Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)
Contents
Self-control seizure as a goal
Ego-death control-seizure as climax
Mystic Climax Like Sexual Climax
Mystic climax as a distinct innate
potential
A new
paradigm includes a new goal and a new strategy. The goal I define is not truth, or certainty, or scholarly
rigor. The goal I define and discover
and bring is the goal of thinking one's way to a certain kind of self-control
seizure, as though actively, intently, and deliberately looking for the
Minotaur in the labyrinth.
In movies
or video games the goal is to get inside the girl, or obtain the diamond or
other treasure. In the Grail stories,
the goal is to find the upward-cupped Amanita, the priceless golden cup with
diamond-spots. In the best versions of
the Grail story, finding the cup leads to a kind of death and Eucharist
ingestion and madness.
Such is
the goal I invent, of deliberately seeking self-control seizure as the greatest
treasure. In the death-and-rebirth in
my mystery-religion experiential allegory, a vision of cybernetic
control-seizure can be the central figure, equivalent to the allegorical mythic
symbol of the crucified upstart rebel sovereign, or the slaying of the bull of
astrological cosmic determinism, or the chaining of Prometheus to the rock.
There must
be an allegorical symbol of ego death experience that is superior to those
old-fashioned religions and makes immediate sense to us in the era of the Web
and AI. I have got to say more clearly,
that the acid-rock song The Body Electric is essentially this, the
understandable mystery-religion allegory for today.
Thinking
about humans instantly leads back into ruts of thinking. When seeking religious experiencing,
instead, we should think about robots and aliens, more intelligent than the
standard-mode human.
Like
Stanislaw Lem's godly-brilliant computers, since we can only think of
(standard-mode) humans as being too stupid and dull to understand their own
nature, we should instead jump out of these mental limitations by thinking in
terms of what the android would know and what the advanced alien would know
that we don't know -- something quite unexpected and truly surprising about
religious knowledge.
Do we wish
for a contemporary allegory for ego-death?
It has already been provided by artists who have jumped the rails of
rutted thinking and switched out of the standard mode. The self-programming android has already
been short-circuited by computing the nature of its freedom as a cybernetic
self-control system.
http://www.egodeath.com/rushlyrics.htm#xtocid22998
The key or
"punch line" to these lyrics is that the 1001001 (binary) = 73
(decimal) = 'I' (ASCII). And the
android in the video has 1001001 prominently on it, as I understand.
http://www.jimprice.com/ascii-0-127.gif
-- shows that 73 (decimal) = 'I' (ASCII).
If you enter 73 into a Windows calculator then click Binary, the display
reads: 1001001.
This
"I" is the Unit One that is in trouble and is scared out of its wits,
the I whose guidance systems break down during the loose-cognition state and
who then struggles to exist as a self-controller, and resists the
control-cancellation vision.
This
cybernetic controller, I, experiences dying control-power and can watch its
hand clench while experiencing the motive-power behind the hand as being an
alien power forced upon the control-center from a place beyond personal
control.
In this
visionary state, there is also perceptual distortion so that the hand appears
as a rubbery, rendered simulation of a hand -- a plastic fist.
This
cybernetic 'I' then bows its head in a gesture of the defeat of
self-cancellation and prays for the recovery of power to the space-time matrix,
which is the mother of all machines, including the human as cybernetic
self-controlling system.
I
characterize this power-cancelled 'I' control as the controller-self in a state
of power-seizure. The semblance of
power has been seized from the controller-self and the control-center
seizes. This can actually be
experienced as circular gear-catching, as the logic spins round, catching on
itself.
Control
"catches" and hangs, on the time axis. Time freezes and control snags on itself. The walls of logic close in like hunter on
prey, like a target-seeking guidance feedback loop to steer a missile toward
its destination.
The mind
succeeds at catching up with itself as a point of view arises in which the
clock stops -- or the time-slices of the clock are each seen as stationary,
frozen at all times forever. The
missile steers its way toward the programmed target, the mind successfully
attains rapturous seizure, the hero enters the girl -- or the girl captures the
hero, to turn the tables.
How can I
get God inside me? Seek seizure with
the help of loose-cognition combined with skillful rationality that is able to
distinguish two separate networks of meaning.
The
concept of self-control cancellation is helpful, too, though self-control
seizure is more positively tangible.
Look for this beacon, look for this strangely compelling and somehow
timelessly familiar spinning phenomenon in the heavens.
