The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death

The origin and essence of religion is the use of visionary plants to routinely trigger the intense mystic altered state, producing loose cognitive association binding, which then produces an experience of frozen block-universe fatedness with a single, pre-existing, ever-existing future that is beyond the individual mind’s ability to control, change, or avoid that future.

Religion is the use of entheogens to reconfigure the mind regarding personal control and the fixity of all thoughts and events.

Primary religious experience entails deep cognitive dissociation directed toward the transformative restructuring of one’s mental model of self, time, control, will, and agency.

Entheogens Generally Historically Common

The entheogen theory of religion holds that the main origin and ongoing wellspring of religion is visionary plants, including Psilocybin mushrooms, Peyote, Ayahuasca combinations, Cannabis, Opium, Henbane, Datura, Mandrake, Belladonna, ergot, Amanita mushrooms, and combinations of these.

Entheogens are by far the most powerful and historically common trigger for cognitive dissociation sessions.

Entheogens are the basis and wellspring of religion.

Dissociative drugs are the main doorway into religion in terms of historical origins, historical practice, and experiential efficacy.

Psychoactive plant usage has a long and influential history (Escohotado 1999).

Visionary plants were central throughout religious and cultural history.

Entheogens have been used throughout history to activate the mystic cognitive state in many variants of mysticism (Freke & Gandy 1997).

Visionary journeying has a long and rich history (Collins & Fishbane 1995).

Various visionary plants and combinations were commonly used in antiquity.

Entheogen use was not a secret, rare, or exceptional, but was common, normal, and standard.

Visionary plants have been commonly used around the world throughout the history of religion and culture (Hofmann, Schultes, & Ratsch 1992) as well as at the origin of religions around the world, including the variants of Western Esotericism (Heinrich 1994).

The aspect of secrecy has been exaggerated; visionary plants were not a secret controlled by a single group to empower them over others, who were in the dark.

Entheogens Throughout Particular Religions

Leading mystics throughout the history of various religions have used on-demand, visionary-plant sessions with rationality-oriented mystic-state experiencing (Merkur 2001).

Visionary plants have been the basis of Western culture from pre-history through antiquity (Russell 1998).

References to visionary plants were routinely used in Greek and Christian mythic-religious systems (Ruck, Staples, & Heinrich 2001).

Ancient Dionysian religion was founded on visionary plants (Taylor-Perry 2003).

Mithraism was a series of initiation experiences based on ingesting visionary plants (Hoffman, Ruck, & Staples 2002).

Buddhism is based in visionary plants (Crowley 2004).

Use and knowledge of the visionary plants was common, not rare, in European religious history until the Enlightenment, and was understood by all social classes.

Entheogens were the basis of Bacchanalian and Dionysian religion, Greek and Christian religion.

The Bacchants eat the god by eating the divine plant.

Religions have a shamanic basis, including Western and Eastern religions, Western Esotericism, Platonism, the perennial Philosophy, and religio-philosophical variants; that is, they were based on visionary plants.

Pre-modern Philosophy is not ordinary-state Philosophy, but rather, mystical experiential, phenomenological Philosophy – Philosophy considered as essentially concerned with discussing mystic-state religious experiencing.

Entheogens the Main and Most Effective Method

Entheogens are the most effective dissociation trigger.

Drugs, not other techniques, were the traditional mystic-state method.

Meditation, shamanic drumming, and liturgical ritual were developed as activities to do in the plant-induced dissociative state, not as methods of inducing the dissociative state in the first place.

The Ego Death Theory

Ego death is the cessation, in the intense mystic altered state, of the sense and feeling of being a control-wielding agent, and the replacement of that sensation by the experience of being helplessly, powerlessly embedded in spacetime as purely a product of spacetime, with control-thoughts being perceptibly inserted into the stream of thought by a hidden source that’s in a position of more ultimate control than the local controller.

The Ego Death theory holds that religion is primarily and originally concerned with the entheogen-induced intense dissociative cognitive state; the pre-setness, unchangeability, inevitability, and unavoidability of one’s own future thoughts; the problematic limitations of autonomous self-control in personal agency; and metaphors describing these experiences and experiential insights.

The entheogen theory of religion and ego death explains religious experiencing by bringing together the dissociative cognitive state, the timeless givenness of thoughts, self-control limitations, and mystic-state metaphor.

Through the mystic dissociative state, religion reveals no-free-will and a way to transcend and accommodate the problematic control-instability that results from perceiving the pre-setness, essential uncontrollability, and unavoidability of near-future thoughts.

Religion Explained by Integrating 4 Subjects

Four domains, when integrated, explain transcendent experiential insight, along with mythemes, religious themes, schizophrenia phenomena, and entheogen phenomena.

The entheogen theory of religion and ego death explains religious revelatory insight by combining four key areas, clearly explaining the ecstatic-state tradition, myth, and primary religious experiencing.

The Ego Death theory modifies and integrates several domains to successfully explain transcendent experiential insight, including a simple explanatory model of the ego-death and rebirth experience.

Intense religious experiencing is readily summarizable and easily intelligible, by combining psychoactives-induced mystic-state religion, the philosophy of time and control-agency, and mythic metaphor.

The combination of dissociation, no-free-will, control-power limitations, and metaphor is found in every form of Western Esotericism, because this set of concerns permeated the culture in which all of them were based, including alchemy, witchcraft, shamanism, Hermeticism, magic, astrology, mysticism, the Grail legend, Rosicrucians, Templars, Sufism, and Kabbalah.

Myths Reflect Dissociation, Fatedness, and Controllership

Visionary plants use in religion is indicated by many metaphors for visionary plants (Entheos 2001-2002).

In scriptures and esoteric writings, mentions of ingesting plant products, meaning entheogens, are found near metaphors fitting the dissociative state.

Myth metaphorically describes the dissociative-state experiential phenomena induced by visionary plants, notably ego death and metaphysical crisis (Grof & Grof 1980).

Religious myths are metaphorical descriptions of experiences of dissociative cognitive phenomena; the sensation of no-free-will and then transcending determinism; and grappling with self-control cybernetics, resulting in a transformation of the mental model of personal control-agency.

Religious myth can only be understood as altered-state-based metaphor; that is, description of altered-state experiences, particularly visionary insights into the nature of perception, self, time, will, and control agency.

‘Mixed Wine’ the Common Practice

Ancient Greek ‘mixed wine’ specifically meant visionary-plant mixtures (Ruck 1978).

Greco-Roman ‘mixed wine’ is best thought of as mushroom wine, in terms of its resulting effects.

A common standard “banqueting tradition” practice with reclining at table while drinking ‘mixed wine’ ran across many seemingly disparate cultural practices throughout antiquity (Smith 2003).

‘Mixed wine’ meant entheogens.

‘Mixed wine’ was central to every aspect of Hellenistic-Roman religion and culture.

‘Mixed wine’ was a dissociative-state inducing infusion of visionary plants, not merely grape wine.

‘Mixed wine’ was the central, reliable means of accessing the intense mystic altered state throughout antiquity, and has been the missing key to religious experience and scholarly comprehension in modern culture.

In antiquity, mystic experiencing was abundantly available on tap as ‘mixed wine’.

Ancient ritual was an activity done while tripping on ‘mixed wine’, across a series of initiations.

Entheogen use was the center of Hellenism and Christianity, particularly through ‘mixed wine’.

If Electric Kool-Aid in an Acid Test type of gathering were switched with ‘mixed wine’ in a Hellenistic symposium, neither party would notice much difference.

Initiation as Natural Developmental Sequence

Initiation classically combines a series of visionary-plant sessions with learning perennial philosophy, followed by subsequent dissociation such as symposium “drinking-party” associations, festival banquets, or Eucharistic agape meals, all of which used visionary-plant beverages rather than alcohol-oriented beer and wine.

Hellenistic esotericists wrote in a puzzle or riddle mode to ambiguously convey two contradictory networks of meaning.

The New Testament uses the approach of riddle and metaphorical double-meaning, entailing the literary form of deliberate misleading about the meaning, and then revealing the higher meaning through the experience of religious initiation.

Hiding and then revealing the meaning of mystic-state metaphors initially protects the sense of straightforward and simple personal autonomy during youth and emulates the mind’s natural developmental sequence.

The risk with the literary method of deliberately hiding the higher meaning and later revealing it is that if the entheogen is removed and the higher meaning is not revealed by explanation or experience, the person and society will remain confused and immature, an outsider to the higher and ultimate meaning of religion.

If the higher meaning of religious metaphor is not explained or experientially revealed, this produces a degenerated version of religion, resulting in a widespread cultural religion that consists entirely of outsiders to the originally intended meaning of religious expressions.

The Greek and non-modern cultural practices of psychospiritual development utilized and incorporated, in a culturally integrated way, an altered-state-based series of initiations for youths.

Writing prior to the modern era is primarily initiation allegory, as an ancient mystery-religion initiate would read it, and is to be read as such, not literalistically.

Initiation culture combined visionary plants with study and training.

Recreational Use Leads to Religious Discovery

Dionysus was fatally surprised by the Titans when he was playing with his toys (spinning-top and doll).

Higher-Order and Lower-Order Religion

A religious system without integrated use of visionary substances is merely a derivative, lower-order simulacrum – spiritually inert; that is, lacking the ability to transform personal control agency.

All religions that include a higher-order version include equivalent altered-state figurations, themes, expressions, and concepts.

Higher-order Buddhism has an entheogenic basis, belief in Heimarmene in the form of Karmic inescapability, and transcending Karma in Nirvana.

Enlightenment isn’t mundane self-improvement; enlightenment transcends details of personality style.

Religion is harnessed for goals other than control-agency transformation, but these other goals are peripheral and secondary-level.

Traditional culture prior to 1700 AD is altered-state based culture (a multi-state culture), instead of being informed only by the single, ordinary state.

The important distinction is not between major brands of religion, but the higher-order versus lower-order version of any religious brand, whether Islam, New Age, or Gnosticism.

Literalist Christianity and literalist versions of other religions need to be sacrificed to purchase the full understanding of what religion is primarily about; this understanding will reduce misunderstanding of religion and reduce the effects of distorted, lower-order religion.

Lower-order religion is derivative, non-transformative, and limited to conduct-of-life and sociopolitical concerns; higher-order religion is primary and concerned with dissociative-state transformation phenomena.

The different religions are all based on primary religious experiencing (intense mystic state experiencing); they are different surface cultic forms of the same basic kind of experience and experiential insight.

Any expected goals of enlightenment other than personal control-agency transformation are mundane self-help, not deep mental-model transformation, just coping better in a mostly unchanged, status-quo framework, to be well-adjusted within that sensation of personal existence and power.

Hermeticism was Greco-Egyptian esotericism, which integrated philosophy and religion.

Origins of Christianity in Entheogenic Initiation

The figure of Paul the Apostle is portrayed as a shamanistic mystic (Ashton 2000), and the apostles are portrayed as adepts in shamanic altered-state mystic experiencing (Pilch 2004).

The Jesus figure is portrayed in the New Testament as a spirit-possessed altered-state shamanistic healer (Davies 1995).

Early Christian writings contain polemical indications of familiarity with ecstatic mania, inspiration, elevated sobriety, and “drunkenness” (Nasrallah 2003).

Early Christianity was ecstatic because entheogen-based.

Shamanistic European religion produced figurations such as the visionary-plant Eucharist.

Early Christianity is portrayed in the New Testament as being based in ecstatic, dissociative-state religious experiencing.

Entheogens Used Throughout Christian History

The extent of entheogen use throughout Christian history has barely been considered yet (Hoffman 2006).

Visionary plants were only “suppressed” in a weak sense of mere veiling; the main Church strategy was to co-opt and profitably direct the use of visionary plants in service of strategic sociopolitical unity, not to eliminate the source of religious experiencing.

Early Christianity involved mystical, religious, visionary experiencing, including the experience of the transformative, transcendent power of the Holy Spirit at Eucharistic agape meals (Johnson 1998).

Nature of Christianity

The entire nature and spirit of the New Testament and associated early Christian writings was entirely different than the modern misreading.

Solving the riddle of the original mystic-metaphorical meaning of Christianity requires figuring-out all the surrounding metaphorical altered-state initiation systems throughout Christian history, including: Persian religion, Jewish religion, Roman religion, imperial ruler cult and Pax Romana, Presocratic shamanistic proto-Philosophy, Greek myth and mystery religion, Hellenistic religion, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Catholic religion, Hermeticism, magic and theurgy, Western Esotericism, astral ascent mysticism, and Reformed Theology.

Canonical Christianity Combined Many Themes

New Testament Christian sayings combine and rework Jewish themes (“atonement for sin and death”), Roman imperial-theology themes (“the gospel of the son of god”), Gnostic themes (“archons, spiritual powers in the heavens”), and themes from Josephus and Hellenistic mystic-metaphor novels.

Gnosticism and early Christianity are equivalently mystical, with some of the determinism-related metaphor tokens shifted around (such as the Demiurge, the Jewish Creator, the ultra-transcendent God, and Satan), forming sociopolitically utilized, orthodox Christianity.

Ahistoricity of Jesus, Paul, and the Apostles

Only the lack of culturally integrated entheogen experience during the modern era made people assume historicity for figures such as Christ the savior and Saint Paul the apostle.

Jesus and all the apostles were entirely and strictly mythic (Doherty 1999, Drews 1924).

The figures of Jesus and the Apostles were exclusively mystic-state allegorical figures.

The figure of Paul served as a controverted authorial token.

Sociopolitical Strategy of Canonical Christianity

The creators of the canonical New Testament system treated mystic enlightenment and the communal unity experience as a tool to build up organized sociopolitical power with themselves on top.

The New Testament was a sociopolitical rebuttal to Roman imperial Ruler Cult and Pax Romana.

The figure of Jesus as willingly crucified and ascended king was a rebuttal to the Caesar cult figure, drawing from themes of Heimarmene (no-free-will, and the frozen given-ness of the future) and its transcendence.

The New Testament editors utilized the era’s standard mastery of mystic-state metaphor to direct the venerable Jewish mystic-metaphor system into the figure of Jesus, in such a way as to strategically sweep together the various differing more-or-less Christian groups.

The redactors’ strategy was to put themselves exclusively governing on top of the nominally egalitarian religion, claiming themselves to have been exclusively appointed as caretakers (rulers) of the Eucharistic gatherings by the short-lived Jesus, who they maintained had exclusively held all authority.

Early Christianity is mystery-religion initiation with a strong communal focus based on the experience of communal mystic unity to form a social support network, set against overblown, quasi-religiously justified sociopolitical government.

Domain Linkage through Entheogens

After the sociopolitical Enlightenment, metaphor and culturally integrated entheogen use lost cultural dominance together, and knowledge domains drifted apart, no longer joined by sharing in common the reflecting of intense mystical experiencing and insight.

