Madame Blavatsky... the Universe as an acting being

Miscellaneous General
1

TL;DR see “Summary” at the end…

The animation is a tad creepy, but I found this lecture absolutely fascinating. Watch it first, then read my interpretation below.

On first brush, she seems to be way off the map: “The will of spirit in action has produced everything that exists. If we understand that intelligent will lies behind everything that exists; is the cause of everything that is; is the creator in the universe; we may perhaps gain some idea of what is necessary for us to know in order properly to user our powers. We all stand as creators in the midst of our creations. There are creators below us in the scale of intelligence.”

She claims that the world in the small (including everything, even “inanimate” matter) consists of “infinitesimal organisms” which “seek what they like and avoid what they dislike.”

However, I would like to turn your attention to another “crazy”, Terence McKenna, discussing hardcore DMT tripping:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw75PxL6O7U

He describes entities that he terms “machine elves” “gnomes” and “self-dribbling basketballs” but they’re not merely inanimate things, they’re actually intelligent and they “talk” “vibrate” “sing structures into existence” - and you are their audience. Now, I’m extremely skeptical of the whole idea that psychedelic drugs help you contact remote beings somewhere out there. I have no doubt they make you feel that way.

There is a much more mundane possibility here… that the psychedelic drug is somehow breaking down the barrier between the conscious, “awake” or “alert” mind of the ego and the computational circuitry of the brain that makes this whole roller-coaster ride of consciousness possible.

So, here’s my hypothesis of what McKenna is describing (in terms of methodological materialism).

There must be some kind of “proto-thoughts” which eventually form into the thoughts which we experience in our conscious mind as the “inner voice” or “inner dialogue”. When you speak to yourself in your mind, who’s talking and who’s listening? We haven’t the slightest idea how big or small these proto-thoughts are or what their nature or encoding is. Similarly, there must be some kind of “proto-action”, some kind of primitive urge to act that underlies the indivisible urge to action which we consciously experience.

Yet, how could there be any physical metaphor for these proto-thoughts or proto-urges? If what McKenna is describing is really a lifting of the veil that hides the subconscious from the conscious, then it makes sense that the world should appear and sound and feel very strange and alien because whatever sensations he is experiencing are really piggy-backing on the brain’s systems which were designed to construct conscious awareness of real, physical phenomena; I think it’s safe to say your brain wasn’t designed to get plastered on DMT (though McKenna has actually written a book claiming otherwise, lol).

Each of the facts that are so astonishing, I believe, reinforce my hypothesis.

  • That you experience other-worldly sights, sounds, sensations and feelings
  • That you perceive many entities
  • That these entities are immensely intricate
  • That these entities are intelligent
  • That these entities speak to you and particularly that they urge you to act
  • That you utter syntactical gibberish

My hypothesis is that there are zillions of “proto-thoughts” and “proto-urges” floating, subliminally, in the brain. Most of these are so simple and buried so deep in the subconscious that no amount of drugs would ever make you directly aware of them. However, there is some kind of “selection principle” which operates on the simplest and smallest proto-thoughts and proto-urges by which those that are not sufficient to rise to the level of consciousness are eliminated and the others rise and possible join together. As this process continues, the final result is a much smaller number (maybe hundreds or thousands) of almost fully-formed thoughts and urges which lie just below the surface of consciousness.

When McKenna takes the DMT, the veil is lifted - this veil is the final round of selection that elminates all but one or two proto-thoughts and proto-urges. The result is your consciousness. When that veil is lifted, you are conversing with the many proto-thoughts and proto-urges from which your consciousness is being selected. This is why the entities are intelligent. They don’t just seem intelligent, they are intelligent, every bit as intelligent as you are because any one of them could have been selected in the final round to become your conscious thoughts and urges.

The immense intricacy of the entities is a result of the fact that they have already undergone many levels of selection and accumulation of smaller, simpler proto-thoughts and urges. So, they are fantastically complex. They are particularly difficult for the individual to analyze because they are every bit as complex as he himself is… they are, in essence, the many individuals he could have become in the ordinary conscious state.

