(no subject)

Jan 05, 2023 15:55

The annual "State of the World" discussion with Bruce Sterling & Jon Lebkowsky is underway @ The WELL (01/3-16/02023). If you wade deep enough, you will notice some pithy posts by yours truly, regarding

My next lj post is also an x-posted response to this thread


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I am not a resident of The WELL (although I have always been somewhat adjacent), so I am not entirely certain that I understand the format, but I thought y'all might be amused by some of this SCRYTCH that I have been cobbling together...

Specifically regarding this entry in the 2023 State of the World top ten list...
9) A new era of psychedelic therapies and the potential for legal recreational consciousness expansion. But is it really an expansion? Or do we just want to get high?

:
Regarding any discussion I have with anyone about psychedelics ever... First of all, I would like to stress that I recognize that psychedelics are definitely NOT for everyone... I would seriously recommend consulting a healthcare professional before anyone considered any kind of
experimentation!

But fortunately, scientists have been discovering that there are therapeutic & neuroprotective benefits (for trauma/anxiety/depression), even from ***sub-psychedlic micro-dosages*** of psilocybin mushrooms (which have been decriminalized in a growing number of nations, states, counties & municipalities).

And this improved neuroplasticity has been observed (even with microdosing) with other psychedelics (which certainly still require more research & further decriminalization efforts)

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If there is one thing that I can impress upon people with whom I discuss these issues, I would like to highlight that we cannot stress enough how crucial *set & setting* are, as well as dosage... this is it:
*Integration practices are crucially important!*

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I personally believe that this is, in essence, the answer to the million dollar question before me: how do we follow up on our first Documentary, _DMT: The Spirit Molecule_ (which has been seen by no less than 40 million people, as a conservative estimate)

Currently, we have already filmed approximately 25% of our interviews for the sequel (with Reggie Watts signed on as narrator... he was also our first interview out in LA, a year ago). While we are gearing up for our Kickstarter campaign (planned for this February), we have been putting the finishing touches on our website for Uniphi Studio...

The working title for the film is _The Conscious Molecule_ ...because we want to cover the ideas of panpsychism that are coming back into vogue in traditional philosophy, as well as information theory & physics.

Last year, we livestreamed the ESPD55 academic conference (many of the participants have actually spent most or all of the last 55 years in the Amazon)... There were presentations on everythjing from social justice issues of reciprocity with the indigenous cultures who have safeguarded the medicine plants for thousands of years... particularly as we are shifting from a Psychedelic Renaissance into a
Psychedelic Industrial Age?

At the same time as we were in Britain livestreaming ESPD55 for the academics, many of the psychedelic celebrities & influencer types were at the Davos World Economic Forum Medical Psychedelic panel, lobbying for funding to birth their nascent industries.

As far as the pharmaceutical corporations go, they seem to be most interested in patenting analog permutations of psychedlics that have the desired effects of treating ptsd, depression, anxiety, etc. but without the "excess cogitation" (& requisite cost in hours of therapy time with a counselor). So, they are essentially still trying to sing the same tune that they have been since they colluded with the insurance corporations to make psychedelics illegal everywhere in 1971... which is that they just want everyone to buy their panacea pills, stop misbehaving and get back to work asap!

Meanwhile, neuroimaging studies, like those conducted by Dr. David Nutt at Imperial College are showing profound results with traditional psychedelics:
There is now extensive evidence that serotonin 5-HT2A receptor acting psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin LSD and DMT work by producing a profound disruption of ongoing oscillatory activity in the brain. This disrupts the segregation of key brain networks and leads to increased crosstalk between them. in this state of increased disorder [entropy] abnormal thinking processes such as rumination that underpin disorders such as depression and addiction become temporally disrupted allowing the patient to “escape” from them. also the increased connectivity allows the person to discover new insights in their past and develop new thoughts about the future which can endure well after the trip is over. this prolonged benefit can be accentuated by psychotherapy and also by the serotonin receptor stimulation that in rodent models can be shown to increase dendrite growth and synaptogenesis. Our recent neuroimaging studies of depressed patients recovering after psilocybin treatment reveals that the increased connectivity seen during the trip persists for weeks afterwards and is associated with increased flexibility of brain function, an outcome not seen with traditional antidepressant treatments. We think this increased flexibility may explain the experiences of increased connectedness with the world that patients often report and the improved wellbeing scores they register.