Modernity typically isolates fields that are actually interrelated, because the altered state is not integrated into modern culture.

When the entheogenic altered state is integrated into culture, using metaphoricity along with the peak-window dynamics as the primary, common point of reference, it is easy to map any domain to any other, so that the various fields come closer together; for example: banquets and parties, contests and games, initiation, civic procession to a sacrificial altar, punishment, release of captives, satire, sport, taxation, alliances and contracts, and war.

The following were also deliberately linked to the intense altered state: art, birth and death, calendars, citizenship, clubs and associations, civics and citizenship, drama, education, entertainment, festivities, government, households, insanity, law courts, literature, magic, marriage and family relations, medicine, mysticism, myth, navigation, philosophy, poetry, politics, psychology, religion, sculpture, science, slavery, social structures, and treaties.

Entheogen-induced mystic-state experiencing was the common conceptual language and the single master domain throughout Hellenistic culture, serving to interrelate all known domains.

Socrates’ initiation of youths outside official channels carried political implications and risks, because ancient politics and religion were deliberately interlinked by mystic-state experiencing.

The story of Socrates’ trial, punishment, and death is not historical reportage, but rather a mystic-state metaphorical reflection on the ancient laws against “corrupting the youth” and “revealing the secrets” outside of the context of official mystery religion initiation ritual – that is, publicly and explicitly admitting that simple personal autonomy and the concomitant simple moral culpability are illusory.

The mystic-state realm accessed through ‘mixed wine’ was the primary point of reference across Hellenistic-Roman culture.

Altered State Integrated into Ancient Culture

There was no isolated mysticism in pre-modernity; every aspect of culture and religious practice was so firmly rooted in the plant-induced dissociative state that no isolated mysticism can be visibly singled out.

Visionary-plant inebriation was thoroughly integrated into ancient cultures.

Homer’s ancient Greek culture evidences a different consciousness than modern culture simply because ancient culture was bi-state due to integrated entheogen use – not because of any inherent psychological, sociological, or biological difference in experiential capacity.

Ancient culture was informed by the entheogen-induced dissociative altered state in addition to the ordinary cognitive state, and the literature and myths they created were specifically intended to focus on describing the distinctive aspects of the altered state, not to describe their workaday state of consciousness, the only state which modern culture has integrated.

Origin of Single-State Culture

Visionary plants have always been widely used and understood throughout Christianity and Western Esotericism, until the battle between politicized religion and politicized science gained cultural dominance, snubbing the mystic altered state as too ambiguous an ally.

The adept use and comprehension of metaphor faded after the battle between politicized Christianity and Scientism around 1700, leaving a long-term standoff between mystically neutered religious literalism versus exclusively ordinary-state-based Science.

After the Enlightenment, the subsequent modern era lacked much contact with the dissociative state, and therefore in practice conceived of the ego as an autonomous self-steering entity, despite the fact that determinism (in its modern scientific and philosophical version) theoretically suggested that people are slaves or puppets of determinism playing out over time in a clockwork, empty, machine-like universe.

Altered State Not Integrated into Modern Culture

Authentic initiation is present in modern culture, including art, literature, religion, and popular culture, but is not integrated into the official culture.

Modern culture is what results from not integrating the altered state into official dominant culture but instead relegating the altered state to the unofficial culture such as Theosophy, art, and pop music.

The defining feature of the modern era is its cultural alienation from and lack of integration of visionary plants.

The modern cultural experience resulted from the predominance of the ordinary cognitive state, the egoic mental world-model, due to the lack of culturally integrated altered-state initiation.

Modernity a Single-State Culture

The modern assumption of single-state, ordinary-state-based religion obscures the mystic experiencing in Roman religion, in the early Mass, and in Jewish religion in late antiquity.

The modern era lost the use of altered-state metaphors along with entheogens.

Only in the simultaneously drug-obsessed and drug-alienated modern era have enlightenment and salvific regeneration seemed rare, difficult, and unobtainable by ordinary people.

The culturally predominant type of religion in the modern era neutralized and reduced the traditional initiation system by a combination of non-transformative surface ritual and intellectual speculation based only in the ordinary cognitive state, lacking the intense mystic altered-state experiencing that was the origin and ongoing wellspring of religious experience and religious transformation of the psyche.

In the modern, Enlightenment era, only the ordinary cognitive state was officially influential; there was a shared inter-egoic control field, uniformly deluded about moral-control agency.

Rock Music as Initiatory Mystery Religion

Rock is a modern-era authentic initiatory mystery religion, though it has been disowned and alienated, dominant culture not recognizing that Rock is authentic religion.

Rock lyrics express the full range of entheogen insights, a continuous tradition running from early Psychedelic Rock (John Lennon’s song “Help!”) through Acid, Progressive, and Heavy Rock, New Wave, and Electronica.

Drug taboos caused allusions to drugs in Rock lyrics to become more cryptic; to the uninitiated these appear unrelated to the entheogenic state, but many Rock lyrics in various genres contain clear allusions for the initiated.

Rock music is entheogenic mythic-metaphor religion.

Metaphors describing dissociative experiencing are found abundantly in acid-oriented Rock lyrics, including madness, overpowering natural forces, fear, blurred and wavy vision, fragmentation, bending, moving images, and confusion or delirium.

Only isolated pockets of art and popular culture in the modern era adeptly reflect the esoteric tradition, such as the Matrix movie series with its themes including ingesting a perception-awakening pill; mental representation as simulacrum; destiny and free will; serpentine monsters and labyrinthine tunnels; battle against a monstrous master machine designed by a dispassionate architect; death and resurrection; and suddenly ending the battle by forming a pact.

The Phoniness of Prohibition

The only viable reform strategy is to expose the insincerity of the prohibitionists and to develop a robust, constitutionally based position, and surpass the view that psychoactive plants have only a minor, incidental role in religious history.

Laws against psychoactives will have been repealed, ending the delaying tactic of claiming further studies are needed.

Instead of attempting to legislate against the entheogen-based ecstatic heart of religion as some modern-day king Pentheus would, there will be an informed respect for the drug-induced breakdown of the illusion of simple personal autonomy and subsequent reconciling with God (higher-order rulership).

Instead of thought-stopping prohibitionist propaganda motivated by insidious self-serving opportunism that serves to retain the status quo egoic delusion throughout society, the future society will learn the rich history and practical usage of psychoactives.

The government will no longer distort use into “abuse” that is portrayed as curable by a “drug rehabilitation” industry – an entirely harmful, parasitical industry that insincerely and knowingly poses under false pretenses and is actually driven by a self-serving profit motive, in league with the incarceration system.

The phony “war on drugs” was a ploy to expand prisons while feigning benevolent concern.

Drug Policy Reform: Abandon the Schedules

As the truth about the entheogenic nature of religion unfolds, the notion of “scheduled substances” will inevitably be retracted as a crime against religion, human developmental nature, and the Creator.

The system of schedules is not from God, but is a recent, baseless, illegitimate invention snuck into law through a mixture of profit motive, bureaucratic self-promotion, ignorance about the central role of plants in religion, and ignorance about cognitive psychology and the human drive to self-transcendence.

The legislative construct of “scheduled substances” is unconstitutional and illegal.

The ever-expanding drug schedules inherently, absolutely, and directly conflict with the only kind of religious freedom that amounts to specifically religious freedom; that is, freedom to regularly and ergonomically access primary religious experiencing.

The Claim and Promise of Religious Freedom

The world needs real and actual religious freedom, which enables recognizing the Christ figure as acknowledgement of our merely secondary-level control-agency, with Christ, as God’s lower-level avataristic representation, being the rightful ultimate bearer of universal moral culpability, and acknowledging that personal control is trumped by and subject to the mysterious prior power that secretly controls and governs all things.

Repealing drug laws is not only sensible and moral, but constitutionally required (Kubby 1995).

The essence of religious freedom is specifically the freedom to reliably access mystic-state consciousness, as in early Christianity, the banqueting tradition, and the mystery religions of antiquity, all of which utilized psychoactive plants as their central sacrament.

Religious freedom and civil liberties are what the United States offers.

Decriminalizing entheogens is essential to religious freedom, and any reform movement must know and spread the truth about psychoactive plants throughout religious and cultural history.

If the religious discovery of our cybernetic control-seizure potential is rejected, then the American experiment will have failed through never actually having been tried.

The essence of Christianity is precisely the testing and culmination of autonomous personal control-agency through the God-given entheogenic body of Christ; eliminating entheogens because of their instability-danger is inherently an elimination of authentic religion – an illegalization of authentic Christianity, and amounts to obstructing the only religious freedom that is meaningful in a specifically religious sense.

Prohibition opposes not just religion, but ultimately the controller of the cosmos.

Freedom for Higher-Order Religion

If America forbids itself the true, ergonomic Eucharist, then religious freedom is dead for all relevant purposes, and is in fact merely the freedom to select among various brands of lower-order religion, never higher-order religion, which is no real freedom of choice, but an enforcement that everyone must belong to the established church of lower-order religion and may not belong to the church of higher-order religion; apostasy from the official lower-order religion is considered an extreme crime.

Laws against psychoactives amount to blanket laws against primary religious experiencing.

The restricted freedom to participate only in the secondary, derivative, mundane-realm, downshifted version of the religion of your choice is merely the freedom to choose among varieties of denatured religion but not among varieties of authentic, intense, mystic-state-based religion.

Role of Democracy Given Danger of Religious Experiencing

Actual religious experiencing is inherently dangerous, but inherent danger doesn’t justify making entheogen use a crime.

Drugs, like democracy, have dangers; the proper role of government is not to attempt to eliminate all danger, but to support freedom and liberty.

The proper role for representative democracy regarding drugs is to work out how visionary plants and psychoactive substances are to be healthily integrated into United States culture, making dissociative-state religious initiation as ergonomic and as safe as possible.

Initiation Required for Mature Normal Development

The intention of a recreational or other non-religious user of entheogens is commonly defeated by the inherently entheogenic nature of the visionary plants, and this amounts to the problem of how control depends on a source of thoughts outside the domain of control – a problem which is the gateway to religion.

Teenagers naturally seek initiatory transformation of the mental model about control-agency; the modern culture of Prohibition asks them to suppress this and permanently stunt their growth, settling into the non-initiate’s mindset for life.

Enlightenment is not a mistake; it is our innate destiny as mature adults, and has always been effectively accessed through combining visionary substances with the study of timeless determinism and self-control agency.

Government will abandon the pretense of “saving us” from drugs, which are not a “problem” calling for a “solution.”

Government will abandon the historically baseless paradigm of “all use is an unfortunate mistake”.

Making entheogens a crime is an abomination against normal human development and against the Creator; attempting to put entheogens off-limits results in stunting and malformation during adulthood, like foot-binding – a kind of enforced perpetual virginity.

For a person to be considered mature and educated, they must experience religious initiation into mystic experiential insight in the dissociative state.

The idea of scheduling psychoactives and preventing their use is a recent notion that contradicts the innate human drive for religious experience, like declaring puberty illegal.

The Entheogenic Future of Religion and Culture

Entheogen Application Ergonomic and Systematized

Ergonomic tools such as systematized theory and controllable entheogens in post-modernity will make the mystic state common knowledge again, but more explicitly and systematically than in antiquity.

Drugs are the only authentic vehicle for the Holy Spirit in communal religion, because they are the only method that is immediately available to all people and fully ergonomic.

Having a systematic theory in hand speeds up conceptually retaining the glimpsed, innate altered-state structure, and increases comprehension for subsequent individuals.

With the systematic ego death theory in hand, there is no need for heroic doses of psychoactives; moderate dosage is most effective.

Authentically modernizing the ancient practice includes courses and textbooks covering the dissociative state and resulting insights.

Society will understand the destabilization and restabilization of personal control through trust in the hidden controller of our thoughts and destiny.

The late-modern full rediscovery of the plant-chemical basis of initiation will result in a modern-type systematization of dissociative-state experiential insight.

Full basic ego death requires comprehension and moderation, with mental stability restored by an attitude of trusting dependence in the hidden source and controller of all thoughts.

Salvia divinorum makes the dissociative-state experience accessible, practical, and ergonomic.

Future of Cultural Fields

Delusion or enlightenment are collective.

Dissociative substances require serious and respectful use, which takes into account religious and scientific considerations (Forte 1997).

The post-modern era integrates the ordinary-state-based modern heritage with the traditional altered-state-based heritage.

In the post-modern era, the rational and systematic, multi-state-informed, cybernetics explanation of enlightenment is discovered and readily communicated, collapsing the egoic field of shared assumptions throughout the society.

In the post-modern era, psychoactive plant products will once again be culturally central.

Future of Historical Scholarship in Religion and Culture

Religious scholars will shift to giving visionary plants the central role in religious ritual and study – along with transcending determinism, transforming self-control thinking, and recognizing the use of metaphor throughout pre-modern culture in general.

Future of Religious Initiation and Christianity

Christianity is essentially the general idea of applying altered-state-based mental worldmodel transformation (about time, self, and control) and its experiential-insight revelation toward providing an alternate sociopolitical configuration to whatever the current flawed predominant sociopolitical configuration is.

The future of religion will be a modern-type systematization of perennial mystic experiential knowledge, starting with recognition of the central use of psychoactive ‘mixed wine’ in antiquity.

Christianity can only be revived through the original, true, active and efficaciously transformative Eucharist, which is psychoactive plants.

The culture of the post-modern era will have post-modern forms of religious initiation.

New, culturally intelligible metaphor-systems will result from culturally integrated agency-transformative entheogen use.

Future of Cognitive Science

Genuine studies of visionary plants and chemicals will clear the way for the cognitive science of altered states.

Cognitive Psychology will routinely acknowledge how the mystic altered state experientially reveals that all experience is mediated by mental constructs.

Future of Schizophrenia and Abnormal Psychology

Having a systematic theory of control loss and the history of restabilization technique mitigates the inherent dangers of psychoactives, and usefully contributes to understanding schizophrenia: the best harm-reduction is comprehension of the nature and history of the danger.

The Dissociative Cognitive State

Preconfigured Innate Modes and Structures

The mind in the ordinary cognitive state is designed to generate the sensation of being an autonomous power-wielding agent moving through time and space.

The ability to mystically climax is inbuilt, as is the mental model that is revealed, although the useful metaphors and systematic explanation necessary to retain the revealed mental structure must be a product of human effort.

Mystic-state climax is an innate structural potential.

Like egoic cognitive structures, the transcendent mode of thinking is an innate, pre-configured structure that is discovered and revealed, like the adolescent discovers the innate ability to climax, then is developed and refined, rather than being invented and constructed as though an arbitrary invention.