He says he feels these entities jumping in and out of himself, which is also consistent with my hypothesis. This is what it feels like for one of your proto-thoughts or proto-urges to make the final round of selection and become you. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that you finally become one of them. This is consistent with Blavatsky’s insight that everything within the Universe “seek what [it] likes and avoid what [it] dislikes.” I think these proto-thoughts/proto-urges are best understood as acting beings and, thus, subject to praxeological law.

He reports that he felt like he could do the very jumping they were doing through his own body from deep down up towards his mouth and out. I think this is particularly the proto-urge to speak. The feeling of exhaling from one’s diaphragm and out through one’s mouth and into the space outside the mouth and that the act of doing so constructs some kind of real object (a thought that others can hear and “see”).

Finally, there is the syntactical gibberish which confirms that a) the DMT is retrogressive and not progressive and b) the psychedelic experience is primarily centered around retrogression of the discursive component of consciousness.

As I hinted earlier, I think we should think of these entities as complete in themselves. They are “beings” that - consistent with Blavatsky’s principle of Universal action - are striving to survive, they are acting beings which avoid what they dislike and seek what they like. Each one is competing to “jump into him” that is, each one is competing to be the one that is selected to be him. This selection principle is, of course, unmistakably Darwinian. The competition, then, is between bits of “neural software” that we experience as “self-dribbling, jewel-crusted basketballs” that resemble Faberge eggs and “sing structures into being” if we lift the veil of consciousness with the aid of DMT.

But there is really no a priori reason that we should think that the Universe itself is not subject to this principle all the way down. We prejudicially divide between “animate” and “inanimate” matter and we ascribe to the latter a certain sort of mundane, inactive solidarity. A rock will simply sit there, inert for the entire lifetime of the universe unless something acts on it. Hence, whatever the rock is made of is clearly inert, as well.

But it is conceivable that at the lowest levels (say, near the Planck distance, which we still cannot get within 20 orders of magnitude of observing), the Universe itself is undergoing a similar process of action whereby everything that exists is competing to remain in existence. Like the smallest and simplest proto-thoughts and proto-urges, they can act in only very limited and unsophisticated ways but the underlying principle is the same.

Now, I’m not going to claim that this is an explanation of consciousness because I don’t think that it is. But I think physical theory may have to re-tool itself as we peer further down into the physical world because there is a lot of room for complexity below what we can currently observe.

Summary: What I found fascinating in Blavatsky’s lecture was the idea of extending the action principle to the entire Universe itself (particularly, in the small) so that we might be able to think of the smallest components of the Universe as “acting beings” which are “seeking what they like” and “avoiding what they dislike” and that I think we can actually see this principle in action in the case of psychedelic drugs and the experience of proto-thoughts and proto-urges they enable us to experience.

Clayton -

Thoughts on Gender?
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I believe that would be a variant on animism, as contrasted with mechanist theories of reality. This is a good post, but I dont have much to add. I would like to mention that blavatsky’s contemporary charles webster ledbetter was the first to discover quarks. He did so with his clairvoyant faculty.

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@Malachi: Note that I’m not espousing Blavatsky’s ideas across the board, merely the principle of “Universe as acting being”, where “being” doesn’t mean intelligent like you and I are intelligent; maybe like an amoeba is intelligent or less than that even. The idea is to attempt to apply a Darwinian principle to the fundamental structure of the Universe itself… the goal is to attempt to get at a mechanistic theory in this way. If it happens that the theory can be interpreted as animism, then so be it.

Clayton -

Purposeful economizing world
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Have you done strong psychadelics before, Clayton? I’ve done quite a lot of LSD…

The feeling of demonic possession… Things jumping in and taking over your body is very real, and quite frightening. Your, uh… I dunno what you’d call it, but your sense of being a single conscious entity named James or Clayton or whatever goes flying out the window, and you’re left feeling like this semi-vacated vessal, cloistered away in a corner of your mind somewhere while all sorts of weird, unidentified signals that you didn’t even know were there get to come out and have their way with what you were once pleased to call your body. It’s humbling. It’s like you’re really just some sort of antenna, and now you’ve gone and screwed with the dial. It’s like you thought you were the President and therefore the most powerful man, the decision maker, and now you find there’s this secret committee calling all the shots behind your back, and you’re just the face. It’s great.