Another crucial recent discovery regarding endogenous DMT was covered in this 2019 documentary, _DMT Quest_
Which referenced this paper:
Biosynthesis and Extracellular Concentrations of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in Mammalian Brain
This is the idea that really stuck out to me:
...during cardiac arrest, people seem to experience a flood of hyperactivity in the brain... including high amounts of dmt... The main function of this process may actually be primarily neuroprotective, rather than psychedelic (although the visual/auditory/kinesthetic & emotional factors are particularly noticeable side effects...

So, I am leaning back towards more of a focus on endogenous DMT production; although I also recognize that since prehistoric times, humans all over the world have been augmenting these experiences with external sources, as well.
*But people need to understand that we can endogenously produce profound psychological states without consuming external sources of these molecules!*

Meanwhile, another of our colleagues, Dr. Bruce Damer has finally publically revealed his techniques for hypnagogic visualization that have provided him *eureka* moments of genius throughout his life... which have only been magnified through his careful combination with Ayahuasca ritual (which in turn produced the research that became the August 2017 cover story in Scientific American). We are looking forward to interviewing him more about his methods of endogenous DMT production to experience states of genius.
"Long a tool for artists and musicians, could psychedelics refined with endogenous practices yield a high-octane fuel to advance science and engineering?"

It still blows my mind that The Veteran's Administration was able to successfully fund one of the largest psychedlic research & therapy clinics in the world, right here in Austin at the Dell Medical School, last year! And I certainly look forward to calling upon Charles B. Nemeroff, M.D., Ph.D. & Greg Fonzo, Ph.D. very soon!
They have already started their first trials! (and it sounds... pretty freakin' hardcore!)

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This article, Ayahuasca and Cancer makes a curious point:
"(In the Upper Amazon, Ayahuasca) is viewed as a tool for diagnosis and prescription. Shamans in the Upper Amazon do not drink ayahuasca to heal; they drink ayahuasca to get information - as Cocama shaman don Juan Curico puts it, “to screen the disease and to search the treatment.” Mestizo shaman don Manuel Córdova says the same thing: “Ayahuasca, it tells you how, but by itself it cures nothing.” If a patient comes to an Upper Amazonian shaman to be healed of, say, cancer, the traditional purpose of drinking ayahuasca is not to heal the cancer, but rather to determine both the etiology and the treatment of the disease."

However, those shamans may not have been aware of certain other systemic effects produced by Ayahuasca
“In summary, it is hypothesized that the combined actions of β-carbolines and DMT present in ayahuasca may diminish tumor blood supply, activate apoptotic pathways, diminish cell proliferation, and change the energetic metabolic imbalance of cancer cells, which is known as the Warburg effect,” Schenberg wrote. “Therefore, ayahuasca may act on cancer hallmarks such as angiogenesis, apoptosis, and cell metabolism.”

DMT is also neuroprotective & contributes to neurogenesis. Although humans & other living creatures generally have the capacity to generate new neuronal cells uner certain conditions, it is not always possible, leading to an interest in drugs and substances that can aid this process.
“The challenge is to activate our dormant capacity to form neurons and thus replace the neurons that die as a result of the disease. This study shows that DMT is capable of activating neural stem cells and forming new neurons”, says Morales.

Here is an excellent overview of N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), an Endogenous Hallucinogen: Past, Present, and Future Research to Determine Its Role and Function
"It has also been observed that sigma-1 receptor agonists are potentially neuroprotective (Frecska et al., 2013). DMT has been shown to reduce neuronal inflammation via the sigma-1 receptor (Szabo et al., 2014) and can also induce neuronal plasticity, a long-term recuperative process that goes beyond neuroprotection (Tsai et al., 2009; Ruscher et al., 2011; Kourrich et al., 2012). Sigma-1 receptors can also influence cell survival and proliferation (Collina et al., 2013) and Frecska et al. (2013) have suggested that DMT is protective during cardiac arrest and perinatal development."