Mental constructs are initially arranged into a standard egoic configuration, then upon loosening of association structures and perceptual layers, mental constructs are rearranged into a standard transcendent configuration, in a revolutionary system-wide transformation including a systemic shift of meaning and mental world-model.

In robust, primary religious experiencing, the mental model of self and world undergoes a standard, pre-configured expansion and transformation to progressively take into account first the representational nature of experience, then the experience of embeddedness in timeless unity, and then finally the limited and dependent nature of self-control, assisted at each stage by a deepening understanding of metaphors describing the experiential insights.

Loose cognition causes a particular revolutionary conversion of mental models.

Loose cognition facilitates and teaches richly creative pattern-improvisation in all aspects of mental activity, even though constrained by some structures that are pre-given in the dissociative state, such as unavoidably perceiving the inherent uncontrollability of thought-origination.

The mind has an innate ability to enter into cognitive dissociation, revealing a pre-configured natural structure.

The mind has an innate default arrangement along with an innate, specific rearranged configuration that manifests during loose cognition.

The ordinary and altered cognitive states or perspectives combine to form a comprehensive, useful world-model.

Extreme dissociation prevents constructing new mental structures, producing merely primordial chaos.

The dissociative cognitive state is a readily accessible, pre-configured mode of mental processing, and was accessed throughout religious history specifically by the use of entheogens.

Representation/Referent Splitting

Representation and Referent Fused in the Ordinary State

In the ordinary state, mental representation and referent are fused.

In the ordinary state, entities are convincingly represented as though they are directly encountered.

In the experiencing and perception in the ordinary cognitive state, mental representations are identified with the referents, in naïve representationalism (related to “the illusion of permanence”), producing the referent projection illusion or effect.

Representation and referent are fused, identified, and bound together such that they can only be slightly differentiated, using abstract theoretical speculation.

The highly realistic-seeming quality of experiencing in the normal state (the illusion of direct perception of referents) is almost more remarkable than the state of things that’s revealed in the dissociative cognitive state (that all we ever perceive is the mind’s own present, internal, representational mental constructs).

The mind’s simulation or representation of self, personal movement, and the world is so realistic, perception of the elements of practical daily life consistently seems simply and transparently direct, including perception of things, people, the personal boundary and self-image, wielding power, and moving through time.

Mental representation and projection form an internal simulacrum of how things are.

Splitting of Representation Layers in the Altered State

In the dissociative cognitive state, representation and referent layers perceptibly split.

In the dissociative state, representational mental constructs dissociate from or perceptibly split apart from their referents.

In the dissociative state, not only do associated mental constructs become separate from each other, the mental representation of each item perceptibly splits and separates from the represented referent, splitting into two perceptibly distinct layers: the representation layer present like a tangible painting, and a remote, speculative realm that is pointed to but perceptually absent, like a foreign country one has never directly seen.

Representation and referent layers perceptibly split for personal representation, as well as for objects.

Tables and chairs tangibly split into representation and referent layers.

Epistemology of Layer Splitting

Referents as well as mental representations can be assumed to exist.

Representation/referent splitting poses epistemological questions.

All that is presented to awareness is present representational mental constructs, which point to alleged referent objects which might or might not exist, or might exist in a way other than the usual tangible mental constructs representing them.

Thoughts or representational mental constructs exist, and possibly also the various kinds of referents that are pointed to by mental constructs.

Metaperception

Salvia divinorum causes metaperception.

Metaperception is the tangible perception of the layer of mental constructs that is the only thing directly presented to awareness.

In the dissociative state, there is a shocking feeling of helplessness upon realizing the insubstantial aspects of the cross-time ego when the usual curtains are drawn aside and the cognitive mechanisms backstage are plainly perceived.

Blatant perceptual distortion together with representation/referent splitting vividly and emphatically poses questions of epistemology and the philosophy of perception, including the existence of one’s past (hyper-solipsism).

In metaperception, personal control-power and personal movement through space and time appear as what they are synthetic, fake mental constructs.

The loosened, altered state permits and causes the mind to get rid of the usual masking-illusion of simple reference, such as time’s passage.

In the dissociative state, the vantage-point of awareness is raised, or stepped back a level, resulting in perceiving the cognitive workings of mental construct processing and perception itself.

A person lives their entire subjectively experienced life inside a brain-computer simulation that their own mind produces by presenting mental constructs to awareness.

In the ordinary cognitive state, the basic mechanisms of mental-construct processing are hidden from awareness.

In the dissociative state, all types of mental constructs cease to naïvely refer to, project, and construct those entities; the mind becomes hyperaware of the fundamentally representational nature of experience and perception, including perception of oneself as a control-agent moving through space and time.

Salvia makes mental constructs visible and perceived as such, rather than as their referents.

Dynamic Mental Constructs

Mysticism is hyper-physical at the same time as becoming a mass of mental constructs pointing to nothing in view.

Mental constructs are the basic units of cognitive phenomenology.

Mental constructs are dynamic association matrixes, held together by some degree of binding intensity.

Pattern Structuring and Reconfiguring

Ordinary State Has Rigid Association Binding

The mind relies on habitual cognitive ruts.

Ordinary-state patterns of thinking and perceiving are supported by tightly bound association of mental construct patterns.

Representation is tightly bound in a characteristic pattern in the ordinary state.

Having a recognizable personality relies on such habitual patterns of dynamic mental construct associations, which are dynamic within a particular range or mode; behind their mask of habit-based, pseudo-separate agency, everyone is Dionysus (the ultimate control-source).

Ordinary-state cognition is settled and immersed in the standard egoic ruts of patterns and mental associations, such as trying to improvise on a musical instrument but ending up playing repetitive patterns.

In the ordinary cognitive state, the mind uses linguistic and conceptual associations in a particular predefined and repetitive way.

Loose Cognitive Association Binding

During loose cognition, patterns loosen and naturally reconfigure.

The dissociative cognitive state enables deep revision of the interconnections between mental constructs.

In the dissociative cognitive state, pattern-perception becomes highly flexible, receptive, and perceptive.

Loose cognition is easily and tangibly recognized through creative visual-pattern perception and through improvising on a musical instrument.

Restructuring Enabled by Loose Association Binding

Revolutionary conversion to a new theory or world-model involves structural transformation of concept networks and hierarchies, increased explanatory coherence, concept recombination, and rational mechanisms of paradigm conversion (Thagard 1992).

Loose cognitive binding enables and causes the mind to readily and easily switch from the accustomed world-model to another particular, essentially predefined world-model which inherently perceives the illusory aspect of ego’s being and control-agency, perceives the future as timelessly frozen, and experiences dual control levels.

The essence of religion is initiation, which is a transformative development of the mind’s mental world-model.

Dis-integration and Schizoid Fragmentation

By eating the entheogenic flesh of the divine visionary plants, Bacchants receive the god into themselves and are likewise pulled apart in disintegration.

Entheogens cause their various phenomenological effects by loosening cognitive associations, causing mental construct processing to appear as artificial representationalism and projection.

Dissociation is accompanied by extreme phenomena such as ego death, the apocalyptic revelation at the end of time, the end of the world, and the descent of divine concord after a great struggle.

Ego Transformation of Control Agency

Ego structures are refined, revised, and upgraded after enlightenment; only some structural aspects are eliminated; ego as control-structure is transformed.

In the dissociative state, the usual cognitive structures constituting the ego are relatively disengaged, along with the projection of the ego image.

Ego Ontology: The Moving Agent as Mental Construct

Humility Is Nullity of Power and Existence

Religious ‘humility’ expressly means mystic-state metaphysical humility (disavowal of independent autonomy of personal control-power), as opposed to mundane-realm humility; ‘pride’ means the claim of independent control-power and autonomy of self-government, which is an affront to the hidden source of thoughts.

The dynamics of the social ego and humbleness is one thing, ‘ego death’ is something quite different, involving religious transformation incorporating nullity of power and existence.

Ego as Partial Reality, and Illusion of Representation

Upon revealing illusion, oneself continues to exist in many ways, such as a body in time, a brain, a mind, possessions, and a personal past.

The ego exists virtually; it exists in a sense that is quickly corrected and revised upon encountering the un-masked observations provided by the altered-state perspective.

The ego is a particular dynamic set of mental constructs and representations.

The ego really exists, as a set of thinking-patterns that are usually experienced as directly present and solid.

During the dissociative cognitive state, the illusion of directly perceived personal solidity quits, and one genuine aspect of oneself has temporarily ceased to firmly exist: the egoic cognitive processing, which is largely suspended during the mystic state, and re-conceived after this transformative experience.

Buddha said “I don’t know what I am, but I know what I’m not.”

The ego-agent and its movement and control are actually known indirectly, through the intermediary medium of synthetic, artificial, representational mental constructs.

The mind is designed to accept the mentally projected self-representation as literally identical to oneself.

The mind usually projects and constructs a fairly solid and simple image of oneself.

The perceived representation layer tangibly splits apart from that which is represented and is otherwise hidden from view, including oneself as a referent hiding behind the perceptual layer or beyond the perceptual chamber.

The mind’s mental representation of the self or ego is only one portion of the ego.

Insofar as the mind confuses the projected self-image with that part of the self which is genuine, that projected self never existed, other than a perceptual illusion, and so could not cease to exist.

The mind’s internal representation of oneself is deceivingly tangible, an internal projection of the self that appears simple, unified, and directly present, but some aspects of this familiar perspective and representation are unreal.

If the ego is defined strictly as the natural assumption that the mentally projected self-representation is literally oneself, then it can be said that “the ego is only an illusion”.

Wielding Control Power While Moving Through Time

There is some autonomous personal control-power in some sense, but the normal perception of this power is distorted.

The ego-entity exists as a real set of patterns and dynamics spread across time, but the ego is not solid, continuous, or autonomously powerful in the manner initially conceived.

The egoic agent wielding power while moving through time and space is a projected, constructed, synthetic image and perspective.

The ego agency along with its movement through time while wielding control-power, normally seems simply real, directly and straightforwardly perceived, and solidly present.

The mental token representing oneself as controller is no longer taken as oneself directly experienced; the representational-illusion effect collapses.

Mental constructs quit naïvely referring to, or representing, their referents, and instead, are explicitly perceived as merely being mental constructs, such as the now-unconvincing and questionable representation of personal movement through time through one’s spatial environment.

Entheogenic Effects

Cognitive phenomenology is an effective and well-suited approach to studying and theorizing about the entheogen-induced experiential state, and the first area of experience encountered in the series of initiations is centered around the mind’s perceptual and visionary apparatus (Shanon 2002).

There are multiple triggers for the dissociative cognitive state, including psychedelics, meditation, schizophrenia, sensory deprivation, and temporal-lobe epilepsy, but of all these triggers, only one is reasonably ergonomic: psychedelics.

Signatures of Plants

Plants Have Different Phenomenological Signatures

Plants have phenomenological signatures, reflected in myth.

There are practical and phenomenological differences between using LSD (acid) or mushrooms versus Salvia, with respect to cognitive dissociation, no-free-will, self-control feelings, and metaphor.

Salvia has a different religious tenor than LSD or mushrooms.

Salvia divinorum has a narrow phenomenological character.

Shorter Duration

Salvia’s short duration affects its phenomenology.

The shorter duration of smoked Salvia means the dynamics such as “voyage”, “long trip that plays out”, and “epic journey” are reduced compared to peyote or LSD.

The reduction of bodily effects along with controllable dosage and short duration makes Salvia ideal for studying cognitive dynamics; when combined with understanding the present theory, one can readily be initiated into transcendent self-knowledge.

The shorter duration of Salvia reduces the situation of “the long trip is starting and there is no turning away from any control-crash that might be sitting up ahead on the worldline”.

Less Surface Distortion, More Religious Experiencing

Salvia produces fewer bodily effects than LSD; it lacks the trembling, pupil dilation, temperature swing, and heart palpitation.

The turbulent visual warping from Salvia moves differently than the waving, bending, and tracers produced by LSD.

Compared to acid and mushrooms, Salvia has a distinctively narrower, signature range of effects and religious tenor, without color smearing and audio warbling.

Salvia divinorum provides classic entheogen-induced religious experience.

Salvia is a vehicle of religious revelation and transformative, initiatory mental-model regeneration.

Salvia divinorum provokes metaphors of spacetime embeddedness and thought-coercion more than of visual and auditory distortion, although it can cause intense undulation of vision and of the mental body-image similar to the seer and priest of Apollo, Laokoon, wrapped by and wrestling with the two serpents of Apollo.

The colors and lights and explicit audio distortion in LSD distract from spatial merging and the simulated, indirect nature of perceiving personal movement through time and space.

Mushrooms or Ayahuasca direct mental energy onto general visual and audio special effects and perceptual dynamics, more than specifically entheogenic effects such as the pre-givenness of thoughts and control-level splitting.

With Salvia, dissociative processing is less distracted by superficial perceptual effects, and more cleanly focused on experiencing timeless frozenness, spatial merging, explicit representationalism, and the sensation of inability to control and steer away from one’s near-future thoughts.

The acid-lyric metaphors of looking through a surface layer of water or crystal don’t apply as well to Salvia, in which the material plane itself seems to undulate, as well as the mental body-image, not just one’s perception of it.

Mythic Metaphor for Dissociative Phenomena

Myth Describes Dissociation, Not the Ordinary State

Myth is about dissociation phenomena.

Metaphor and myth are descriptions of experiential insights in the dissociative cognitive state.

Myth reflects dissociative phenomenology or dissociative-state experiencing, not ordinary-state and ordinary dream-state experiencing.

Myth is based in the altered state, not the ordinary state.

Myth has nothing to do with dreaming or with ordinary-state rituals or ordinary-state life adventures.

Myth is first and foremost the expression of the intense mystic altered state; the ultimate motivating concern of myth is not the surface figurations about agricultural fertility, literal birth and death, celestial observations and cycles, ordinary mental tranquility, ethical conduct of life, or avoiding postmortem punishment.

Religious myth is entheogen metaphor or entheogen allegory, not intended literally.

Myth is more than the description of the plants themselves; myth is primarily metaphorical description of the intense mystic experiencing that results from visionary plants.

The central focus and concern of mythic themes is the experiencing that results from visionary plants, rather than the visionary plants themselves.

Metaphoricity is a prime characteristic of the entheogenic, dissociative cognitive state (Shanon 2002).

Myth describes the experiential insights provided by visionary plants.

Myth is the use of metaphors to describe entheogen-induced phenomena.

Different visionary plants lead to different metaphors.

Developmental Model Change

The most profound aspect of myth reflects the dynamics of the entheogenic state, in which cognitive associations loosen and the egoic model gives way to the transcendent model of time, space, self, control, and world.

Myth describes the development process that unfolds in mystic-state experience.

Mythic metaphor works by switching between networks of meaning.

Metaphor can be designed to filter and divide the audience into two groups, misleading the noninitiates, while confirming initiates’ understanding.