What is normally subliminal becomes exceedingly liminal. This goes for music, TV etc too. Yeah, you see things which aren’t really there, but it’s really just pattern recognition run amok - faces in clouds and trees etc, but much more obvious, to the point where they move around of their own accord etc. Good times.

Of course you also get to see and hear things which ARE really there, but which you wouldn’t notice unless you were in exactly that state of mind. Subliminal messages in songs etc. (Rock music from the 1960’s and 70’s is full of it.)

As above, so below, is a generally compelling principle, I agree.

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As above, so below.

The concept that pervades physical reality is that of fractal existence. It is only a logical extension of the pleasure we feel with sex, that the whole univerese distinguishes and creates based on the pleasure (whatever is in question) feels.

Blavatsky is a new age goddess. Have you read ther theories on Atlantis and the arians?

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No, never have… I’ve got a job and kids so it’s not really an option at this point. I hope to give it a spin later on, however (ayahuasca/DMT, in particular, comes highly recommended by McKenna).

But if my theory is correct, isn’t that precisely what we should expect? It is really your awake consciousness that is the illusion, in reality, there is all this stuff going on inside your head of which you’re not aware as you go about your day. We can see it with fMRI and other brain imaging techniques, we can see the signals with encephalography. Somehow, all that chaos and insanity is filtered down to this very quiet, solid, relatively noise-free conscious experience that you experience when you’re awake.

But if the ego (ordinary conscious awareness) is what makes action (conscious choice/will) possible in the first place, then it seems to me that interfering with whatever is responsible for holding the ego together by bombarding your brain with a psychoactive drug must necessarily result in a feeling of “loss of control”.

But that’s precisely what my theory is… these “machine elves” that are described by DMT trippers… I think they are real intelligences within one’s brain and that’s precisely how our thoughts and urges are formed, from an “ocean” of these proto-thoughts/proto-urges. I suspect what is happening is that the brain is way, way more complex than the drug-taker can possibly comprehend in the first person and as soon as that “veil of alert consciousness” is lifted and you begin to experience what is going on inside your head all the time, it is truly unbelievable… it literally feels like entering an alternate universe.

And, I suspect (as you know, everything I’m saying is speculation since I’ve not taken any psychedelic drugs) that another surprising/humbling aspect of it is that it is immersive. You don’t just have a vision, like a dream, where you’re still you and you’re just seeing weird things. Your “you” is a construct of your brain to begin with… when you alter your brain, that very you is what is altered.

I’ve listened to hours and hours of McKenna lectures. Listening to him describe psilocybin is where I first got this idea… he describes this feeling of cosmic awe like being in immediate contact with something so large and so powerful that the entire neighborhood for 100 miles in every direction must be hearing/seeing this. Why can’t it be that psilocybin is just screwing with your in-built sense of terror/awe? Have you ever had that experience of almost slipping off a high spot or falling off your bicycle at speed? There’s this terror that just grips your insides from your throat down to your toes, like an invisible hand is choking you almost. If that “terror/awe” system were not shut down by your conscious mind once the source of objective danger were removed… I’d think that would be a bit of a “bad trip,” would it not?

So you recognize that in the case of perception (sense-data translation) what is happening is that your brain’s normal sense circuitry is going haywire and this accounts for the bizarre things you see. The fact they seem “so real” is that they are as real as any ordinary sense perception… you are directly perceiving these haywire sensations because the drug is screwing with your sense perception and “sense reconstruction” circuitry.

But then why can’t this be the case for intelligence itself, for the ability to think, speak and act? Why shouldn’t you perceive “machine elves” that are intelligent, conversant beings who urge you to act?

Clayton -

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Describing these entities or beings as “elves” is ironic as in Norse mythology, etc., spirits that inhabited various inanimate objects were called land wights (Landvættir). The terms elves/alfs, dwarves, etc., play a role in folk lore or “lower myth”. These beings cannot be seen (obviously, as far as I know), but still play an important part of folk ways in modern Scandinavia. Now, how these various wights are interpreted or viewed can vary, the roles of dwarves may be different among Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic belief, etc.

