liable to change matter. I prefer to defend the interaction between mind and matters and not one against the other. I consider myself a pragmatic dualist. That is why this Laboratory is called LIMMIT, due to the therapeutic intention of bringing the two together.
Professor, how do your peers see you?
Mário Simões: They see me as a peculiar person. Some of them are with me in this line of thinking, but they are few. They are very few...
Do you feel alone?
Mário Simões: Very much. Particularly at the university level. Although I must say that in this Faculty there are many supporters of the cause, they just don't admit it. (Smiles) We talk privately and at home, but then formally they don't admit it, they prefer to take a stance that is in line with the paradigms of Western Science. And that's why I feel alone when I have to state these beliefs in my studies. So now you ask me how did I asserted myself throughout my career? I tried to assert my beliefs early on in scientific circles, and I know some people laughed at me in an attempt to ridicule me. But I never stood against anyone, nor have I been militant in my ideals. I often kept quiet and just let things go by and, by making myself harmless, I completed by Master's degree, then my PhD, then my aggregation. Always smiling benevolently and accepting other people's differences. Nevertheless, when someone comes up to me and says "Mário, I don't know much about that, there are no grounds", then I react and I reply "I'm the one who doesn't know much about it, you know nothing, because if you knew something, you would accept that these phenomena exist".
And, over the years, have the students shown interest in these matters?
Mário Simões: Let me tell you that there is a lot of interest among students. Professor Martins e Silva, a former Director of the faculty, was the person who opened more doors to different courses. That's when the Clinical Hypnosis course was created. I've had more than 500 students interested in these matters, some completed their degrees and came back. I actually taught a Regression Therapy course, which was more appropriately called experiential and cognitive restructuring therapy, and I never actually talked about past life therapy. We had people from many different areas and the courses were open for years. Eventually, only clinical and experimental Hypnosis remained and then an optional subject called Introduction to the Science of Consciousness, which was always attended by 10 to 15% of all the students in the course.
Right at the end of your last lecture you probably noticed that there were many people crying during the long standing ovation.
Mário Simões: I wasn't expecting to have a full house and I wasn't expecting that loud applause with people standing up. It seemed like it was never going to end. I looked and I saw the emotion of many of my former students, some older ones, some recent ones, and then I felt I had left something, some kind of message. I left something that still isn't mainstream, but maybe someday it will be.
In your last slide, you quoted Galileo – eppur si muove. Were you saying that, just like with Galileo, who spent many years defending heliocentrism and was burnt by the Inquisition that accused him of witchcraft, your beliefs will also be socially and scientifically asserted and defended many years from now?
Mário Simões: (Emotional) You know that Pope John Paul II apologized on behalf of the Church... I wanted to say two things. One is that I'm going to be around, studying these matters. And the other thing is that, knowing that I'm seen as a lunatic who believes in these so-called "not very serious matters", I think that all this will be proven one day.
Mário Simões will keep working at the Faculty, as Director of the LIMMIT, until December 2019, and then he will continue to co-supervise 14 PhD theses. Until then, he will keep his space, the LIMMIT, waiting for the perfect follower to come and continue his project.
At the end of the interview, the Professor refused the hand I had stretched out for a formal handshake and asked me for a hug instead. He taught me that hugs should always join the left sides of the two people who come together, to bring their hearts close to one another.
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Joana Sousa
Editorial Team