Comparison of religions and their principles must be done skillfully and favorably, with mastery of myth-interpretation, not with deliberate rigidity, not superficially in terms of simple surface terminology such as apparent differences.

Dissociative-State Themes

The mystery religions used entheogens, which produce the phenomena allegorized in mythic form as miracles, child sacrifice, and shape-shifting.

Entheogens reveal the experiential content of the philosophy of mystic religion and vividly reveal how themes of water and light are metaphorical descriptions of altered-state experiencing (Thorne 1998).

Visionary-plant states and otherworldly themes form the tradition of altered-state journeying (Culiano 1991).

Many thematic categories of metaphorical descriptions have been used throughout history to describe dissociative-state sensations and experiences (Metzner 1986).

People regularly accessing the intense mystic state are more concerned with the practical encounter with active experiential ideas such as “the angel made the chains miraculously fall off and the prison door open” than with speculative theorizing about ontology and causality, which are derivative, secondary concerns.

The Heimarmene-snake is shown leading up to the wine mixing bowl in many Greco-Roman illustrations.

In a Greek myth, the hunter Actaeon saw the goddess Artemis bathing naked, so she turned him into an animal, and his own hunting dogs tore him to pieces.

The Actaeon hunting myth comprises the dissociative-state themes of seeing divinity (the higher or ultimate control-level), transgression of control-limits, transformation of oneself, mental searching, dissociative fragmentation of the mental body-image, and the death of the initial self-conception.

No-Free-Will, the Block Universe, and Frozen Worldlines

The Block Universe

Time can be envisioned as a space-like dimension, forming a block universe that includes snake-shaped personal worldline threads (Rucker 1984); this perspective is characteristic of altered-state perception.

Salvia divinorum enables experiencing frozen timeless block-universe determinism, with time as a space-like dimension.

The subject of block-universe determinism includes determinism-transcendence in religious history, and the experience of frozen-time Necessity and pre-set thoughts throughout all subjective experiencing

Analytic philosophy and space-time physics have been brought together to construct a tenseless, static model of time (Oaklander & Smith 1994).

Salvia presents a strong, clear sensation of spatial merging and unity, and the static, frozen nature of time is perceived as a collection of present moments, with time as a space-like dimension, but with space itself seen to be not simply present, but rather, mediated through present mental representations.

Salvia produces a sense of spacetime merging, as a natural way of organizing perceptual data and ideas when the usual sense of a tangible separate self and tangible exterior world is released.

Metaphors for being embedded in the frozen, timeless block-universe include the end of time, imprisonment, and fastening the body to physical objects.

The feeling of Salvia is strange yet familiar, returning the mind to home-base – the block-universe Origin.

Physical Fastening of All Thoughts and Actions

Prometheus is chained looking out from the rock; the disc of Ixion in the sky pivots around the pole star of the fixed Heimarmene-sphere looking out and down.

King Pirithous and Theseus are snake-fastened to the universal physical block down in Hades’ and Persephone’s kingdom; the same solid object as the tree in which king Pentheus is caught up in, looking out from; the same physical object as the coffin Osiris is trapped in by his brother; these are all physically connected to the cross Jesus is nailed to, together with his elect: entheogen initiates.

In the experience of helpless embeddedness in frozen spacetime, everything and everyone is physically attached together back to back, affixed to the spacetime cross, looking out; all nailed to the same structure, looking out from the same throne in the land of Hades.

The metaphor of ‘the affixed-then-ascended king’ represents the intense mystic-state experience of determinism, followed by the experience of transcending determinism.

Jesus’ helpless bodily fastening to the cross, followed by resurrection and ascension to rule as God, is an allegory of the mystic experience of block-universe determinism and its transcendence to produce more durable, stable control.

King Pirithous in Hades

The mythic image of being fastened for eternity to a bench in Hades (an altered-state realm) describes the dissociative-state sensation of physical embeddedness in the timeless block-universe.

The figure of king Pirithous left fused into the banqueting bench in Hades describes aspects of dissociative experience, when the self-image and mental world-model are revised during the dissociative state, abandoning the former world-model.

Hades imprisoned Persephone’s would-be suitors by fusing them to a magical bench and binding them to it with snakes while preparing them a banquet with wine.

Heracles freed Theseus, but had to leave king Pirithous behind because the whole world shook when Heracles pulled him.

All Agent-Actions Fastened Together

The altered state reveals one’s quasi-physical attachment to all deeds in the world.

In the dissociative state, all actions anyone has done in the world, good and evil, are experienced as physically attached to one’s own arms, body, and frozen-into-spacetime train of thoughts.

Actions of agents everywhere in all times are frozen and interlocked together, fixed with respect to the time dimension.

From the transcendent perspective, the hand of God or some non-local universal control-source does everything, which puts the problem of evil in the foreground, not just some abstract light.

Metaphors Representing Heimarmene

The principle of Heimarmene – presetness and noncontrol over near-future thoughts – has been represented as the Demiurge, the celestial planetary gatekeeper Saturn, a devouring dragon, an attractor beacon, and a black hole.

Religion as Accommodation to Heimarmene

The essence of religion is a series of mystic-state initiations leading up to a full comprehension of the ego-killing ramifications of timeless frozen block-universe determinism, followed by some kind of effective way of relating to determinism and that which gives one’s pre-set thoughts.

Esotericism provides transcendence of determinism in the entheogen-induced dissociative state, with ‘rulers’ (archons) or ‘prison gatekeepers’ representing self-control instability and the challenge of leaping out of the current system of thinking in order to regain practical freedom in light of the new perceptions.

Unavoidability of Pre-set Thoughts and Initiations

The aspect of determinism which is experientially important is the feeling that there is a timeless, single, unavoidably pre-set future that is not susceptible to personal control that could change or avoid it.

I can’t change what I will think, say, or do in the future or near-future, particularly the alarming thought of being made to act out the idea of loss of control.

During loose cognition, the world blatantly and explicitly appears as merely mental representations which are themselves frozen into the block universe.

Use of entheogens is initiated and caused by the divine, such as Isis bringing Apuleius to be initiated into her mysteries.

Entheogen use is pre-determined.

The person’s worldline of pre-set thoughts, nearing the point of ingesting entheogens, was portrayed as a snake that is inevitably drawn to the entheogenic libation of ‘mixed wine’, incense, or sacrificial cake placed or poured onto altars of sacrifice, or in a wine mixing bowl.

Ingesting the entheogen is the predetermined destiny of initiates.

Initiation into No-Free Will

The mind is designed to initially experience the world from within a mental world-model that is premised on possessing independent freewill control of its future thoughts.

The hierophantic priests, as agent of the gods, “abducted and sent to Hades” youths (of whatever biological age) through the revelation of no-free-will in a communal religio-political authorized sacred environment and context.

Mystery-cult society veiled the fact of no-free-will from youths.

Determinism first creates the person in the false form of an agent that wields freewill control-power.

Determinism causes the pseudo-freewill agent to glimpse, approach, and recoil from determinism.

In the intermediate stages of the series of visionary-plant initiations, the feeling of being a control-agent moving through time and space is increasingly suspended and replaced by the sensation and perception of no-free-will – frozen-time block-universe determinism – while the mind systematically reinterprets key aspects of its mental world-model to fit the transcendent perspective.

Religious philosophy often equates transcendence and enlightenment with awareness of cosmic determinism (Martin 1987, and as a modern instance, Balsekar 1999).

The Moving Continuant Agent

Seeing the illusory aspects of mental representation of oneself, and feeling static spacetime unity in the absence of the accustomed sense of personal solidity, can be experienced as death – the ending of personal existence – because the egoic-mode mind strongly identifies with the projected image and sensation of the moving continuant agent and its control-power.

Worldlines of Subjective Experiencing

A person’s entire subjective life is a snake-shaped worldline frozen into spacetime, with time as a space-like dimension.

The snake is a common religious symbol because a person’s subjective stream of conscious experience throughout their entire life is embedded in spacetime in the shape of a snake or a thread woven and cut by the Fates to a predefined, finite length.

To be bitten by a snake, as in the allegory of Paul the Apostle after his shipwreck, means to perceive the fatedness of one’s stream of thoughts.

The Heimarmene-snake appears as Moses’ snake on a pole, the snake on the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Leviathan in the book of Revelation, the snake under the altar that bit the rabbi, Triptolemus’ serpent-drawn winged chariot, and winged dragons.

The seer Balaam had an unavoidable encounter with the angel of death on a winding path with no place to turn aside, and was permitted to pass upon acknowledging that he speaks the words God puts in his mouth.

Any sacrifice that occurs is predestined and frozen into spacetime, like the altar to which Isaac is attached and bound, comparable to the labyrinth path inevitably leading the sacrificial youths to the Minotaur in the central lair every year, and comparable to procession to a sacrifice at an altar.

The serpent is, above all, a depiction of fatedness (Heimarmene, Necessity, universal predestination).

Snakes represent Heimarmene and the pre-set worldline of one’s life, a thread frozen into spacetime, including one’s future train of thoughts.

When Perseus shows Medusa’s Heimarmene-snakes to King Polydectes and his followers at the feast, they turn into stone, helplessly frozen.

Obelisk as Esoteric Time Symbol

Outdoor poles indicate time by their shadow.

Moses’ snake on a pole indicates non-control with respect to time; the pole’s shadow indicates time through its oscillating movement, and the snake’s shape represents the finite-length worldline of all one’s thoughts frozen in spacetime, including control-thoughts.

The image of the snake winding up the obelisk ultimately alludes to the pre-setness, unchangeability, inevitability, and unavoidability of one’s own future thoughts and all the pseudo-sovereign autonomous acts a person does as a control-agent.

An obelisk pointer or pole, casting a moving shadow, alludes to how we are forced headlong into an unavoidable preset, predestined, pre-existing future – neither cyclic nor an opening-forward directionality, but more like “closing forward”.

A snake-wrapped obelisk casts a shadow producing a moving image of a snake tracing a consistently varying, oscillating pattern.

The obelisk straightforwardly and explicitly represents a time-embodying sundial, with snake as cosmic Heimarmene dictating our worldline or thought-stream for our entire life.

Frozen Time and Time Slices

Objects and the controlling ego-entity are perceived as extended across time in a more explicit way; they are perceptibly distributed along a fixed and pre-set stream of time-slices frozen into position, such that a person appears as a living statue consisting of a series and set of statues or image-frames in incrementally different poses.

Time is no longer perceived as a flow, but as a frozen expanse and positional relationship of stationary time-slices, with mental constructs permanently laid out across the time axis.

Time is inherent in the cognitive structures and ideas of personal control.

Vertical versus Horizontal Determinism

The complaint that modern science introduces determinism and thereby reduces the person to an automaton reflects the lack of historical awareness that traditional mystic-state-based determinism comparably reduced personal power.

All eras are concerned that timeless determinism (Heimarmene or Fatum) reduces personal power and freedom.

Ancient Vertical, Atemporal Determinism

The ancients thought in terms of a horizontal causal chain (events caused by temporally preceding events) as a mundane-realm lower reality, but also thought in terms of a vertical causal chain with causality frozen into timeless eternity.

Modern philosophers only consider half of determinism – the temporal sequential aspect – with no awareness of the vertical causality aspect that sets the whole subject rolling and motivates the concern with determinism in the first place.

The problem of Heimarmene (Fatedness, timeless cosmic determinism) was the central thematic concern of religions in the Hellenistic era (Martin 1987).

Augustine’s era took determinism and the presetness of the future as the given starting point for mystic theology, and was concerned with ideas about transcending the fact of everything in the world being determined.

Greco-Roman culture was premised on no-free-will.

Late antique consciousness was centered around the doctrine and mystic-state experience of the pre-setness of future thoughts and occurrences (Necessity, Heimarmene, or Fatum).

Modern Horizontal, Temporal Determinism

The principle of determinism or fatedness is not actually unique to modernity, as the common complaint assumes; the only thing that’s new about the modern idea of determinism is the ordinary-state-based manner of picturing determinism.

Modern-era, single-state-based Philosophy remains stunted and fixated, narrowed and limited to the single concern of how to be absolutely certain about determinism?

When the mystic state lost cultural predominance, mundane-state Philosophy retained the idea of sequential, in-time determinism (causal-chain determinism) but forgot the particularly mystic-state-based, dissociative-experience-based idea of vertical, frozen timeless determinism.

Copenhagenist quantum mechanics aims to provide an alternative to hidden-variables determinism, but through intellectual activity and a conception of time that are based in the ordinary cognitive state.

Philosophical Metaphysics investigates tenseless time, fatedness, agent movement through space and time, and controller agents (Oaklander & Smith 1995).

Mechanics of Vertical Determinism

Generally the term “determinism” in religious experiencing actually means Heimarmene, as a network of connotations.

The future is unchangeable and pre-set not because of causal-chain determinism acting from one moment to the next, but because of the static relation of control to the time dimension.

Mystic-state-based determinism is more relevant to experiencing and history than ordinary-state ideas of determinism.

‘Determinism’ as conceived by modern-era Philosophy is unaware of the vertical dimension and the vivid experiential potential – the potential of the mind to vividly experience the pre-setness of thoughts as a disruptive problem especially because of the fatal circular potential of the idea of being drawn into the thought of loss of control, as though into the whirlpool of the sea monster Charybdis, a dangerous threat to passing ships that the enchantress Circe warned and instructed Odysseus about.

Religious Myths of No-Free-Will

Religious myth is a metaphor game involving visionary plants and mastery of the various metaphors centered around no-free-will theme, and applying these to the mundane realm and drawing themes from the mundane realm.

Transcending Determinism

The Roman grafitti of a crucified donkey could mean both reaching determinism-awareness and transcending determinism, because initiation comprises multiple, comparable transformations; the pseudo-autonomous free-will-shaped self carried the intellect to the goal of awakening to the rulership of Heimarmene and was then done away with, and also the Heimarmene-ruled self had carried the intellect to the goal of transcending the rulership of Heimarmene and was then done away with, producing transcendent freedom.

Transcending determinism trans-rationally was a key theme in Western religion.

Transcendent, dissociative-state religion provides a justified alternative to determinism.

Two Jumps to Transcend Determinism

The revelation of determinism transcends animalistic or demonic thinking to some extent, and then discloses a possible transcendent escape route from the rational and experiential problem of prison-like determinism (a star-prison), to complete the transcending of animalistic or demonic thinking.

Determinism is both a praised goal and a disparaged trap to escape, due to determinism-awareness being the intermediate but not final goal of religious mental transformation.

3-stage initiation paths centered around determinism are elegantly simple, yet confusing in that they are often posed as a 2-stage system: they both endorse and disparage the realization of determinism, because determinism is the intermediate destination on the path to salvific regeneration – like loving and hating adolescence.