A lot of religions/myths have the idea of spirit beings (guardian spirits, etc.) so if one is tripping and their mind is perceiving things differently it may be a subconscious reaction to view these projections into a conscious realm. As far as animism goes there have been few cultures/religions that actually held animistic beliefs, so my understanding is that an object is not the spirit itself, but a spirit can dwell/live in or around an object or place, or that place is a gateway (for example we can find old trees of worship in NW Europe, but the trees themself were not worshipped they were the gateway or object to pay tribute, honor, respect to for said gods/spirits). This may come off as idolatry, but I feel such an idea or seperation is irrelevant, idolatry is forbidden in Christianity, but people will pray to or at a crucifix or figure of Jesus, because this symbolism holds something significant for those individuals. The idea of praying at an object for the intention with connecting with a higher form shouldn’t be separated into idolatry or the spirits themselves.

Joseph Campbell, with the influence of Jung, wrote that our construction of the world comes from within subconsciously and that’s how it’s projected into a conscious realm. It can start with the individual in myth/religion, community, and further itself into government (foundation, structure, and order being subconscious projections, manifested in a conscious world). From this we see polytheistic religions, where these deities can be described as archetypes representing different facets of aspiring human characteristics/attributes that are beneficial to the community, as well as “lower” spirits that play a role in daily life (I think it’s a more modern belief that a god, or God himself, plays a direct role in individual life - in other beliefs the land spirits themselves have a more direct role than the gods - consider the god the king and the land spirits his servants that answer the people, if that helps).

So if someone is tripping and experiencing other objects, beings, or things being manifested that come from subconsciousness it does not surprise me that these would be coming to that person as something real and material. I think this is where the views and idea of science and religion come together, science is always there, it’s perception can be in religion.

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Clayton, if you get the time watch the Mythos documentary by Joseph Campbell. It’s his lectures pieced together and he talks about how religion/myth comes about from a pyschological point and it’s subconscious projections into a conscious world. You can watch them on Netflix. It may be of some interest on the formation of these things and their projection into daily life.

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I spend more time arguing with myself than anyone else.

I’d love to see what someone’s brain looks like on MRI under the influence of one of those drugs…

It feels somewhat like being asleep. But if you’re jerked in and out of it constantly, ugh… Terrible. There are ways to do it properly, of course.

I wouldn’t just go at these things willy-nilly. I would say that all my experiences have been positive, on balance, but it’s not unlike purgatory. The walls of the maze are torn down, and if there happens to be a minotaur lurking somewhere within, it will find when you take a drug like LSD or DMT.

It happened to a friend of mine. He took too much, and lost lucidity - fell into his dream and became a minor character. He thought he’d killed someone, been arrested and sent to some God-forsaken African jail where he was being repeatedly gang-raped by large Nigerian men. He was puking because of how real he thought it was.

So yeah… YMMV. I had taken the same dose he had, by the way, and was just stressing out about how much he was freaking out… No prison fantasies for me. Then again, he said afterwards that he felt his soul had been cleansed, that the experience was positive on balance, and he’s taken it since then with no such nightmares… So maybe it helped get it out of his system. But yeah… Just because the dose is measured in micrograms, don’t underestimate this sort of thing. Time means nothing when you’re on it. I remember him asking me how old he was, in all seriousness…

If you aren’t ready to make your peace with God, you might want to try a more subtle approach than one of the sacred drugs I guess. Hell is a real place, oh yes…

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Having taken psychadelics like mushrooms, DMT, LSD, and 2CE- I can tell you that when McKenna is describing a feeling of “cosmic awe” its absolutely nothing like what you would think is a sense of terror/awe in the “sober” world so to speak. Any actual “terror” or “awe” feeling that is similar to what you feel when you’re sober might also be happening but that is not what he’s pointing to. He has to use words like that because it can be very difficult to actually convey the experience with words- hence you get words like “cosmic awe” which hint towards something but won’t really do you justice.