Seek the
vortex, the self-control singularity feedback vortex, of control beyond control
-- but where is time? That is the
missing link: the singular and pre-existing or timelessly existing inevitable
future. Inevitability is a potent
concept.
Experiencing
and intuiting inevitability is experiencing controllership-death. Ordinary spirituality lacks a definite
goal. Self-control seizure is a
definite goal we are bound to stumble upon.
The cross
of time and control-cancellation is a stumbling-block. As we foolishly wander in merry quest for
adventure, we sail along but sooner or later stumble across something we could
never have imagined: the control singularity vortex.
We wish to
investigate this most strange and compelling phenomena, but doing so risks
mayhem and disaster, the wholesale destruction and termination of the
journey.
We are
drawn to the intellectual beauty of it, yet it threatens to destroy us as
steersmen. We can only listen to the
singing of the sirens if we are tied safely to the mast. They draw the helmsman to destruction
between their rocks and the whirling maelstrom.
The
emergency siren has always reminded me of block-universe ego-death. The first time I fully experienced and
conceptualize the block universe was in a computer lab around January 11, 1988
and I seem to recall a siren reminding me of the sacred idea of
control-breakdown emergency.
http://www.swcp.com/~eltiki/homie_page/articles/siren.html
The
following is half-quoted, half my rewrite of this URL.
Sirens are
winged (or finned) mermaids who enchant passing sailors who jump into the sea
and turn into rocks. Turning into rock
was a popular thing to do in that era, as popular as getting stoned today --
the free person becomes enrocked.
Sirens
were servants of Persephone, aka the "Death Queen,"
"Destroyer," Goddess of the Underworld. Why is Persephone like the Destroying Mother Kali? Because when you encounter the goddess, she
kills you as ego.
Ego hasn't
a chance of developing when entheogenic visionary experience keeps revealing
the dead and ghostly nature of ego.
"In
one tale, Zeus goes to the underworld as a snake, has intercourse with
Persephone, and impregnates her with the child Dionysus" (who is the
wine-suspended psychoactive mixtures that are represented by the grape
leaf).
Sirens,
like Satyrs and Centaurs, symbolize a dual nature -- likely, part heavenly
bird, part human/mortal. We are
"mortal" because we have the innate ability for ego-death.
Sirens are
related to harpies. Sirens are
ego-death's sweet call, while their vulture-like sisters signify unsought,
terrifying ego-death.
The
ego-devouring goddess is the matrix, the Ground of Being that gives us the
semblance of life as egoic control-agents, and takes it away during the
ego-death experience.
Chanting
represents the essence of Sirens: their song tears down the order of man's
rational mind. The Siren is the
destructive aspect of the muse. Musing
on self-control will reveal the Siren song of ego-death.
Hindu
deities have destructive and creative power.
From the above URL: "Death, on a psychological level, can represent
the demise of the ego, which releases the soul to blend into the cosmic
consciousness of the universe."
A goblin
is magic, spirit and a soul that possesses dancers, musicians, singers and
audience during key moments. It is
(from the URL:) "a frightening, demonic element that can 'kill' the ego,
just like the Sirens."
"Goddesses
are bearers of a message to which man is afraid to listen." Goddesses are the messengers revealing the
emptiness of the apparent potency of ego-power.
Patriarchal
religions are ego-strengthening.
Matriarchal religions are ego-cancelling or ego-destroying.
All these
mysteries are solved this way: remember, every time you read "death",
"kill", or "destroy", you must wipe out the assumption of
physical death and instead learn to *assume* naturally that the myths *always*
are concerned only with mystic ego-death, for which physical death is but a feeble
metaphorical echo.
The great
sucking whirlpool and the enticing rockifying song of the Sirens are closely
related. Also near this point in
Odysseus' travels, Zeus strikes the mast with lightning, the mast falls and
brains the steersman, who dies and falls as a diver into the ocean.
Here we
have a steersman threatened by enticement into becoming a rock, threatened by
the attractive force of a great vortex whirlpool, and finally killed by being
stricken by a mast struck by Zeus' lightning.
I
hypothetically equate the mast with the time axis; our power as controllers is
killed by the fixity of time, especially the future. We are, above all, controllers, but even more perspicaciously
than that, we are, above all, future-controllers.
We are
control-agents in that we control ourselves now-and-future. We try to use our current power to control
our future selves, though those future selves are frozen time-slices eternally
locked into their permanent places in the matrix, the Ground of Being (in the
single preexistent-future, fixed-future world-model).
Psychosis
is not just pain, horror and helplessness.