In the 3-level, determinism-centered system, there are two pivots or jumps: the jump from naïve freewill autonomy to rational mystic awareness of timeless block-universe determinism, and then the jump to a mental model that is trans-rational or super-rational.

Transcending Determinism in Christianity

Mystically attuned Christianity continues past the affirmation of determinism to affirm transcendent freedom from determinism, sometimes demonizing or disparaging determinism.

By positing a portion of the person as lying outside the block universe, pre-modern Christianity was able to affirm that everything in the world is governed fully by Fate, Heimarmene, or determinism – while still holding that a certain kind of super-transcendent freedom is available, for the fully regenerated elect.

The Christian religion uses game-like metaphors centered around the theme of no-free-will, including playing with the idea of moral guilt and release, mentally reconciling one’s quasi-autonomous power with no-free-will, and transcending no-free-will.

Religious expressions such as “faith that Jesus was raised up from death” make sense upon reading them as mystic metaphor describing experiential events in the altered state.

The ‘natural’ portion of man, inside the block universe, cannot exercise genuine choice; the man must be divinized by a force external to the natural man – such as by one’s holy guardian angel – and then the person is awakened outside the block universe and can therefore make a choice that’s based outside the determinism-controlled block universe.

It’s a matter of mystic metaphor: given the 3-level scheme of body/psyche/spirit, if a regenerated person has a body controlled by Fate and a spirit that transcends the domain of Fate, is cognitive functioning free, or is it material, so that only some vague ultra-transcendent portion of the person is free?

Transcending Determinism in Gnosticism

Gnosticism, Western Esotericism, and Neoplatonism are ways of penetrating past determinism into a trans-rational, hyper-cosmic, ultra-transcendent sphere.

Valentinian Gnosticism affirmed cosmic determinism but also transcended it, and formulated two contrasting schemes of thinking about moral culpability (Pagels 1992).

In gnosis, the mind turns one way to discover Fatedness (the Law, the Demiurge, or spacetime imprisonment), then turns an opposite way to discover the potential to transcend Fatedness.

Transcending Determinism in Buddhism

Buddhism’s concept of the Ground of Being or Tao that flows everywhere including one’s mind, combined with escaping the endless round of moral karma and its unbroken causal chain, is an expression of the concept of the frozen timeless block universe and the problem of transcending the idea of autonomous moral agency – regardless of the surface appearance of different concepts.

Two Devils to Cast Out

Determinists equate the ego or devil with naive freewill thinking, while determinism transcenders equate the ego or devil with determinism.

Two main demons are exorcised to restore true sanity.

The first of the two devils or stages of egoic delusion to cast out is the naïve assumption of simple self-control and freewill, which gives way to retaining the comprehension that the world is ruled by determinism rather than autonomous egoic freewill-possessing agents.

A distinct devil (control usurper) to break away from in the later part of the initiation series is the mental model of cosmic determinism or fatedness, in its practical problem-raising aspect.

There is a sequence of two basic devils or evil demons to overcome and exorcise: the demon of beginning-level ignorance (naïve freewill and personal-autonomy delusion); and then the demon of determinism, Fatedness, Heimarmene, or material Nature (the urgent problem of awareness of being in the overpowering grip of cosmic determinism).

Transcendent restabilization occurs through overcoming illusory demons.

Astral Ascent Mysticism Past the Fixed Stars

Astral ascent cosmology is key for understanding much of Gnostic mythic metaphor, Platonism, Western Esotericism, and Christian mythic metaphor.

The Eastern goal of ceasing to be reborn into a material body is equivalent to Western figurations for transcending the egoic illusion of autonomy, such as moral purification, passing through the gate of the fixed stars, casting out seven demons, and being pulled out of the jaws of Hell.

Passing Through the Danger Gate

The level of “the 8th”, the sphere of the fixed stars, is feared and venerated, ruled by Saturn, who, as time, eats his children.

Astral ascent mysticism uses the Earth-centered Ptolemaic cosmology, emphasizing crossing the star-sphere boundary to the transcendent heavens.

The gnostic’s spirit leaves the body, relinquishing the particles of the fragmented and dis-integrated soul while passing through the planetary stages and eventually across the boundary of the fixed stars, and thus enters into the ultra-transcendent pleroma as a spiritual being, now subject neither to ignorance nor to Necessity.

When ego solidity-projection disappears, you become invisible, elude and slip past the prison gatekeepers, to return to the divine origin outside the material, Fate-ruled cosmos.

Heimarmene and Control in Astral Mysticism

The pivot point of the system of astral ascent mysticism is the dangerous gateway or “fatal” boundary crossing – the sphere of the fixed stars – representing the apprehension of Heimarmene and its power over one’s own near-future thoughts.

The vertical causal chain is portrayed in a woodcut showing God’s hand in a cloud holding a chain down to a woman’s arm; her head is above the sphere of fixed stars.

In the classic 3-level system centered around cosmic fatedness, the ultra-transcendent God controls (governs, rules over) Fate; God breathes on the zodiac to turn the sphere of the fixed stars (like Mithras and Jupiter), and Fate then controls the material part of oneself.

To exercise genuine choice in a block universe, it must be a special, divine, supernatural, miraculous, magic kind of genuine choice, and such choice is based outside, not inside, the block universe.

Heimarmene was centrally important in ancient astrological cosmology (Barton 1994); Heimarmene was a major theme and concern in Hellenistic-Roman astral ascent mysticism and religion (Cumont 1960).

Christian Astral Ascent

Jesus in a sense tramples the cross he transcended and ascended from.

The Platonist ascent of the soul past the boundary of the material cosmos is a process of redemption, or recovery and release of something that had been in captivation and captivity through a kind of payment or process.

The 3-level control scheme of ultra-transcendence, Necessity, then personal control has been depicted as the hand of the hidden God holding a chain controlling a soul-woman whose head is above the sphere of the fixed stars, and who in turn holds a chain controlling a monkey down in the world.

Jesus Christ is shown in conventional art trampling the cross of cosmic Heimarmene as the X-crossed gates of hell, when harrowing hell and rescuing the elect from limbo (control’s impotence in the face of cosmic determinism and fatedness).

‘Trampling the cross’ means repudiating, transcending, and disparaging Heimarmene as ‘the Demiurge’.

Pre-modern Christianity held that the body (lower self) was controlled by Fate, but that the spirit (higher, ultra-transcendent part of oneself) was above Fate, residing outside the block universe (cosmic rock, sphere of the fixed stars), in the high heavens.

Ancient Jewish writings metaphorically describe mystic-state experiences, including the problem of how to get past various threatening gatekeepers that are encountered during ascent (Arbel 2003).

Altered-State Initiation in Astral Mysticism

In an astral mystic system, through entheogenic anointing, with psychoactive principles absorbed through the skin, the initiate ascends to the sphere of the fixed stars and then on into the pleroma.

Transcending astral fatedness involved ingesting holy food, ambrosial water, and astrological medicine (Fowden 1986).

In dissociative mystic-state death, entheogenic anointing in a transcendent religious ritual assures the “dying” person of victory in the perilous ascent of the soul.

Astral ascent mysticism pictures the series of entheogenic initiations as ascending through the planetary spheres (1st-7th) to the determinism-aware sphere (8th) of the fixed stars, and then beyond to reach the mysterious hidden, spiritual realm (the 9th) that transcends determinism.

Astral ascent cosmology is a tangible framework or model for crossing the boundary from the material cosmos into the transcendent heavens during a series of initiations (Ulansey, forthcoming).

When the spirit leaves the body during mystic death, the soul is tested and purified by passing through the gate-like sphere of the fixed stars into the upper heavens outside the material cosmos.

The Snake in Astral Mysticism

Astrological observation showed the sun and other planets as winding around the world in a spiral pattern, depicted by the snake wrapped around the cosmos or cosmic egg.

Saturn, as governor or gatekeeper of the outermost planetary sphere which is sometimes associated with the sphere of the fixed stars, is portrayed as riding in a serpent-drawn chariot and eating the child or youthful self-concept as the price of passage across the boundary into the truly transcendent heavens beyond the starry Heimarmene-boundary.

The elect are rescued from Leviathan’s jaws of Hell, and are helped to escape across the guarded boundary of the serpent-encircled, fate-ruled material cosmos into the higher heavens.

Reformed Theology and the Elect

Reformed theology asserts a form of determinism: the predestination of who is rescued from punishment for rebelling against God’s all-powerful rulership.

Determinism causes the person to acknowledge that all their power has always come from determinism; this acknowledgement is a willing sacrifice, caused by determinism.

The Reformed doctrine of double-predestination divides people into two groups from before birth; religious predestination is inherently ‘exclusivist’ in this sense.

The Jewish theme of ‘the chosen race of God’, the Christian theme of ‘the elect’, and the Gnostic theme of ‘the immovable race’ are metaphors expressing the idea that two sets of people are pre-determined: the set of people who are destined to be experientially initiated into no-free-will, and the set of people who are destined to remain under the delusion of autonomous personal control-power.

Self-Control and the Source of Thoughts

Transformation of Self-Control Cybernetics

Self-control cybernetics includes personal agency, the separate-self construct, personal government-power, and breakdown and transformation of personal control.

Mystic-state experiential insight involves not only the self as a being-entity, but the self as a controller-entity; mystic enlightenment is about self-control cybernetics and the controller-agent (Watts 1973).

Personal control-power is largely a mental construct.

The kind of control-power I have over my future is not the type of control-power over my near-future thoughts that would allow me to avoid, change, or deviate from them.

Cognitive phenomenological dynamics about the source of personal control are fascinating, attractive, destructive, and transformative.

Controlling one’s thoughts is a difficult or intractable problem; the mind has limited power over the source from which its own thoughts arise (Wegner 1989).

A control-agent inherently tries to increase and secure their personal control-power by exploring and testing control-power.

An efficient method of enlightenment about the dynamics of control-agency is to test self-control-power by deliberately supposing that loss-of-control is lying fated on the worldline ahead, and then struggling to use one’s personal control-power to avoid that potentially given control-loss event, while in the dissociative state – experiencing this basic and fundamental idea is a useful point of reference for thinking about religious questions.

The dissociative state naturally leads to testing one’s self-control in relation to time, leading to basic enlightenment about the limitations of self-control power and the nature of personal control-agency, which is a central part of the self-concept.

Mental processing in the ordinary cognitive state is structured with the ego-representation as the center of control and experiencing.

Government Metaphors for Self-Control Power

Political ideas were deliberately and strategically related to dissociative-state mystic experiencing, connected by the idea of governing or controlling power – the power of governing-control agency.

In myth, including religious myth, ‘king’ means the initiate as pseudo-autonomous controller-agent.

The mind’s natural naive initial assumption is of being a simple sovereign autonomous control-agent able to determine, create, control, avoid, and change its near-future thoughts.

Religious initiation emphasizes transformation of concepts of self-governing and personal control-agency.

The projection of the self-image as an empowered steersman is partly suspended in the dissociative state.

The god as higher-level king is present at the king’s entheogenic banquet; it is evident and manifest during the entheogenic banquet that our thoughts emanate from a hidden uncontrollable source upon which our control-power is dependent.

Myths of Control Breakdown

Mythic metaphors describing self-control cybernetics include Helios’ proud son Phaethon losing control of the horses, getting tangled in the chariot-reins, and falling to his death; drunken, out-of-control centaurs at the wedding banquet; Dionysus rescuing the pilot Acoetes from Dionysus’ destruction of the slave-taking crew; and the Golem growing tall, going berserk (out of control), and then returning to fragments of clay.

A crisis of personal existence is a central event in transformative altered-state experiencing (Grof & Grof 1989).

Myth is about control breakdown, transformation, and restabilization.

Jewish mysticism has often involved a perilous transcendent death experience in the mystic state (Fishbane 1994).

The Hidden Source of Thoughts

The controller part of oneself is profoundly dependent upon and subject to the hidden source of thoughts.

External Controlledness an Observational Datum

One’s thoughts are perceptibly controlled by an alien, invisible force outside one’s realm of control-power.

A basic, given sensation and experience in the mystic state, an observational datum to be explained, is that one’s thoughts are vulnerably controlled by something outside one’s own local power-wielding agency – an alien, distinct, invisible controller-force outside one’s local domain of control-power.

It is a basic sensed experience and fundamental observational datum in the dissociative state, that the mind is in some profound, significant, frightening, and threatening sense, helplessly and vulnerably controlled by or injected by something outside its power.

Loose Cognition Shows External Controlledness

Dissociative-state initiates feel the source of their thoughts isn’t themselves, but some hidden, external force, as if emanating from some mysterious underground spring in a cave.

During loose cognition, the source of thoughts is revealed to be external to the personal control area in the mind.

Dread of Controlledness

The heart of the spiritual divine encounter is trembling dread and fear of control-vulnerability stemming from the mysteriously uncontrollable origin of one’s thoughts.

The most profound fear is the fear of one’s thoughts being vulnerably controlled by some hidden force outside one’s power: this is metaphorized as fear of God or fear of being possessed, bewitched, or abducted by an alien force.

Metaphors for Dependence on the Mysterious Thought-Source

The remoteness, separateness, and hiddenness of the newly sensed force of determinism or principle of Heimarmene – timelessly pre-set and unchangeable thought-injection – is commonly experienced metaphorically: as a commanding voice, remote scientist, witch or sorcerer, fatal enchantress, spirit-creature, otherworldly elf, demon, angel, deity, wrathful angry god, compassionate rescuer-deity, Demiurge, celestial prison gatekeeper, monster, overpowering serpent, devouring dragon, alien, machine, irresistible whirlpool, attractor beacon, force-beam, controlling ray, or black hole.

King Pentheus versus Dionysus as Alien Control-Source

The ecstatic-state experience is fundamental to the Dionysian religion, which was native to Greek culture despite the description of Dionysus as ‘alien’ or ‘foreign intruder’ undermining the ruling power of the ‘local’ king: Dionysus’ foreignness was a metaphorical description of consciously experiencing the separate, transcendent control-level, not intended as literal historical reportage of mundane-realm events.

Achilles Heel

Achilles’ Heel is the mind’s lack of control over the source, origination, or emanation of self-control thoughts – the point of vulnerability for the transient, temporary, ‘mortal’ self-concept.

Killing, Already Died, Rebirthing

The dissociative-state revelation that higher-order power stands over the source of our control-thoughts is described as killing, rebirthing, and rendering deathless or immortal (athanatos) the initiate, making them mature or “perfected” in that they have already died as an autonomous moral agent.

Upon control-level splitting, your “life” (vital control-power) is sensed and felt to be drained away, removed into the hands of an utterly hidden, mysterious force – a sadistic tormenting demon, a sinister mysterious alien, non-sentient master-machine of severely doubtful reliability, a wrathful angry god out to prove a point at your expense, or a compassionate benevolent deity.