A large part of it is like you described- understanding that a person’s “ego” is not really who they are- its just what you decided to identify with. The thing with these trips is that they’re all similar in that they are all very introspective. Even though you may see “things”- they’re not really the most amazing part of the experience- what’s amazing is how much you learn about yourself since you’re able to break out of the ego shell and look at yourself without any preconceptions. The idea of your “Self” can break up and a lot of habits that come from the ego are shown for what they are. DMT is a lot more visual than the others- but its STILL not the visual portion of it that’s the true focus of the trip. The machine elves may happen but they’re not really what’s interesting- they point to something about your real self that’s beyond the conscious mind like you hypothesize, beyond the body and brain itself- and that’s the “cosmic awe” part of it. You’re even more than the feeling of being “awed” because you’re the one who is able to watch this experience!

So on the one hand you can say that your brain’s normal sense circuitry is going haywire- but at the same time you have a very conscious understanding of what’s going on.

A “bad trip” comes from thinking that this trip is just you going insane- it comes from holding onto the ego and your personhood- “I am Clayton! I have a wife and kids I can’t go crazy like this how am I going to go to work!!”- That’s why a sitter is recommended for first time users so there’s someone to remind them “You’re on drugs man just go into the experience and have fun, you’ll be sober in an hour” just incase they’re the paranoid type.

Someone who is prone to nightmares and certain fears like James’s friend- I would go out and make a good guess that he had some type of fear about being raped in prison before he took the drug(could’ve been easily something supressed that he never wanted to talk about further)- and the trip made it come out in full force and you deal with it now and get it over with- or let it beat you up. It removes a lot of mental baggage people seem to keep- as deep seated as they may be.

These drugs are definitely not toys- they’re definitely nothing like marijauna where you can just smoke some because you’re bored- setting and your state of mind has a lot to do with it. Being outside in a park has a very significantly different experience when you’re on Mushrooms or LSD than if you’re in a room by yourself. Someone who decides to take a psychadelic when they’re really stressed out in the same vein as having some alchohol when they’re upset will have a very powerful experience where they have to DIRECTLY deal with their issues and stressors created by the mind

The basic idea is- if you think you can handle your own projected fears- go for it. If you can’t and just thinking about the biggest fears you have when you’re sober causes you to sweat and immediately try and supress them…then maybe try it with a sitter who’s also done it before instead of going at it by yourself. Haha of course try it if you can by all means. You’d definitely need to set a day aside for yourself to do it- so wife and kids do make that impossible.

You can turn a bad trip into a good one too! Even though this intense and immersive experience is going on- there is still a part of you that is able to “watch” it all from a distance so to speak. No matter what changes a person goes through there’s one part of them that’s immovable and doesn’t change, and from there the worries drop.

I hope that made some kind of sense?

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We had a sitter…

He thought she was a like a prison shrink or lady-in-a-white coat type. She just fed into the delusion. But he was physically safe. It’s sort of funny in retrospect, we have laughed about it many times. Gallows humour, I dunno.

It’s like a nightmare you can’t wake up from, so yeah… You just have to learn how to change it. There is always that part of you that seems to watch what goes on from a distance, and seems to escape the ravages that afflict the physical body, including the brain.

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Of course. I’m sure words cannot convey what it’s really like to orbit the Earth in a space capsule, so my understanding is purely analogous.

However, my basic hypothesis is this: when you’re tripping, you’re experiencing (to some extent) the unfiltered reality of what is always going on within you. Your “awake” consciousness acts like some kind of “barrier” or “membrane” that filters 99.99% of that noise out so you never become aware of it. When you experience a feeling of terror/awe in the sober state, I don’t mean that it approaches a psychedelic experience. What I am hypothesizing is that your conscious mind is letting just a little of the “terror/awe” genie out of the bottle for whatever reason (this appears to be how we’re hardwired) and only for the duration of the terrifying or awesome experience. Once the objective threat is over, you move into a different mental state (shock, whatever).

When you take mushrooms or have a bad acid trip, what I am hypothesizing is happening is that the drug itself is disabling the membrane that normally keeps the terror genie in the bottle and part of the feeling of utter helplessness you are experiencing during the bad trip is that the normal mechanism for putting that genie back in its bottle isn’t working, isn’t doing its job and that is even more terrifying… not only are you experiencing a feeling of utter terror but nothing can make it stop.