There is also considerable evidence that DMT improves recovery after strokes, as well!

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Here's an off-the-cuff summary that a sometimes local medical colleague, Dr. Jens Langsjoen
relayed to me in June, 2022 concerning his opinion about the function of DMT and its role in natural selection:
"a survival advantage emergency organ (or function produced by a system of organs) that allows for temporary dissolution of self in priority of instinct and clarity of perception "

Regarding that quote, I suggested that the idea that DMT allows us to transcend the self & visualize our instincts (often anthropomorphically) during survival emergencies is a perspective that seems reminiscent of the Hermetic Mystery: " In all cases of doubt, difficulty and danger, in (W)hom do you put your trust?" Furthermore, there has been recent publication of the historical relationship between DMT & Freemasonry.

Not only Freemasonry, but also Christianity, Judaism, & Islam all reference the sacred nature of Acacia &/or Mimosa (and curiously, combining their root bark with Syrian Rue/Peganum Harmala plant produces the Mediterranean equivalent of Ayahuasca). They are also evergreens, so it makes sense that they would symbolize immortality. However, there has been an increasing degree of agreement that the ancients had extensive psychopharmacological knowledge. Acacia was sacred to Osiris, as well as Jehovah's burning bush, the ark of the covenant & the temple at Jerusalem (and also was used in medicine & as a ritual incense).

Also, there is considerable evidence that Syrian Rue/Peganum Harmala was the plant used to produce an entheogen known as Haoma in the roots of the Zoroastrian tradition (the same plant is still used in that tradition symbolically)... & the same plant may be also have been one of the principal ingredients used in the creation of the elixir known as Soma, mentioned in the Rig Veda (as mentioned above, it can also be used a potentiator of synergetic effects with Acacia/Mimosa, as well as with psychedelic mushrooms &/or cannabis)

Will someone please tell Brian Muraresku that he should cover this in a sequel to _The Immortality Key_???!!!!!

If you are unfamiliar with Muraresku's work, he has discovered the smoking gun (archaeological evidence analyzed by mass spectrometer to prove that the Eleusinian tradition used Ergot-infused beverages) that explains the ancient mystery traditions & their connections to the formation of the original Xtian gatherings in ancient Greece

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So, going back to the generally beneficial aspects of integration techniques, as mentioned previously...

In my experience, humans generally benefit from some kind of symbolic ritual to align themselves with their chosen ideals... Although many worthy traditions of mindfulness recommend non-attachment, and I think that there is certainly a time for that... I think that there are profound lessons to be learned from psychedelic states that take us back to the womb & perinatal imprinting (q.v. the work of Dr. Stanislav Grof), and just as babies that receive compassionate care generally grow up to be more well-adjusted adults... so, too will someone experiencing a psychedelic state benefit from exercises of kindness... but i suppose that could still be me projecting my preconceived notions & values onto other people... sigh... i will work on gathering more evidence... but in all my considerable life-experience, my research points to this as fact... although i guess i might temper my words here with a reference to my initiation in a Bwiti temple with Ibogaine... there is an aspect of toughlove... "breaking open the head" ...to allow our spirit to enter the graveyard & commune with the ancestors... their message is still for us to see ourselves through the eyes of those who love us unconditionally... Consider this evidence from the Staten Island Projet who pioneered work with Ibogaine in America during the early years of entheogen prohibition:

...Moreover, what tied Bwiti specifically to Gnosticism (even ancient Gnosticism seen through the post-quantum eyes of Philip Dick) was that, as Fernandez points out: “For these Bwitists… religion was not a matter of faith… It was a very pragmatic technique for understanding, predicting and controlling-in short a science or pre-science of hidden to things. To believe in something despite lack of evidence or evidence to contrary, which is the Western religious condition, was foreign to their attitudes. Fang had alway had good evidence for their beliefs”-via ready access to plant sacrament, like the Gnostics. In VALIS, in a passaga on Gnostic sacraments, Beal found an Ibogaine parallel which was just uncanny:

"48. ON OUR NATURE. It is proper to say: we appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computer-like thinking system which, al-though we have correctly recorded thousands of years of experiential information, and each of us po ssesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction-a failure-of memory retrieval. There lies the trouble in our particular subcircuit. “Salvation” through gnosis-more properly anamnesis (the loss of amnesia )-although it has individual significance for each of us-a quantum leap in perception, identity, cognition, understanding, world- and self-experience, including immortality-it has greater and further importance for the system as whole, inasmuch as thes e memories are data needed by it and valuable to it, to its overall functioning.
Therefore it is in the process of self-repair, which includes: rebuilding our subcircuit via linear and orthogonal time changes, as well as continual signalling to us to stimulate blocked memory banks within us to fire and hence retrieve what is there.
The external information or gnosis, then, consists of disinhibiting instructions, with the core content actually intrinsic to us-that is, already there (first observed by Plato; viz: that learning is a form of remembering).
The ancients possessed techniques (sacraments* and rituals) used largely in the Greco-Roman mystery religions, including early Christianity, to induce firing and retrieval, mainly with a sense of its restorative value to the individuals;the Gnostics, however, correctly saw the ontological value to what they called the Godhead itself, the total entity." - an excerpt from Tractates Cryptica Scriptura by PKD in 1978

The more Dana got into it, the more he realized having VALIS** in 1980 was like being handed a roadmap to understanding gnostic substances, Ibogaine and Bwiti, back in the very beginning. But the Ibogaine story is replete with these coincidences.

...