Experiencing Dependence

If you adhere to the belief that you do not have the type of control over your near-future thoughts that would allow you to avoid, change, or deviate from them, then you experience total dependence on something, and an interesting kind of absolute powerlessness, particularly when those thoughts build up into the circularly attractive and captivating idea of control-loss.

Religious conversion is a trembling, desperate turning and change from the idea of simple self-reliance on oneself as sovereign controller (an autonomous self-governed ‘law unto oneself’), to acute awareness of being dependent on the hidden source of one’s own pre-given and substrate-embedded thoughts.

When the mind is in the altered state, it becomes conscious that its control power is profoundly dependent on something outside its region of control; this is the experience of being possessed and controlled in one’s innermost core by a hidden, external, uncontrollable force.

Perceiving the split between control-levels causes alarm and panic in an effort to retain control and avoid potential dreaded, harmful thoughts.

Salvia divinorum reveals the non-autonomy of personal control-power.

Some Ayahuasca drinkers fearfully cross themselves and pray for mercy before taking the Eucharistic potion (Shanon 2002).

When control levels split, the agent experiences being a helpless puppet whose strings are pulled by determinism.

Altered-state-based Philosophy experiences the uncontrollability of thoughts, understanding first-hand and immediately the sense in which it is experientially certainly and unavoidably true, that one’s thoughts are controlled by an invisible controller-force outside the local domain of control-power.

Conversion or metanoia is the feeling and recognition of helpless dependence, upon comprehending one’s vulnerability to the threat posed by the uncontrollable source of one’s thoughts.

Control Concerns in Religion

Greek culture including myth and tragedy was concerned with Necessity and the nullification of the sense of autonomous control-agency (Vernant & Vidal-Naquet 1972).

When Western and Eastern religions are understood as entheogen-induced control-revelation, the claim of a significant difference of emphasis between the religions collapses.

Religious initiation is mental model transformation regarding control-agency.

Experiencing Determinism Produces Instability

Determinism brings control-breakdown.

Cybernetic level-splitting and control-limitations is more the point than whether block-universe determinism is the case.

Self-control seizes and becomes unstable in the light of comprehending timeless determinism with a given, pre-set future.

The clear need to examine and confront our dependent puppet-like status causes distress, anxiety, panic attack, or self-control seizure.

The mystic-state perception that near-future thoughts are permanently pre-set occurs together with the sensation of not wielding significant steering-control over one’s train of thoughts, accompanied by a strong feeling of being caught in a trap of helplessness and vulnerability.

‘Determinism’ becomes essentially identified with the threatening, frightening experience of the destabilization of personal control in light of the unavoidability of one’s near-future thoughts however terrible and harm-laden those thoughts might be.

Believing and sensing we’re subject to timeless determinism causes self-control instability, impending doom, and harmful destruction.

Autonomous or sovereign personal control agency becomes problematic in light of the principle of Fatedness (White 1997).

The mind has the potential to distrust its own control-source and “blind” machine-like deterministic fatedness.

Contemplating timeless determinism and utter dependence on permanent, unchangeable, pre-set thoughts inevitably coming your way presents a vulnerability that threatens to lead into inescapable seizure, panic, and chaotic control-instability breakdown.

The mind’s local control-agency becomes distressed and apprehensive about whether and how it can retain control, upon turning attention around and perceptibly recognizing its vulnerability to thought-coercion and control-instability, and seeing the illusory aspect of personal autonomous power.

Altered State Sensing of Determinism Causes Instability

Sensing and believing in timeless determinism in the dissociative state brings control-chaos and self-control cybernetic instability.

In the garden of Gethsemane just prior to the court trial, Jesus began to be very distressed, amazed, agitated, fearful, and troubled, saying like the elect initiates as though of a necessary poisoning of the lower self, “Father, remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what Thou wilt.”

In the altered state, determinism is experienced as an alien mysterious force distinct from yourself, trumping personal control.

In the loosened, altered state, the normally hidden dynamics of control-agency become vividly obvious, especially control’s dependence on the uncontrollable origination of thoughts.

Experience, Metaperception, and the Type of Control-Power

We do not have the type of control over our near-future thoughts that would allow us to avoid, change, or deviate from them, because of the illusory nature of time and the relationship of control to the time dimension.

Metaperception shows mental constructs inalterably frozen in spacetime, with no type of power that can alter future thoughts.

Return of Stability as Transcending Determinism

Myth is about the cessation of the feeling of control-power while experiencing determinism, and transforming one’s concepts of control-agency.

The effective restoration of self-control stability and the return of the ordinary state of consciousness are metaphorically described and allegorized as a transcendent journey past the boundary of cosmic determinism or Necessity.

Snake-Train, Jewish and Christian Metaphors

Religious myth metaphorically describes the perilous collapse of apparent personal power in light of one’s snake-shaped, determinism-ruled train of thoughts, and the transformed restoration of practical personal power.

The Rational Thought-Coercion Trap

The pre-set givenness of thoughts produces a rationality-based realization of the threat of vulnerability to harmful loss of control and thought-coercion.

Levels of Control

A vertical 2-level legal and moral relationship applies to all controller/agent scenarios: master/slave, commander/soldier, child/doll, programmer/robot, author/character, puppetmaster/puppet, creator/creature, and virtual-world creator/virtual agent.

Enlightenment is about seeing and understanding the aspects in which personal separateness and autonomous personal control-power are illusory.

The ‘lower self’ is the local locus of control, initially considered as though its own source, simple and independent.

Mystic religion is concerned with establishing a relationship with the hidden source of the thoughts that mysteriously arise inside the mind.

Levels of Control in Comparative Religions

The plant-induced dissociative-state reformation applies to all religions, uniting the authentic core of religions under the true “monotheism” (the preeminence of the higher control-level over lower control-level agents) whether the higher control-level is labeled as Isis, Zeus, Jupiter, JHVH, God, Mithras, Mary, Allah, the Tao, or other labels for higher-order control which local control-agency is subject to.

Actual religion is drug-accessed, leading through self-control seizure to regeneration of the mind’s self-system, producing a mental model that recognizes our quasi-autonomous self-control through time as merely a secondary level of control-power, with the Creator (or Tao or Ground of Being) or an ultra-transcendent level as the primary level of controllership (the Prime Mover).

“Jesus is Lord” means that the Jesus figure is the lower-level avataric representation of the higher-level controller that is the ultimate source of all our thoughts.

Mithraism tells of a pact between the sun as ruler inside the material cosmos and the hypercosmic sun as higher-order ruler outside the material cosmos, representing the reconciling of local control agency with the meta-controller.

Sol is overpowered and undermined by the power of the hypercosmic sun or Mithras, because any power Sol wields is given to Sol by the hypercosmic sun.

Control-Level Splitting Process

Pseudo-Unitary Control in the Ordinary State

In the ordinary cognitive state, control is not split into two levels; one always and continuously experiences oneself as a simple sovereign autonomous controller and unified local locus of control, as a sensation and feeling, even when abstractly reasoning that in theory, thoughts are subject to and controlled by determinism or the Ground of Being.

The non-initiate’s controllership cognitive structure is shaped into the apparent form or semblance of an simple autonomous control-power, with 1 level only.

The sense of possessing a unified, autonomous control-power is generally valid and reasonably represents reality, but it is an incomplete perception, with some aspects taken too literally and too simply; it’s an incomplete, half-developed world-model.

Control-Level Splitting in the Altered State

In the altered state, control splits into local and external centers, forming a bipartite agency and relationship where the local control-area relates to determinism as a local control source (oneself as control-agent) relates to an overall control-force (cosmic determinism).

A person’s seemingly integrated control-power splits into a present, local, but subservient level of control, and a remote, hidden, tangible, sensed, felt, master level of control.

Personal control-thoughts and control-power don’t originate from the person, but have always secretly been given to the person by the timeless block universe.

In the dissociative state, the initiate’s controllership cognitive structure is shaped as split-level control power, with local subservient control controlled by separate, isolated, unknowable, uncontrollable driving-controller.

The will exerts virtual, dependent, or secondary-level control-power rather than literal, independent, or primary-level control-power.

Control Loss

Even though entheogenic religious initiation was a prerequisite for symposium banqueting, so that participants were experienced, participants sometimes went out-of-control and would be handed the thyrssus as one possessed by the mad god Dionysus, and the horses (bouncers) would remove them.

The mind has limited power to control its thoughts.

Dissociative-state thematic concerns include overcoming anxiety and panic (Merkur 1993), ecstatic death, and prayer to restore personal stability by trusting in transcendent power over oneself.

Attractor Thought of Unavoidable Control-Loss

The dissociative-state experiential perception that near-future thoughts are pre-set and unavoidable is fascinating vulnerability that is clearly important, bewitching and attracting one’s control-thoughts like Odysseus’ sirens and like the sweet singing of the witch or enchantress Circe, who attracts and charms travellers, gives them a potion that temporarily changes their shape into swine, and then restores them with improved stature.

The mind is unable to avoid its own near-future thoughts and movements of will, including the alarming feedback-buildup thought of being drawn into unavoidable near-future, coerced loss of control.

Salvia emphasizes the fascinating, strangely attracting, fearful thought of vulnerability to thought-coercion.

The full-on experience of determinism includes the alarming vivid realization that one is utterly powerless to avoid one’s near-future thoughts, however terrible and harm-laden those thoughts might be.

With short-duration entheogens such as Salvia, wrestling with self-control power has less time to build up, but little time is needed to latch onto the idea of control-loss lying ahead unavoidably in the near-future.

I don’t have the power to exercise the type of control over my near-future thoughts that would allow me to avoid, change, or deviate from them, particularly when those near-future thoughts are about harmfully being increasingly drawn into acting out the idea of loss of control-power.

The mind in the dissociative state discovers that it is unable to control and steer away from the given near-future thoughts, which are pre-set, unmoving, and inevitable – particularly the thought of being helplessly, inevitably, and irresistibly drawn into examining the idea of near-future loss of control.

Restabilization of Control

Religious Metaphors for Control Restabilization

Greek

The restoration of control-stability is experienced as being divinely rescued, reset and restored to stability from outside one’s own local locus of power, as if a god were artificially, mechanically lowered onto the stage to transcendently resolve a humanly unsolvable problem in the plot of a tragedy by introducing a new assumption, the trans-rational assumption of ‘faith’, that that which ultimately sets and controls your thoughts is trustworthy to steer your innermost control-thoughts.

Jewish

The mind can be brought to recover stability, calming the storm and regaining self-control stability even while retaining ‘fear of God’, which is fear of the potentially destructive and harm-causing thought of inescapable control-loss lying ahead on one’s train-of-thought worldline in the near future.

Savior (Roman/Christian)

The Christian Gospel is about control restabilization and rescue from non-control, coming in from outside the local center of control-identity.

Control-restabilization has been metaphorically described as surrendering and paying obeisance through sacrificial homage or humiliation-tax, in order to placate the overpowering divine wrath, solving the fatal vulnerability to control instability.

Prayer to be restabilized from outside one’s own control-power resources is directed to a compassionate, transcendent rescuer who is positioned to pull one’s strings – a transcendent rescue from destruction.

Maria Ska Pastora rescues the person from the direly threatening wolf, which is the threat of loss-of-control or control-usurpation with hostile intent, whereas Maria is restabilization or the explicit reclaiming of formerly hidden control over one’s thoughts by the benevolent goddess.

Gnostic

Durable mental stability is a challenge and a desired goal to be achieved by transcending cosmic fatedness and metaphysically transcending change altogether (Williams 1997).

Transcendent restabilization is central to Gnosticism.

Gnostics used the theme of the Immovable Race (the timelessly pre-defined set of initiates), highlighting the theme of stability.

The completed gnostic is able to stand stably in the face of overwhelming, autonomy-undermining controllership emanating from the hidden, uncontrollable, primary control-level.

Eastern

Transcendent restabilization is found at the center of higher-order Buddhism, although obscured by mundane conduct-of-life doctrine suited for the ordinary state of consciousness.

Buddha was aided by spirits who reminded him of the countless compassionate efforts he had made on behalf of sentient beings throughout his incarnations.

Buddha recognized that it was his destiny to touch the ground in an act of resolve, causing Mara and his army of demons to instantly disperse – then he experienced enlightenment.

Restabilizing Control Through Trans-rationality

A rescuing thought is available to restabilize trans-rational belief in the harmless beneficence of the mysterious hidden source of one’s control-thoughts.

The advanced stages of religious initiation are concerned with the transcendent restabilization of personal control.

The mind has a reason-transcending capacity to save its control system from harm and destruction – a divine, rationality-transcending thought that rescues it from the jaws of destructive, chaotic control-loss.

Rescue from self-control chaos in the light of frozen-time determinism arrives the moment one believes in a non-rational supposition: a reason for stability, a ballast to regain stable self-control, a practical self-control power, despite ordinary reason’s utter inability to provide control re-stabilization.

The person who repeatedly accesses the intense mystic altered state is all-concerned with how to access divine self-control seizure and how to, in practice, recover from that deliberate fascinating breakdown by some transcendent leap outside the system or model.

A sudden restabilization results when the mind is made to acknowledge that there’s no alternative but to trust in the hidden source of its thoughts.

Total distrust of your own thought-source, mysterious as it is, is neither viable nor logically sustainable.

The life-threatening mental storm is calmed, the shipwreck is prevented, and the chaotic death of the helmsman is avoided by calling for help from the external control-center, disavowing the power to originate one’s own control-thoughts, and acknowledging the need to trust and depend on the hidden level of control.

How do you control the fearsome cosmic determinism – fearsome because it is invisible and uncontrollable, yet is positioned as the ultimate controller and giver of your thoughts?

Goal: Combine Transcendent Understanding with Stability

Myth describes intense mystic-state phenomena, including stumbling across the world-model and experience of no-free-will, and the desperate scramble for some way to recover a practical sense of stable egoic control, while also transforming control ideas to reconcile personal control with a broader world-model.

Authentic mysticism increases the mind’s survival ability when it leads to the heart of religious experiential insight, bringing a vivid understanding and appreciation of the nature of the fear and relief about impending control-loss.

Practical self-control stability is possible even while fully believing that determinism renders the person powerless to avoid or change their own potentially harmful near-future thoughts that are cast into place permanently in the timeless frozen block-universe.

The challenge for the initiate is how to eliminate ignorance about personal control and non-autonomy of the will, while also retaining stability of personal control.

The initiate grappling through a series of dissociative-state sessions that show frightening but fascinating and obviously important glimpses of determinism is centrally concerned with the question, or goal: “How can we avoid delusion while also avoiding harmful instability; how can we have both enlightenment about determinism and self-control stability?”