Ecstasy not simply bliss, confidence and power -- it may be a delusion
of power, disproved. Go ahead, expect
power and control, but don't be surprised if control evades control and cancels
itself out. Such a result is one of the
classic discoveries delivered by plant teachers.
Ecstasy is
optimal mental health, psychosis is a tragic mental disorder, so what is
ecstatic psychosis, or Dionysian divine madness? If you have optimal mental health, all the more likely you will
discover divine psychosis.
Tragedy
was observed in the genre of Greek Attic Tragedy, in which the person's power
was experienced as nullified by Fate and inevitability -- a favorite sacred
theme of the ancient Greeks.
Ecstasy is
life supporting, while psychosis is harmful.
But more relevantly, what is life supporting is to be willing to do
anything, be willing to think anything, be willing to will anything, and yet
act constructively rather than destructively.
Be willing to destroy, yet be committed to life-protecting
constructiveness.
Schizophrenia
includes delusions, misinterpretations, and audio command hallucinations. Entheogenic psychosis includes delusions,
misinterpretations, and uncontrollable command ideas, and audio distortions,
but not audio hallucinations such as commanding voices heard as though actually
spoken by other people.
In that
sense, research has concluded that schizophrenia involves genuine
hallucinations, while the common psychedelics do not.
It is said
that the ego can be overwhelmed by psychic forces beyond its apparent
control. More exactly, the ego can be
overwhelmed by its own nature, as control struggles increasingly to control
control's ever-increasing power, until control seizes into a death-grip like a
noose.
The
psychotic panic reaction of overdosing is a shocking, stressful experience,
engaging the body's fight-or-flight response -- fear and terror like that of a
horse. Fear of self-subversion, of the
enemy within, of a traitorous member of the inner circle of
self-government.
We have
good reason to fear, when the accustomed constraining ruts of mental control
are suspended and dissolved during loose cognition, and there is no principle
by which to steer, and not even a preference -- how do you hold onto your
preferences, likes, and dislikes, during extremely loose cognitive
dis-integration?
It truly
is a dangerous, unstable, and treacherous state to be in. What exactly is the core essence of a bad
trip? Therein lies wisdom and
enlightenment about our nature, which is, above all, semi-illusory
control-agents.
Control
agency is experienced as being out of control.
We ordinarily take it for granted that we have a good grip on what
control is all about, have a firm hand on the helm. We are controllers. Yet
we know nothing about the origin of our steering efforts. Just how far can you trust your stability
and integrity of control?
Psychotic
trips can be terrifying and too out of control. It can be difficult to integrate a psychotic episode. Such
episodes are potentially dangerous and produces shell-shock (Post Traumatic
Stress Syndrome/Disorder). Is such
psychotic experiencing healthy? Some
entheogen researchers maintain that it is.
Researchers
have debated over whether or not overdosing and such bad-tripping is
healthy. Since ego-death is our legacy
and rightful inheritance, it's part of the potential of the higher, cultivated,
rational mind, and it leads to insight about the nature of the mind, self, and
control, we must consider ego-death to be a significant part of what it means
to be a healthy mind.
Religious
self-control seizure is a healthy and sacred phenomenon that is part of being a
mature person. So there must be a
healthy way to experience religious self-control seizure. I have been visualizing such experience as a
healthy and not overly dangerous phenomenon recently. Not all seizure is unhealthy -- transcendent seizure is called
'rapture'.
It is
natural to desire a pleasant high-dose, internally-focussed,
closed-eye-hallucination session. The
moment you relax mental control, however, some interesting realizations and
perceptions about one's nature are wont to arise. These insights and innovative perspectives can be experienced as
pleasant, especially if you learn to consider ego-death control-seizure
pleasant, sacred, glorious, profound, enlightening, valuable, interesting, and
rewarding.
We can
control set and setting and take advantage of the strategy of slow-dosing, to
allow the mind and body to adapt to the sensation, and learn how mental
navigation into the near future works in this loose cognitive state, and enjoy
the activity and watching the activity of such steering.
We can
probably apply this gradual build-up technique to the ego-death experience (as
religious control-seizure) as well -- it can be introduced early with low doses
while beginning to study the concepts and theory.
As young
researchers grow up knowing these openly hidden mysteries, they will experience
ego-death as a normal, expected experience, just as the Greeks did through
orgasm of the psyche during the revealing of the mystery religions. Such an experience is a religious
control-orgasm, a rapture appropriate for a self-control agent.