“The long waking dream period that follows the absorption of iboga or ibogaine at a subtoxic dose (or oneirophrenic dose according to Naranjo) appears to be responsible for a temporary destructuring of the ego, followed by its restructuring.
“This hypothesis is consistent with the observations made by the ethnologists in their studies of the Mitsogho Bwiti, and may be compared to the hypotheses of Michel Jouvet and Sir Francis Crick (C. Debru, 1990) on the role of dreams in the programing and deprograming of basic behavior patterns, resulting in a new individuation of the human brain.
“Normally, the stages of wakefulness of the human brain are: waking, NREM (slow wave or deep) sleep, PGO (pontogeniculo-occipital) waves, and REM (rapid eye movement or paradoxical) sleep. REM sleep is the period of dreams.
“Michel Jouvet and Sir Francis Crick consider PGO waves to be the principal coding tool that acts at the cortical level in recording the genetic and epigenetic acquisitions necessary for the individuation of the human brain.
“In addition, through random activation mechanisms, the PGO waves eliminate from certain types of neuronal networks an informational overload linked to pathological behavior. This is what C. Debru calls “cleaning out the neuronal circuitry.”
“REM sleep apparently undertakes a sorting out process among the “residues” stirred up by the PGO wave sleep pattern and disposes of these residues during dreaming.
“Michel Jouvet (letter of November 7, 1990) wrote: “The oneiric effects observed in humans and which are produced by hallucinogens do not enable us to approach the dream mechanism directly, because it does appear that these two phenomena cannot be link ed together as one.
“We know, however, that the principal difference between dreams and hallucinations resides in the way in which the stages of wakefulness are organized, with the suppression of REM sleep and the intrusion of PGO waves in the arousal (waking) stage and i n NREM (or slow) sleep. “The new organization becomes: waking (arousal) stage, stage of PGO waves, hallucination stage, sleep stage, and it appears possible that hallucinatory manifestations, the waking dream, eliminate “residues” stirred up by the PGO wa ve pattern in the absence of REM sleep.”-(Pharmacodynamics and Therapeutic Applications of Iboga and IbogaineRobert Goutarel, with Otto Gollnhofer and Roger Sillans, French National Scientific Research Center)
“You were right,” exulted Carlo. “Ibogaine is fundamentally different from the ‘clear’ psychedelics. And Howard is right in that there’s no way to duplicate the Ibogaine effect without the visualizations! It is a waking dream-but REM-like, not tr ue REM.”
What it is exactly is explained in Goutarel’s next lines:
“Near Death Experiences
“According to the Mitsogho, the initiate will see the Bwiti only twice in his life: on the day of his initiation and on the day of his death.
“This means that the visions at the approach of death, what are called near death experiences (NDE), are the same as those termed normative visions.
“We know that at the time of dying, some individuals see their whole life pass before them. In those who are “rescued from death,” a spectacular transformation is observed. They no longer fear death, they feel stronger, more optimistic, calmer, and con template their life more positively.”
The brain is capable of generating another state, which the conscious mind recognizes as “dreamlike.” Normally the waking mind has only indirect access to the activities of the acetylcholine pathways. Normally the activity of the sleeping brain only se eps into consciousness slowly-during the few minutes of REM we get every night.
But a real emergency can trigger a survival reflex, the NDE, which gets both halves of the brain up and functioning stereoscopically, at the same time. The serotoninergic pathways, organized as the ego, get direct access to all the disorganized acti vity of the cholinergic pathways, which are perceived as “five or six television programs going at once.”
Ibogaine triggers the NDE reflex. The “splitting of the skull,” which releases the visions, is the same as the jerk you sometimes feel just as you’re falling asleep, greatly amplified because your serotonin and acetylcholine are pumping at the same ti me, and your DA is way down, which normally doesn’t happen. But in the NDE, the conscious mind gets access to PGO wave material: direct genetic instructions from the non-nucleated genetic material in all of your cells.
These are the genes that are passed on directly from your mother; they don’t lose anything from generation to generation, unless a cosmic ray hits them. You get nothing from your father but nucleated genes passed on through the sperm, which is the ge netic equivalent of an earth satellite. The egg by comparison is a minature planet.
Primitive cells that replicate by division, like amoebas, pass all their memory along through these non-nucleated genes. But about a billion years ago some cells invented sex, swapping of genetic instuctions contained in the nucleus via mitosis. Much more complex organisms became possible, but to maintain access to cellular memory, through the acetylcholine pathways, they had to sleep . All the activity of the sleeping mind is summarized several times a night in the REM phase, which when you remember your dreams, makes a “report” from the unconscious to the conscious mind.
Sleep doesn’t just raise cellular memories to consciousness, though; every night your mind makes a “back-up” of the day’s memories all the way down in the non-nucleated genetic material of the cells. Since these little packets of information don’t de grade much from generation to generation, you have ancestral memories going back a quarter of a million years. But always through the mother, which is why Fred, on Ibogaine, experienced the concentration camps through the eyes of his mother and not his fa ther.
The thing is that these cellular memories might have in them the informa-tion you need to survive in a real emegency, when you have no chance to sleep until the answer just comes to you, in a dream. There’s a lot of situations, a lot of scenarios in a quarter million years.
So before there was language, before there was writing, we developed the NDE, this trick reflex that allows the conscious mind to access PGO wave activity directly. Ibogaine triggers the NDE reflex chemically, without having to be near death. Ibogaine turns the serotoninergic and cholinergic pathways into a super-augmented, “sterescopic” entity, capable of scanning ancestral memory in the nonnucleated genetic material of your cells: the ancestors...

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Akashic Record: HP Lovecraft, Psychedelia, Ancient Astronauts, and Occult Theories of Creativity
(Jon Lebkowsky noted that this excerpt seems particularly pertinent, regarding the
lovecraftian aspectd of the 23 enigma in this year's context)