I think this “membrane theory” of consciousness (definitely inspired by the Freudian/Jungian conception of the unconscious but updated with the concept of the brain as a neural/biochemical computer) can also help explain the feeling that psychedelic drugs are enlightening, that you are getting in contact with the way things really are. Because your “awake” consciousness is a filter, that means that it is concealing the reality of what is going on inside your head all the time. When that veil is lifted, you really are seeing the real deal not the filtered reality that your awake consciousness permits you to see. But you wouldn’t be able to think or act if that awake consciousness was not filtering all that noise and chaos that makes consciousness possible, so it performs the most crucial function of all (otherwise, all the rest of that chaotic insanity inside your head would be useless).

As for the idea that the brain is an antenna, I am suspecting that this may be true and I’m intrigued to have just learned that the Pineal gland has calcite crystals within it. I have experienced on many occasions the weirdest psychedelic phenomenon while falling asleep… I have a baseboard heater in my room that makes a pretty distinct “click” when it turns on… there’s clearly a little bit of electrical arcing that happens for a brief moment. I have been drifting to sleep on at least 4 or 5 different occasions when the heater has clicked on but I can swear I was aware of a bright white flash that felt like it filled the whole room … but it really, really feels like this flash occurs a microsecond before I hear the click from the heater! I swear, it’s like I see a bright, room-filling white flash and almost instantly later, I hear the click from the heater.

I know that a spark gap sends out massive amounts of wide-spectrum RF noise and I have wondered for sometime if there’s something in my brain that could be picking up that RF noise… but I have only had this experience when I’m on that edge where you’re just about to fall asleep, you know that twilight zone when you can “trip” or “fall” in your “dream” but you are actually still awake (I think it’s called lucid dreaming). So maybe as I’m falling asleep, the filter of my awake consciousness is reduced and I’m able to become aware of the brain’s reception of an RF signal from that heater click. I swear to God it’s like when I hear the click I already knew it was coming because I had just an instant earlier experienced this bright, white flash!

I believe mainstream science rejects the notion that the brain has any RF sensitivity whatsoever.

Clayton -

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The point I was trying to make with the RF thing is that perhaps you’re right that it’s not completely internal and that’s what makes it even more bizarre… perhaps you inexplicably know that this isn’t all coming from within you, that you are “in tune” with something else “out there.” If the brain is RF receptive then I can imagine that psychedelic drugs could be all the more disconcerting. You have all this machine elf insanity being created within your head and then external signals being sensed from outside of yourself and influencing the whole experience.

Can you guys think of anything that might sort out the difference between something internal and something external? Clearly, you are aware that some or most of the experience is internally generated… but are you able to sense that “this part” was coming from inside of you and “that part” was coming from some external stimuli (not necessarily the five senses)?

Clayton -

14

Well…

The usual trick is to get external verification of your reality, but of course you might be asking someone you dreamed up, or someone who is also dreaming.

Maybe make a special widget, like in Inception?

I think the external aspect is information itself… Symbols. You forget how powerful and real an intersubjective consensus really is when you’re like this. I don’t want to call it “sober”… It’s highly conditioned. When the ego disappears, the intersubjective part of reality is all that’s left. The part of you that seems to hide away is being protected by a defense mechanism, I think.

I’ve read things about people dissociating like that in times of severe trauma to the mind or body… I think it’s basically that. I’ve experienced a vaguely similar thing before with somewhat traumatic incidents, like your bicycle anecdote up above. But try hours at a stretch, in and out, in and out…

I think you’ve basically nailed it. You are hyper, hyper sensitive in that state. You will hear someone slamming their car door five blocks away, and it will startle you. You’ll hear these chainsaws hectically sawing away in the distance, and hours later realise it was the little hard-drive disks spinning in your iPod.

It’s like you’re a baby all over again… :confused:

You’re spot on with the filter. But… It thinks it’s more necessary than it is, kind of like a government. Overprotective. At least with everyone I’ve ever met. Which might explain why we have a government.

15

As far as Darwinian universe, sounds sort of like the premise of this book, I think. I never read it, but I’ve been meaning to get around to it since reading some of Howard Bloom’ other stuff.