Sacrifice to De-escalate Battle Against the Thought-Source

The returning ruler’s offendedness and wrath at his rulership being challenged is appeased by sacrificing one’s autonomy-claim; this sacrifice demonstrates obedient allegiance and non-competition, narrowly averting destruction and danger.

The source of one’s control-power thoughts is a devastating, catastrophic threat if and as long as the mind is opposed to it: the puppet has no chance whatsoever against the puppetmaster.

Sacrificing one’s claim to sovereign autonomy and independence from frozen timeless determinism (Heimarmene, Necessity) immediately brings calm and control-stability, by the mind readjusting its worldmodel so as to recognize the meaning of mystic sacrifice and incorporate the principle of Heimarmene rather than resisting and fighting against it.

Emphatically sacrificing your autonomy-claim, acknowledging your fundamental situation of dependency on that which ultimately gives you your thoughts, brings mental peace and harmony, and calms turmoil, because as long as you persist in claiming autonomy, you have to prove your autonomy by testing the power of your autonomy and the limits of your self-control thoughts.

Mystical redemption is a release into (and restoration of) in-effect freedom, upon payment of a price: sacrificing one’s formerly assumed ultimate autonomy of personal control, and acknowledging the preeminence of the hidden, ultimate source of control.

Repudiating the autonomy-assumption and trusting in the benevolence of the hidden source of all thoughts brings a great relief, calming the storm.

Ancients controlled determinism by offering it sacrificial honors, as if to say “All-powerful cosmic determinism, I sacrifice my assumption of my own autonomous power over my train of future thoughts; I cease to rival and compete against your power, in return for your compassionate causing of me to have a non-destructive, non-wrath-subject train of future thoughts.”

Determinism or a god who rules over it (controlling it) is an uncontrollable higher-level controller, yet like in the client-patron patronage hierarchy of the Roman Empire, the lower people cooperate with the higher by offering them honors.

Grasping mystic-state meaning around uncontrollability of one’s own thought-origination assuages the enmity and wrath of god, by repudiating or sacrificing the claim to stand against the power of the source of thoughts; in effect, the wrath regarding conflicting rulership claims is directed onto one’s repudiated youthful self as though a lightning rod, resulting in a purified remnant, figured as the result of the sacrificial death of the God-given first-born son.

‘Piety’ is the disavowal of one’s own thought-origination, and the showing of loyal respect for and cooperation with an independent, more ultimate power over one’s own power, upon which one’s own power and well-being depends; ‘godlessness’ and ‘impiety’ is the assumption of personal autonomous control-power and origination of one’s own thoughts.

Sacrifice is a visible display of submissive allegiance and loyalty to that which gives thoughts, trustingly offering up and handing over your resistance to its power over you, as opposed to battling against that overpowering source.

Logic of Roman Sacrifice

Roman sacrificial altars are typically shown with a libation of concentrated, psychoactive unmixed wine being poured on the altar, which would turn the wine to smoke sent up to the gods, along with the sacrificial animal such as the unresisting, cooperative bull. The sacrificer pouring the libation has a cloth behind the head, equivalent to the billowing wind-blown cape theme in ancient art, indicating the ecstatic spiritual state.

An entheogenic sacrificial cake is shown as placed on altar, drawing a snake, to enable sending up the sacrifice.

The shoulder of the bull, as in Mithraic iconography, represents lower-level control-power, so that sacrificing the bull or bull’s shoulder represents the greatest control-power being sent up, with Mithras’ arm wielding the bull’s shoulder, and thus showing his power of control over the bull’s control-power; Mithras wrestles and overpowers the bull, being the person’s control.

The sacrificial bull means cessation of resistance to the thought-source; a holy and pure sacrifice requires that the victim repudiates their autonomous power willingly, in alignment with and in recognition of the higher-level power.

The mind is designed so that in the dissociative state, it initially wrestles against its own source of power.

When you wrestle, resist, and struggle against God’s primacy over your thoughts, you cannot win; you send up your resistance-self as a sacrifice in deference to honoring him, sending it up through a ray of smoke and light up to the gods.

Psychoactive, full-strength unmixed wine forms an opened channel of communication, an elevator shaft to send up the sacrifice up to the god, who is the controller of what happens on the lower control-plane.

Roman religion was political, but the political was entirely based in intense, altered-state, primary religious experiencing.

Political Restabilization Metaphor

Transcendent restabilization is the mystic political gospel – a rescue from the instability of self-government.

A kingdom, house, or control-system divided against itself cannot stand.

Prominent in the Roman context was the metaphor of the arrival of divine rescue, a rescue from a chaos of governance.

Mythic religion employs the dissociative experiential themes of ‘destruction resulting from resisting divinely authorized rulership’, restoring to power the disempowered king, and political turmoil and resistance followed by harmony.

The figure of Caesar was plugged into the routinized mystery-cult format utilizing ‘mixed wine’; these imperial mystery cults had initiation rites for mystai using ‘mixed wine’ heavily, along with symposium drinking parties (Pleket 1965).

The good news of the birth and victory of Caesar resolving civil war into peaceful accord, was taken up and modified in the Jesus figure.

The prospect of a hidden, separate, uncontrollable force or agent having already designed one’s entire life, near-future thoughts, and direction of will, is initially disturbing and forces a kind of surrender and truce; the hidden controller or Author is in a position of ultimate control even over one’s thoughts of resistance, and initiates a pact with oneself as an authored character, servant, or puppet – a pact to sacrifice one’s autonomy-claim in order to give honor to the hidden controller’s ultimate, though indirectly perceived, creative power over all one’s thoughts.

A pact for cooperation rather than opposition is circularly established by the transcendent level, between the person as control-agent and the divine level of control that underlies all control-agents and all their thoughts.

The Battle of Resisting the Source of Thoughts

Religious myth highlights the wrath and anger of the gods as something needing to be averted and placated.

When one hasn’t sacrificed one’s pseudo-sovereign autonomy-claim, when one confronts a given, pre-set, unchangeable future, the typical result is initially a situation of battle, challenge, and resistance.

Self-control instability and recovery through trusting, cooperative dependence on the transcendent hidden controller has been allegorized in terms of political conflict, rebellion, and rulership, including the initiate-king; planetary rulers; nations resisting Caesar’s rulership, and then attaining harmony upon accepting Caesar’s divinely mandated rule; and Caesar rescuing the Roman state from civil war and granting clemency rather than destroying those who had fought against his rulership.

King Pentheus resisted Dionysus, the foreign god coming in from outside the kingdom, a mad divine power offending the rule of the local king; then Pentheus was tricked into participating in an ecstatic-state excursion, was lifted and caught up helplessly in a tree, and was defeated and torn apart by his mother and other raving Dionysus worshippers (Esposito 1998).

Jacob wrestled with an angel all night, coming away with one leg injured, but also the desired blessing from the angel.

Our prideful notion of independent personal power is partly weakened and injured after initiation, thus the mytheme of the ‘limping, part-impotent king’.

The initiate’s first inclination is to adhere to the assumption of the autonomy of their control-power while battling against the threatening, alien, monstrous inner force of timeless determinism, but eventually a reconciled alternative way of thinking about the situation results, upon realizing that the very power one wields in resisting the mysterious, untrustworthy external control-force is ultimately given to oneself by that control-force, that prior, underlying, hidden level – the Tao, the Ground of Being, or timeless determinism.

Upon perceiving how thoughts are timelessly present in the mind, the control-agent fights as though a sovereign autonomous agent against determinism (or the hidden source of its own thoughts) – but that hidden opponent is the source that created one’s thoughts in the first place.

In Roman imperial ideology based in the dissociative state, rescue from civil war was compared to rescue from an internal battle between aspects of controllership, or levels of control, in the psyche.

The god of battling and the goddess of love – Ares and Aphrodite (Mars and Venus) – were caught together in a near-invisible net, producing the child Harmonia (Concordia).

The Puppet King or Client King

Perceiving and trusting-in the hidden, higher-level source of one’s control-power makes the initiate a puppet-king or client-ruler; resisting the source of one’s own thoughts as an alien, opposed force is a trap leading to humbling and humiliating defeat.

The entire world, across time, is filled with an empire of puppets, all driven by the same unfathomable puppetmaster, all frozen into place, including the abstract, transcendent thought of transcending cosmic determinism, sprinkled like light-sparks throughout the spacetime block.

The puzzling, isolated saying “Jesus is Lord” is easy to understand in terms of levels of control using a puppet model.

The gods do with the block-universe tree, throne, star-sphere, or block what they will; they strike down the king’s notion of autonomy and then put a triple crown on him, letting him know he’s a spacetime puppet in a chain of control-origination (transcendent God, then timeless determinism, then finally egoic control).

We’re an empire of puppet-kings even when it comes to our own near-future train of thoughts – it’s alarming to fully experientially comprehend our puppet status and the predominance of an external factor over our own personal power.

The whole world of all actions at all times is governed by that same ultimate source of all our movements of will, which ultimately underlies all semblance of independent power that individual minds, or personal control agents, claim to wield.

The world is a thousand-armed puppet world, with the initiated puppet kings accommodating their own power in faithful, obedient allegiance to that of the central imperial power, rather than opposing, competing against, challenging, and rivaling that power.

The pseudo-autonomous king undergoes a disempowering crucifixion (fastening-to-spacetime), then the realigned king is resurrected by the ultimate higher-level ruler and ascends to co-rule with that true ultimate governor of all thoughts and events throughout the spacetime block.

As emperor, Caesar governed by using puppet kings to rule client states; like Jupiter, he was king of kings, or the higher-level ruler of rulers, just as the hidden higher control-level has control-power over a person’s local pseudo-autonomous control-power.

The canonical Jesus figure was crafted to one-up Caesar’s divinization by being more closely identified with God (the all-creator and all-ruler) than Caesar was with Jupiter.

Vertical Rebellion-Guilt Transfer to the Higher-Level Avatar

Christian Sayings Solved by Puppet Model

The expression “Jesus died for your sins” is understandable in terms of levels of control using a puppet model.

The Jesus figure is the puppetmaster’s own representation in the puppet world.

The Jesus figure was portrayed in the New Testament as the earthly avatar and manifestation of the all-powerful and all-controlling Jewish creator God (Thompson 2001).

The Christian gospel is a mystic-metaphor system with a riddle, puzzle, or double-meaning of ‘religious transformation’ as moral guilt, then purifying atonement for sin through the willing sin-sacrifice of the first-born child-self.

The first-born child-self is provided by God as his property to serve as a sacrifice back to himself, to demonstrate fear of God and obedience to God’s rulership, to gain right, cooperative standing with God as the all-ruler and source of thoughts.

Roman and Jewish Themes of Rebellion and Rescue

The more Jewish component of the Gospel is a clearing of guilt-culpability along with non-control, logically fulfilling justice regarding insurrection against the higher-level ruler, in light of the metaphysics of control agency.

The Christian gospel used the metaphor of ‘punishing rebellion’ to simultaneously express several mystic-metaphor themes: political stability through autonomy-repudiating allegiance to Caesar; rescue from cosmic determinism; and moral rebellion-guilt, then a purifying atonement through sacrifice demonstrating non-competition.

Shift of Sense of ‘Sin’

Upon peak initiation, the concept of ‘sin’ is reinterpreted and revised, producing a transformed mental model which understands ‘sin’ to be a logical error about the nature of control-agency and agent-culpability.

Prior to initiation, one’s mental model is premised on ‘sin’ in the sense of ‘freewill moral guilt’; one’s initial conception of ‘sin’ is general moral guiltiness.

Moral redemption is transformative knowledge about moral agency, emphatically distinct from being moral or acting morally in the mundane sense.

In enlightenment about moral agency, there is a regenerative transformation that involves riddling switching between two networks of word-meanings.

To ‘take away sin’ is to re-attribute responsibility upward to the higher control-level, or outward from local control-agency, and to transform understanding of moral agency.

In mystic metaphor, misunderstanding moral agency is considered the fundamental sin and immorality; God was most angry about the king’s rebellious worship of idols that are fashioned out of created materials – a metaphor for taking pseudo-autonomous personal control-agency as though it were genuinely autonomous.

Vertical Atonement, not Horizontal

Vicarious atonement is a mystic metaphor about metaphysical non-culpability.

Vicarious atonement is vertical, not horizontal, as when a master commands a slave to break the law – the master is rightly punished, not the slave.

In vicarious atonement from man to an all-sovereign god-man, the shifting of responsibility-attribution and guilt-attribution is a vertical shift upward to a higher-level controller, not a horizontal shift sideways to a morally better person.

The puzzling moral logic of vicarious atonement is straightforwardly solved by applying the logic of crossing control-levels, rather than imagining atoning guilt being transferred horizontally onto Jesus as a regular man situated on the same control-level.

The Jesus figure is positioned as the avataric lower-level representation of the higher-level Creator and controller of all that happens down at that level, not as a regular citizen in an egalitarian society.

The Entheogenic Court in the Initiate’s Mind

Christianity used the visionary plant-induced dissociative state to test egoic control-power in the court of the mind, bringing recognition of the hidden role of the higher control-level as the all-powerful puppetmaster, to whom or to which all praise and blame must ultimately be attributed.

In the loose cognitive state, you experience being controlled by timeless determinism – or more generally, controlled by some separate force and external locus of control-power, thus nullifying your own locus of control-power as merely subservient and impotent (non-sovereign, a puppet-king only).

The figure of the king fastened to the cross, in punishment for being a rebel claimant to the throne, is a mystic-state metaphorical description of experiential insight about the origin of personal control-thoughts.

When it is revealed that we have no primary-level control, it follows that we have no primary-level guilt-culpability.

Crossing Control-Levels Reattributes Guilt Upwards

Awareness of control-levels cancels rebellion-guilt.

The author and creator of a virtual world places an avatar of themselves within the virtual world, claims to commit moral righteous judgment upon all agents within that virtual world, and to rightly do so, punishes their own avatar for the crimes of rebellion against the puppetmaster and all other moral crimes committed within the virtual world, reveals the logic of this, and thereupon declares the puppet-like agents as justified, cleansed, cleared, and purified of guilt and of error regarding guilt.

The puppets are initially guilty of rebellion in that they falsely take themselves to be autonomous moral agents, but the puppets are discovered to be exempted from culpability, as they awaken during moral regeneration and acknowledge their dependent, puppet status.

All culpability for the false claims of autonomy the puppets make, all rebellious claims of autonomy against the puppetmaster, and all punishment for all moral or spiritual transgressions properly reverts upward to the fault or credit of the puppetmaster.

Jesus Court Scene

In the mystic-state allegory, Bar-Abbas (son of father), who is guilty of rebellion against the ruler and who is therefore under sentence of the death penalty, is released, and the personally obedient and non-rebellious Jesus is recognized by initiates as ultimately guilty of any noninitiates’ rebellion against the ruler, instead.