"Narby’s thesis in The Cosmic Serpent is worth dwelling upon for a moment. He concluded that when in trance, shamans 'take their consciousness down to the molecular level and gain information related to DNA.' The idea in essence, however, was not entirely new. Timothy Leary had come to more or less the same conclusion after experimenting with mushrooms and (copiously) with LSD. In a television interview from the Millbrook days, Leary spoke of gaining access to 'the long telephone wire of history, which goes back two billion years, and which is buried somewhere inside your brain and mine… We are neurologically and biochemically in touch with thousands of generations that came before us, and the record of these previous evolutionary attempts are there, it’s just that our mental/symbolic minds can’t decode these messages.' In the idea of an accessible database of genetic memory contained in our DNA, we find a new quasi-scientific metaphor for the major idea which has recurred throughout this essay, be it the Platonic Mind At Large of Huxley, the occult Akashic Record of the Theosophists, or the Indiana Jones-like lost temple of Cayce’s Hall of Records. In his treatment of Leary’s eight circuit model of consciousness in Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson calls this the Collective Neurogenic Circuit, which 'processes DNA-RNA-brain feedback systems' and is 'collective' in the sense that contains and has access to the whole evolutionary 'script,' 'past and future.' All of this speaks to a fascinating notion which is perhaps preeminent among the religious ideas of the modern west: that our minds contain something far older and smarter than ourselves, and with which we attain a fleeting communication in the shared register of myths, dreams, and the fantastic or weird. To attain communion with these deeper strata of consciousness is perhaps the shared heretical goal of Jungians, surrealists, psychedelic voyagers, and a certain type of fantastic or popular artist who embodies elements of all of the above, sometimes unconsciously. Philip K. Dick observed that the symbols of the Divine appear first in the trash stratum. William James conceded that many religious manifestations and visions could be accounted for by appealing to the individual's psyche and unconscious, but he left it open that the unconscious might itself be precisely designed to receive the influx of higher transmissions: 'The notion of the subconscious self certainly ought not at this point of our inquiry be held to exclude of notion of a higher penetration. If there be higher powers able to impress us, they may get access to us only through the subliminal door.'
Whether such vast storehouses of ancestral and possibly futuristic knowledge actually exist or not, and whether it happened that a Providence misanthrope of dubious literary reputation was tapping into one due to nightly soakings of DMT from his overactive pineal gland, I leave as usual to the reader to decide. Interestingly, though, the idea of the Hall of Records within seems to have occurred to Lovecraft, as we find in the conclusion to the earlier quoted fragment The Descendent:
'There rose within him the tantalizing faith that somewhere an easy gate existed, which if one found would admit him freely to those outer deeps whose echoes rattled so dimly at the back of his memory. It might be in the visible world, yet it might be only in his mind and soul. Perhaps he held within his own half-explored brain that cryptic link which would awaken him to elder and future lives in forgotten dimensions; which would bind him to the stars, and to the infinities and eternities beyond them.'"

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Speaking of extraterrestrial exploration, it seems crucial to talk about the looming competition over Lunar mining operations...

Especially in the wake of the recent net positive fusion experiement, there is definitely a conflict brewing

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But let's be honest... human biological systems are not designed to function outside of our homeostatic gravity well... and even the most hardened cynics who have gone to space often still experience massive brain change through salutogenesis ("the overview effect")

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Along that theme... In 2021, Bruce Damer suggested a "new key theme for our times: boundary dissolution!"
"The late Terence McKenna...called for boundary dissolution as an elixir for humanity on its rickety road to shooting the wormhole through to long-term survival and thrival. Terence's elixirs were psychedelics and i proposed that there are other potions that can dissolve these boundaries which divide us. Terence and i collaborated on avatar cyberspace explorations in the late 1990s. I picked his brain and picked up and ran with one of his other key questions: how does novelty arise i.e how do more complex things compress out of simpler ones? Cracking some of this code over the past two decades has led to our current proposal for how life itself emerged and a new perhaps more complete view of the dual nature of nature. We propose that nature rests on a base substrate of collaboration supporting a theater of competition above it is not strictly survival of the fittest driving evolution forward."

For those of you who are not already familiar with Bruce Damer's work in
Astrobiology & the Hot Springs Evolutionary Hypothesis
, I am willing
to bet that you will be fascinated!

Meanwhile, back in the Anthropocene... we have many options of methods to produce transformative states of consciousness... Jamie Wheal, Steven Kotler & the Flow Genome Project published a great book called _Stealing Fire_ that identified a trillion dollar underground economy... forcing us to rethink how we can all lead richer, more productive, more satisfying lives... Driven by four accelerating forces- psychology, neurobiology, technology and pharmacology

Robin Arnott & Andromeda refer to their VR experiences as *technodelics* and their products have provided solid evidence when tested with sound science

And I have been rather impressed by the research being done by Dr. Jeffrey Martin & colleagues at the Transformative Technology Lab.... particularly their studies around producing states of Fundamental Wellbeing and Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience
(aka non-duality, persistent mystical states, unitive states, transcendental consciousness, enlightenment, illumination & emergent wisdom, etc.)