I just happened to be reading Stanislav Grof’s book ‘Holotropic Mind’ where he talks about using LSD for psychotherapy. Pretty far out stuff: people are having memories of birth and then a bunch of other things like becoming one with the universe. He also goes into some of David Bohm’s theories about holographic universe.

16

But I don’t think you’re very functional when you’re that hammered, so it would be pretty difficult to do things like, say, gather wood, hunt deer, and so on. I’d imagine that even filling out forms and assembling the pieces coming down the line could be equally daunting.

Now, where I think you have an argument is in respect to pharmacological recreation, generally - I think that if people drank ayahuasca or smoked cannabis as casually as they drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes, they’d hold their free time much more dearly and this would throw a monkey-wrench in the whole Elite-controlled system of production because they’d have to start paying “workers” a lot more to motivate them to get out of their chairs.

Clayton -

17

http://biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/Your17Senses.html

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There is a time and a place for everything.

The point is… You aren’t the same after you take one of these drugs even once. You think differently afterwards.

I’m not sure if you’re joking, but I think the Elites like it when people are drugged out of their minds. They do deal most of them. But not entheogens… The CIA experimented with LSD for mind control and as a sort of truth serum, but it didn’t really suit the purpose afaik.

Some drugs are made illegal because they have medical potential and are very cheap, and would outcompete Big Pharma’s drugs if they were allowed on the market. LSD, MDMA and cannabis are likely candidates here.

19

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX3qShzHX0g

Here’s a wild theory that struck me last night: what if life is not extraordinary in this Universe? I don’t mean this in a trite way, I mean it in a real, objective sense… what if the original life-forms were nothing more than higher-order combinations of molecules engaging in exactly the same kind of “Darwinian process” which I hypothesize above to exist all the way down?

I have this idea of particles/waves/whatever-you-want-to-call-them as little automatons or machines which exist above a sea of pure randomness (Quantum foam/Dirac sea). But instead of being “existent” in the ordinary sense, they are transitory, they are only “existent” insofar as they can manage to propagate themselves, that is, to propagate their state to keep it from “melting” back into the sea of nothingness/randomness. Some of these particles generate cycles… particle A transforms into particle B which transforms back into particle A and so on.

At the macroscopic level that we can observe, we still see a single entity because we cannot observe the cyclical transformation from A to B to A, ad infinitum. Other particles create “chains” so that A creates B creates C creates D and so on, like the integers are created one by one, on toward infinity. Other particles create chains that end after some time and these particles appear to us as a single transient particle. We still observe it as a single particle because we cannot resolve the chain of particles creating one another.

If you continue to extend this idea, the laws of physics are not so much laws as “invariants with respect to time that happen to hold here and now”. The particles which exist way beyond our capacity to observe (near the Planck length) are what make up what we observe to be fundamental particles. I shouldn’t say “make up” because this implies a kind of solidity/staticness that I do not think these particles have. Imagine a wave traveling through steam… the wave is, by analogy, what we can observe. The steam is what “makes up” or “composes” that wave (the medium over which the wave is traveling) but the steam itself is transient… as soon it cools, it will become water again. So, I think that the very smallest/simplest components of the Universe may be in a continual cycle of rising and falling; constantly emerging from a sea of randomness and then melting back into it. But in the process they create higher-order “particles” or phenomena. It is these higher-order particles that we are observing today with our particle accelerators.

This process is already Darwinian. The criterion for “survival” is for one of these primitive automatons to propagate their state (in time). If it fails to propagate its state, it simply melts back into nothingness. (I’ll get to conservation of energy/mass in a minute). Hence, the existence of all particles, all atoms, all chemical elements, and all molecules is already Darwinian. A particular configuration of protons, neutrons and electrons persists in time because that particular configuration is “stable” with respect to the constant Darwian process of state-propagation which is occurring at the lowest-level of the Universe.