If a created, guilty rebel is in God’s transcendent court along with God’s avatar Jesus, the rebel should rightly be released, becoming a released prisoner, and his crime attributed to God’s avatar.

Jesus’ sentencing and punitive death fulfills justice by properly attributing all guilt-culpability to the higher level of control, no longer mis-attributing guilt to “rebellious” (that is, pseudo-autonomous) control-agents.

Releasing a false king (claimant to autonomy), and punishing the representative of the divine in their stead, is found in the Roman Saturnalia and in Jesus’ trial by Pontius Pilate.

The puppetmaster’s own puppet representing himself must be found exclusively culpable in any court of puppets that is set up by the puppetmaster.

The substitution of Jesus for the rebel Barabbas is sensibly just, if Jesus is considered the avatar of the all-responsible all-creator and all-controller.

The Jesus figure is held to be innocent in the sense of not himself rebelling against God (that is, he never mistook the pseudo-autonomy of personal control-agents as literal autonomy), but being the Creator’s representative avatar within the created world, he ultimately was responsible or guilty for all instances of such ‘rebellion’ which did occur by other people.

As the representative avatar of the Creator and true ruler, Jesus suffered the death penalty to fulfill the omnipotent Creator’s demands of justice for the crime of our rebellious claim to sovereign autonomy of control.

For the puppetmaster to be truly just, all moral punishment and reward must be rightly directed onto and assigned to the puppetmaster’s own avataristic puppet representing the puppetmaster.

The Jesus figure as a penal-substitutionary sacrifice expresses how agents become morally clear from the guilt of rebelliously claiming sovereign autonomy, similar to Jewish sacrifice to clear ‘sin’ or guilt.

To hold that Jesus is Lord and is identical with the Creator, and that God is truly all-controller, is necessarily to assert that Jesus is all-responsible and all-culpable, and that therefore the only righteous judgment for rebellion against God’s rulership falls onto the one who authored that rebellion, God himself, punishable through his authorial avatar inside the world he created and controls.

Reformed Theology and Augustinian Compound Consistency

Reformed theology holds that first, God takes the initiative of giving grace to the elect (and of withholding grace from the non-elect), for no reason, with no moral merit or distinguishing moral failing on their part, before time began (this giving of grace is timelessly predestined); then that grace causes them to choose Jesus as savior; then finally through that process entirely initiated by God (not at all by the person), the elect are saved.

Reformed theology emphasizes the ‘penal substitution’ theme, affirming the predestination of who God gives salvific grace to, while holding to the moral culpability of created persons in practical mundane life – this Augustinian compound model is a bi-modal, metaphorical meaning-shifting technique, rather than a simply inconsistent combination of beliefs.

Reformed theology holds unregenerate created agents to be morally guilty as though they were autonomous agents, citing the mystically ironic verse about the potter which amounts to “You puppets are in no position to question the logic of your puppetmaster.”

To assert the noninitiates’ autonomous moral guilt is to encourage their delusion of sovereign agency, thus entrenching that “moral rebellion against the rule of the almighty Creator”, without yet revealing the mystic-state irony, setting a trap that is later released by transformative meaning-switching.

Blaming puppets for their guilt serves to sustain and protect the egoic, falsely pseudo-autonomous mode of personal existence, a delicate illusion which readily collapses in the light of the dissociative cognitive state.

Lucifer fell from heaven, as Adam fell, due to pride through the virtual power of his virtual free will, and justice consistent with this metaphorical meaning-mode requires that he suffer a virtual death-sentence for his rebellious autonomy-claim, a sentence which is appropriately fulfilled in the intense mystic altered state.

Compassion, Rescue, and Averting Wrath

The religious message of ‘rescue that narrowly averts divine wrath’ is the idea of being brought into a harmonious, reconciled, integrated relationship with the compassionate, beneficent, and responsive controller of all that happens, including your near-future thoughts.

Jupiter Optimus Maximus means all-good and all-powerful, as is hoped for from a protective deity when one is vulnerable to Heimarmene in the intense mystic altered state.

Gods are a personification of cosmic determinism as compassionate and responsive – responsive, thus controllable (even if ultimately control emanates from the divine back to itself).

Mythic figures such as the Jesus figure on the cross solve a terrifying and intriguing problem – wrath directed against oneself as autonomous agent.

Compassion and Wrath

Mystic-state ‘compassion’ means that that which ultimately gives you your thoughts is intimately united with you and is good or benevolent toward you, not antagonistic, endangering, or an unaware, uncaring machine run amok grinding you up in its gears.

‘Wrath’ means the threat that Fate or blind, machine-like determinism is ultimately in control of your thoughts but is irreconcilably set against your power, and is uncaring, destructive, and non-sentient, such as wrathful deities or the righteous wrath of almighty God.

Wrath, Compassion, and Making Peace

The wrath/compassion polarity is portrayed as paired deities of wrath and compassion in Tibetan Buddhism, and two traits in the figures of Kali and Jehovah, and Jesus as harsh righteous judge with Mary as compassionate intercessor.

The wrath/compassion polarity in religious metaphor indicates control-abduction and restoration upon making peace with that which has always secretly been in the ultimate position of control over one’s thoughts.

Ego Death as Strengthening

The essence of peak mystic experiential insight is perceiving the threat of harmful loss of control of due to uncontrollability of thought origination, and creatively relating to this situation in a feasible way that results in unharmed survival and the increased ability to survive under a broader range of experiential modes.

The challenge for the mind during initiation is to learn how to survive while being invaded and abducted in its innermost core as a control-agent.

A control agent becomes agitated and fearful, afraid of being a helpless puppet controlled by timeless determinism or Fate, potentially caused to think and do terrible harmful things, but deals with this fear, growing more robust and surviving it, by establishing a harmonious relationship with the higher-order thought-giver, with the agent acting as a client king or puppet king under the remote all-ruler.

For security and stability to be restored, the mind has to incorporate and accommodate itself to its status and newly perceived relationship to the higher control level, an invasion and abduction coming into the mind from the innermost core and source of one’s control-power thoughts.

First one encounters profound vulnerability to the hidden source of thoughts (divine ‘wrath’), and then a trust and alliance with that source, an essentially practical rather than rational attitude which is effective at restoring the stability and viability of personal control (‘compassion’) while preserving understanding about control-limitations (‘wisdom’).

Mystic-state purificatory ego death is inherently tantamount to a divinizing rebirth; to sacrifice the old self-conception and yet to live is to become athanatos – “non-dying” or “immortal”.

Trust, Unity, Confidence, and Harmony

Difficulty of Trusting

The mind is configured such that it can become unable to trust the hidden control-source with their own precious personal thoughts and actions: who is in control here, that can be trusted?

The Urgent Problem of Trust

Cognitive dissociation brings an urgent thought-control crisis in which reliance on one’s own local powers and resources is of no avail; to combat fear and re-stabilize mental control, trust is needed in the hidden, uncontrollable source of one’s thoughts and actions.

What reason is there to confidently trust in determinism even though determinism has the power to force you to think harmful thoughts in the near future and there is nothing you could possibly do to avoid or change those thoughts, no matter how harmful, entrapping, and irresistibly captivating?

It is fearfully inadequate – not reassuring – to think of determinism as blind uncaring machine.

The trustworthiness of determinism is not ordinary-state philosophy; this is an urgent life-or-death question in the mystic peak window, associated with trembling, fear, last-resort prayer for rescue from the looming potential personal-autonomy shipwreck or control-system crash.

Self-confidence vanishes when an outside agency is seen to hold the key to one’s personal control.

If timeless block-universe determinism is the case, as the mystic altered state experientially suggests and portrays, can determinism be trusted?

As soon as one’s control-sense splits into two levels, the trust issue is raised.

Determinism Always Controlled and Sustained You, to the Peak

There is no reason to trust the mysterious unfathomable source of one’s thoughts, other than the fact that determinism is, will be, and always has been in control of all one’s thoughts.

The mind in the altered state is made to acknowledge its profound vulnerability and come to grips with it, having no option but to trust in the true, ultimate source of all its thoughts – a source on which one’s cognitive stream has always secretly depended, by which it has been unknowingly governed, and which carried the intellect to the very peak of realization, like Balaam’s reliable donkey which he initially beats.

Determinism (Prime Mover), as The Good, Forces You to Trust It

The mystic, esotericist, or Neoplatonist holds that determinism or the source of future thoughts can be trusted – for no rational basis, but by the ultra-transcendent principle of dependent faith that whatever it is, the ultimate controller of one’s fate is Good, or is The Good.

Determinism or omni-fatedness makes us trust determinism and acknowledge its power over us; or, God takes the initiative to provide the solution by putting trust in Him into those he reveals his omnipotence to (similarly with Isis, Virgin Mary as loving, nurturing mother and Queen of Heaven, and Kali as destroyer and lover).

To Trust Oneself Is to Trust Determinism

A persons can’t trust themselves, given that the person is a helpless puppet of determinism; to trust myself to govern my thoughts is to trust determinism or Fate to govern my thoughts.

Resisting the Source of Your Thoughts Is Utmost Futility

To distrust determinism, to fear it and set your control-power against the power of determinism, is the definition of a losing battle, a conflict you are certainly bound to lose, because for the determinist, determinism is the source of all your control-power and thoughts in the first place; determinism initially battles against itself.

Trusting Is Practical

As the book of Job points out, trust in the harmless benevolence of your hidden thought-source is a practical requirement through thick and thin; the only viable attitude is an attitude of trusting determinism as the ever-source of all your thoughts.

Trusting Determinism or a Personified Deity

Trans-determinism deities provide a personified, compassion-capable alternative to trusting in machine-like determinism as benevolent.

If you can’t trust determinism (or thereby, yourself, your own thoughts, your own mind), the only possible and practical mental alternative and solution is to trust unknowable compassionate trans-determinism quasi-entities to control and drive and steer your mind, thoughts, actions, and future.

You either have to trust determinism with your thoughts, mind, actions, and near future, or, if not that, then trust a deity that controls determinism, with your thoughts, mind, actions, and near future.

Trusting Metaphorized as Family Relations

‘Compassion’ is the transcendent hope and faithful belief – beyond the possibility of a rational basis – and the commitment to the premise that a compassionate, empathetic entity like oneself is ultimately in control of one’s future thoughts: commitment to not fighting against the source of your thoughts, but trusting the source as though it were a benevolent parent (creator of oneself) and also as if a spouse (intimately united with oneself).

In Christian metaphors for transcending determinism, becoming a slave of the ultra-transcendent God instead of a slave of the Devil makes us not a slave, but a beloved and trusting child of God, sharing in God’s ultra-transcendent freedom in the spiritual realm outside the fate-ruled material portion of the cosmos.

A mothering deity figure serves to provide transcendent trust in the source of all thoughts – providing compassion, rescue, and benevolence.

Control-stability is possible through trusting in determinism as a person would trust in a loving, nurturing mother who has full control over one’s near-future thoughts.

Leaping Out of Ordinary Rationality

The urgent control-crisis problem of perceiving the uncontrollability of the source of control-thoughts is solved by transcendently leaping outside the ordinary rational but transient model of time, self, and control, adding the specific non-rational commitment to trusting that which ultimately gives thoughts, even though its nature is otherwise hidden, reigning from afar, behind the mask of pseudo-autonomous personal control-power.

The Sacred Marriage

The ‘sacred marriage’ represents the mind acknowledging that its practical controller-actions work in conjunction with a separate hidden part of oneself that’s the mysterious ultimate origin and source of thoughts.

In marriage in the Greek abduction tradition, marriage involved the themes of death and abduction of the girl, and initiation.

Metaphors for mystic-state experience and insight into self, time, and control include birth, death, climax, rape of the mortal soul by the deity, rebirth, conception, copulation, marriage, family, twins, parent and child, lovers, and reincarnation.

One’s inner control-center is experienced as passively subject to and penetrated by the hidden ultimate producer of all one’s thoughts, which attracts and overpowers the illusory and illegit pseudo-autonomous self, and then marries that self.

The metaphor of Christ rapturing-away and marrying his Church descriptively represents the revealed higher hidden control-level and how that separate locus of control-power or control-agency is accommodated into one’s mental worldmodel, with one’s own local locus of control acting as the secondary, dependent, subsidiary locus of control-agency.

The Roman soldier in Mithraism was considered a girl-turned-married-woman.

The soul is female (as the “beautiful youth” Ganymede is portrayed, as a girlish boy bringing the cup of mixed wine), and the soul of the non-initiate is a girl (not a mature married woman).

In the altered-state myth of Orpheus, Eurydice died and was abducted into Hades during their wedding.

The ‘sacred marriage’ is a metaphor for being overpowered and then placed into a new two-level relationship of personal control power.

Determinism, or the uncontrollable hidden separate controller you find that you are subject to, invades your innermost locus of control-power, as though that innermost wellspring of your thoughts is your generative organ and ego death is climax, giving birth to the self that is married to the higher, abducting controller.

The sacred marriage gives birth to the new self-concept which takes into account both levels of control-power, including the formerly hidden and secret level.

The sacred marriage of hidden and visible levels of control, producing new life, is celebrated in the wedding banquet with entheogenic mixed wine.

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About the Author

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Outtakes from the Abridged Article Draft

Some of the following outtakes are new or different than the above draft.

Thorne, R. Marihuana: The Burning Bush of Moses: Mysticism & Cannabis Experience. Portland: Clarus, 1998.

Escohotado, A. A Brief History of Drugs: From the Stone Age to the Stoned Age. Rochester: Park Street, 1999 (1996).

Drugs were the traditional method of inducing the mystic altered state.

Psychoactive plant usage has a long and influential history (Escohotado 1999).

Visionary journeying has a long and rich history (Collins & Fishbane 1995).

Buddhism is based in visionary plants (Crowley 2004).

The origin and essence of religion is the use of visionary plants to trigger the intense mystic altered state, producing loose cognitive association binding, which then produces an experience of frozen block-universe fatedness with a single, pre-existing, ever-existing future that is beyond the individual mind’s ability to control, change, or avoid that future.

Visionary plants use in religion is indicated by many metaphors for visionary plants (Entheos 2001-2002).

The nature and spirit of the New Testament and associated early Christian writings was entirely different than the modern misreading.

“Jesus is the only name by which you must be saved” was a statement against ruler cult and Caesar worship.

Only in the simultaneously drug-obsessed and drug-alienated modern era have enlightenment and salvific regeneration seemed rare, difficult, and unobtainable by ordinary people.

Rock music is a modern-era authentic but only partially formed initiatory mystery religion, though it has been disowned and alienated, dominant culture not recognizing that Rock is authentic religion.

Only fragmented artifacts of art and popular culture in the modern era adeptly reflect the concerns and experiences of the esoteric tradition, such as the Matrix movie series.