However, as easily as I have seen that it can be for some people to glimpse Fundamental Wellbeing (in 14 weeks or less, in most cases), this kind of profound life-changing experience has still been somewhat elusive to a few others. In the post-modern world that we inhabit with all of its demands towards materialism & accelerationism, many dismiss such pursuits as incompatible with their current worldviews. I have also been concerned for some time that even though modern rational humans refuse to believe in the spirit world, that they may in fact still be extensively subject to others' beliefs (and the Leviathan structures which have been set in motion by others' beliefs), in profound ways that they do not consciously realize. At some times, I may have been inclined to ask, whether or not "individuals" even exist in the way that we are led to believe that we do? That last question may need to wait, so let us assume that individuals do exist, but perhaps it is just that we are still subject to external forces which we may or may not be aware of...

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On that note, I feel that I would be remiss without including these final throwback references...

_Corporate Metabolism_ by Paco Xander Nathan (22 Oct 02000)
An extensive analysis of the structure and function of the corporate organism
"Let's review the evolution of political system, vis-a-vis corporate governance. Elizabethan England made a bold proclamation in the name of humanism. They effectively said: "Fucke Spain & thee Catholycks. Yn the cominge yeres of Newe World Order, rules of the game changeth and
none of their bloodie golde shall matter not one wit." The English reckoned that if Church and cojones were removed from the political equation, the Crown and its people could prosper. They invented corporations to implement that plan and serve the Crown. That worked remarkably well.
Americans came along and objected to corporations, wishing to empower individual sovereignty based on property rights. They reckoned that if the Crown were removed from the political equation, then representation of individuals could reign over corporations instead.
Their experiment died within a few decades, and arguably the United States became the first flag of convenience.
Socialists noted problems due to corporations in both England and the US. They reckoned that if individual property rights were removed from the political equation, societies could reign over corporations instead. They attempted to organize politics to mimic the corporate
structure itself, which has so far proven to be problematic.
*Where do we stand now?*
Humanists of all varieties have struggled to control corporations for the better part of four centuries. They failed. They lacked a fundamental understanding of the problem. GAME OVER. Direct confrontation of the corporate form does not work, because such
efforts inevitably become .

Backing up for a moment, let us examine more closely this concept of
the Egregor(e)
_Chasing Egregors,_ By Paco Xander Nathan (March 02001)
"...In the spirit of Vitruvius, think of egregors as the allegorical buildings of the allegorical stonemasons of Western Esoteric Tradition... In a Platonic sense, egregors are dynamic structures used for perpetuating belief systems. They provide intellectual frameworks
for constructing and deconstructing the beliefs that arise from group dynamics, i.e., the autopoietic emergence of an additional 'individual' to represent a group of individuals..."

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Can Social Systems be Viewed as Autopoietic?
Durkheim's concept of the 'collective consciousness' refers to the parts of our psychic lives which integrate into a social consciousness that is more than just individual motives and actions. In autopoiesis, however, meaning emerges in the social sphere as a way of processing information and putting it into a multitude of different contexts, then moving from one actualisation to another. This can be regarded as a form of 'socio-Animism.'
When a lawyer or economist or poet creates a work of meaning, the important thing in an autopoietic system is not what that work means to its author's individual psyche, but the way the work gains in meaning when it moves through different worlds. This is similar to the
way in which the legal world interprets a contract in terms of its observable meaning, rather than according to the subjective motivations of individual actors.
Maturana avoids explicit claims that his theory of biological autopoiesis is directly applicable at social levels. However, he does offer some implicit reinforcement to the notion that society can be perceived of as an organic unit of the people involved when he identifies 'higher order' autopoietic systems. These build from the cell to the brain, the mind and the whole human being and could be interpreted as seeing society as a high-order community of the brains and minds of the people within it.
Social autopoiesis based on Luhmann's principles creates a distance between real people and their engagement in social processes, which also makes clear we are dealing with profound and infinite dynamics that never intersect with each other. Theories, like Maturana's, which can too easily conjure up a merging of the individual with the social can be very dangerous in certain political arenas.
Husserl's notions about 'consciousness' initiated debates about the difficulty of integrating society into phenomenology. Wittgenstein and others replaced this with language theories in which the observer was no longer the conscious human, but the language game. Autopoietic systems theory reinstates Husserl's idea of consciousness, but this time parallel to - and in competition with - several autonomous 'language games'.
To some extent, this reifies collectivities and deconstructs the reality of the actor through socio-Animism. It multiplies the number of observational perspectives as the observer is not identified just with the mind of an individual agent but with a 'chain of distinctions', which could be a human actor or an ongoing process of communication involving people. That chain develops its own criteria and perspective of observation.