Even larger, macro-molecular entities that we can call life - bacteria, virii, etc. - would be operating on a recursive Darwinian principle. Given a relatively static background of stable atoms, molecules, etc. living systems on Earth live and self-propagate according to the now familiar Darwinian principle of evolution which we can observe. But that static background is a veil and behind that veil is not the steady, dispassionate hand of the Geometer, but a roiling sea of constant creation and annihilation, filtered by the severest form of survival of the fittest. Noise, friction and entropy are all macroscopic phenomena which give us a hint that our apparently highly-structured and geometrically perfect Universe is an illusion behind which hides the abyss; just below the surface of existence. Perhaps these quantities play a hidden role in connecting the recursive Darwinian principle of macro-scopic life forms to the deeper Darwinian substrate of state propagation.

What I’m trying to get at is perhaps the life - the recursive Darwinian principle - naturally tends to emerge in this Universe wherever physical matter is sufficiently “cool” and “stable”. Perhaps water itself isn’t even a pre-condition for life. In this case, the problem of abiogenesis (how life originated) simply disappears… of course life originated, we are in a living Universe. Perhaps the “noise” coming from the Universe itself is part of what drives the creation of life.

I said I’d deal with the problem of conservation of mass/energy. The principle of conservation came about when, I believe, an Ottoman scientist dissolved salt into water and measured the result. He found that the weight of the salt and water separately was the same as the weight of the salt-water. Today, we consider this obvious but it’s not obvious when you think about it… after all, the salt disappears. Much later, further experiments were done with all kinds of oxidated compounds in vacuum chambers which would confirm the “corner cases” of the principle but it has been know for a long time: matter and energy are never created or destroyed, their form is simply changed over time.

At the smallest level, I think the Universe consists of randomly created automatons that emerge out of nothingness/randomness… but they do so according to a well-defined law of random probability. Not all automatons are equally probable, those which are simple are relatively more probable than those which are more complex. The smallest/simplest automaton of all is simply a random coin-flip: the binary unit or the bit. More complex automatons emerge less frequently but when they do, they are more likely to propagate their state. This helps explain how the structured Universe (highly improbable) can actually arise from random noise. State propagation causes the more improbable (because more complex) random structures to be able to persist in time. Those structures which persist the longest dominate the phenomena, thus driving the noisy sea of randomness to the margins. When these non-random, persistent structures interact with each other, we can begin to speak of “physics” or “physical law.”

The motivation for this insanity is the problem of state. Eliminate all assumptions. Begin with a blank slate. What will this blank slate look like? Well, think of a TV screen with all that static running across it; that’s how I imagine a primoridal Universe which requires no explanation because it’s simply random (unexplainable as a matter of logical necessity). How could any structure ever persist in such a Universe? At every moment in time, at every point in space, the state of such a Universe is fluctuating randomly. But if there is some basic machine (such as a Turing machine) to which all this noise is an input, then the output is completely transformed. A Universal Turing Machine (UTM) is a complicated device (requires roughly 200 bits of information to encode, at least, that’s the smallest UTMs we have at present) but it’s a hell of a lot simpler than Quantum mechanics and relativity theory.

This still leaves the “substrate problem”, i.e. what is causing the “Universal Turing Machine” itself to exist (assuming this is the most basic structure of the Universe)? What is causing it to separate the Universe into random and non-random components? What is the mechanism (you can call it “will”, if you prefer) which is implementing the fundamental Darwinian principle of state propagation in the Universe? I have no idea but I think if my description of the Universe has some validity to it and science can eventually discover some of this stuff, we will have taken a pretty big whack at the problem and new ideas will eventually emerge to be able to answer the hardest question of all… the problem of existence itself.

Mathematician Gregory Chaitin has been highly influential on my thinking in this regard and you can read his work on a closely related subject of “pure mathematical” evolution, which he calls metabiology.

Clayton -

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With Xanax, Prozac or Ritalin but these drugs don’t “open the third eye” or generally cause you to “question everything”.

So they can control them.

Even opiates are suppressed within the medical establishment. They’ll shoot you up with every non-opioid anesthetic known to man and only after trying everything else - like you’re some kind of guinea pig - will they give you the one anesthetic that works every time: morphine (it works up to the level of kidney stone pain, which is really mind-blowing pain, but I can’t speak beyond that).

I don’t believe that the Establishment wants people taking drugs like DMT or cannabis (despite its massive popularity, they are still resisting it with everything they’ve got) for reasons that Terence McKenna explains here.

Clayton -