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_William S. Burroughs and the Language of Cyberpunk,_ by Brent Wood
"What Burroughs terms the viral function of language is its ongoing ordering of reality toward the limit of total control, the opposite of anarchy. He employs the figure of the virus, a force hovering between evolving being and mere replicator, to problematize conventional definitions of living and non-living. In Burroughs' cosmos, one must always remember that the words one transmits can never be neutral moves in the universal language-game; even if misfiring, some sort of force is necessarily being transmitted. This is the very problem addressed by Csicsery-Ronay when he cites Jameson's skepticism over sf's linguistic aporia. It is exceptionally difficult for any resistant message to avoid complicity with the dominant communication systems in whose language it is composed. If 'a butterfly flapping its
wings in Tokyo can cause a tornado in Toledo' (Porush 381), who knows what havoc a few well-chosen words could wreak in the infosphere? As responsible cyborg-writers, we'd best have a good idea how the 'techsts' we use are going to function out there before we turn them
loose. The trick, argues Burroughs, is to transmit a kind of force that doesn't immediately contribute to the virus-effect but can actually help work against it."

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:
Another specific PKD reference seems appropriate now...
_The Enlightened Madness of Philip K. Dick: The Black Iron Prison and
Wetiko,_ by Paul Levy
(who is the founder of Awakening in the Dream Community in Portland, Oregon, from whence came the founders of my Iboga family's Bwiti temple in Mexico)
"...PKD likened our existential situation to being in a maze, what he refers to as “one colossal and absolute Chinese finger trap.” The harder we try to get out, the more trapped we become; this is to say that we are not able to find our way out through ordinary means. Seemingly alive and sentient, the maze has a peculiar nature of shifting as we become aware of it. It is as if it is aware of-and responds to-our awareness of it.
One only escapes from the maze, to quote PKD, “when he decides voluntarily to return (to resubject himself to the power of the maze) for the sake of these others, still in it. That is, you can never leave alone, to leave you must elect to take the others out… the ultimate paradox of the maze, its quintessential ingenuity of construction, is that the only real way out is a voluntary way back in (into it and its power), which is the path of the bodhisattva.” We would only voluntarily return to help others if we recognized that they are not separate from ourselves, which is to realize that we are all interdependent and interconnected-which is the very realization that simultaneously enlivens compassion and dissolves wetiko.
PKD writes, “when you think you are out of the maze-i.e., saved-you are in fact still in it.” This brings to mind the insight that if we think we are free of wetiko and it is only “others” that are afflicted with it, this very perspective is, paradoxically, a symptom of having fallen under the spell of wetiko. To quote PKD, “If there is to be happiness it must come in a voluntary relinquishing of self in exchange for aware participation in the destiny of the total one.”
In a very real sense, PKD did find the solution to humanity’s existential dilemma. He writes, “compassion’s highest power is the only power capable of solving the maze.” As PKD points out, “The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.” In other words, the true measure of who we are is how much we are able to love.
PKD concludes, “If the final paradox of the maze is that the only way you can escape it is voluntarily to go back in (into it), then maybe we are here voluntarily; we came back in.” In other words, perhaps we have chosen to incarnate at this very moment in time, i.e., our voluntary return to the maze has already happened (evidenced by the simple fact of our incarnation), which is to say that we have already solved the maze and simply have to recognize this fact...


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