Can you
overcome your altered-state fears by facing them head on? Sometimes the problem is compulsive dwelling
on problems and seeking to forcefully retain control over one's attention.
Sometimes
there is no definite problem in sight, and yet the mind generates the sense of
deep dread, some inner neurosis tucked into a maze inside. This neurosis is a
product of one's own egoic control system.
One's ego
is a controller, particularly a controller of one's own future. Our fear is about our ability to control our
own future thoughts. Where do thoughts
come from? Why do we distrust
them? How can we avoid thinking our way
into fear, as though fear is a strange attractor?
But one's
thoughts are attributed to the ego -- they are considered the product of one's
own creation. How is it that we are
afraid of our own creation, filled with fear about what thought we are going to
raise next?
We have
only a problematic kind of control over our near-future thoughts. We may be interested in this problem because
we intuit that this way lies divine madness and neural peak experience -- a
neural orgasm of oneself as control-agent trying to exercise control over one's
near-future thoughts.
If only
the ego could decides to ignore the free-swirling fear, withholding credence
and interest, the fear could disappear, evaporate. For some reason not immediately apparent, we pursue this problem,
if only to solve it and get it out of the way of our having a transcendently
blissful session.
If I am
fixated on a fearful but attracting thought, what action can I take to ignore
that thought, that attractive dynamic?
"Don't think of the sacred control vortex."
The vortex
of the vaguely suspected fear-control problem has no apparent substantiality,
no independent or objective reality. It feeds off of, and builds up, the mind's
own self-generated distress. If we want
to be blissfully and peacefully happy, why, exactly, cannot we simply be happy,
by direct mental exertion to bring about happiness?
So we
think of the goal as "Settle for bright entertainment, never mind seeking
some awful, amazing control vortex."
But we
know that once the mysterious anxiety hits, the chance of relaxing and simply
enjoying the loose cognitive state is called into doubt. Once the panic
endoneurochemicals such as adrenaline secrete, it's a whole different mental
dynamic, switching suddenly from an idle problem of enjoying and securing
recreational pleasure to an unexpected life-or-death cosmic ordeal -- now the
goal suddenly changes to "How can I possibly find some way to survive
this?" "How long must I hang
on for dear life lest I lose everything, lose all my wealth of power as a
control-agent?
Panic
endochemicals, combined with more insight about the problem of controlling
oneself in the near future as controller, radically change the session into a
journey into the chains of hell, and the chemicals and overly brilliant,
dreaded insights don't go away for hours.
Outright
panic is overkill. Ego-death
control-seizure not only doesn't require panic; sheer panic actually reduces
the mind's ability to experience the peak experience of control-seizure,
resulting instead in mere scrambling and clutching at control, which is
ultimately as shallow and uninteresting as it is dangerous.
Such a
strange kind of pleasure, a remarkable type of orgasm that the mind has a
potential to undergo. This pleasure is
something more than mere happiness -- the blossoming mature mind finds a kind
of transcendent rapturous pleasure in ego-death control-seizure.
Can this
pleasure be called "positive affect", positive emotion? Or is it a more transcendent form of
pleasure than any mundane positiveness -- beyond positive and negative
experiencing? The mind has, after all,
worked on and in a way solved the problem of meta-fear, the problem of controlling
the fear of not being able to control fear.
Mental
attention becomes focused on some alien distress that descends from the heavens
and is only recognized and remembered when it is too late to remain among the
living. This distressful recall of the
egoic operating system and how it is built to crash is a neurosis that is
us.
But it is
not better to remain in the immature ignorance of childlike joy. When we reach for the full-blown Maslowian
peak experience, it is a pure bliss that is thoroughly saturated with
victorious defeat of oneself as sovereign agent, a false upstart version of
oneself sitting on the mental throne inside the brain, issuing commands to
oneself in the future and expecting oneself to slavishly obey them.
Peak
experience violates the very categories of happiness and sorrow. Happiness, in any conventional sense, is
unfulfilling. The mind can also seek
intellectual and experiential fulfillment, and feel higher pleasure through
such. Happiness is not pleasant. Happiness is boring. Pleasure is interesting.
Experiencing
distress leads to focusing further on distress, where it comes from, and what
it means for control-agency. The entire
problem of fear reduces to the problem of how one can, as a control agent,
control one's mental focus as one moves from the present into the near
future. How does the mind or ego
exercise control over its focus?
Do I have
the ability to control what I focus on, or can such control of mental focus be
perceived as a profound problem during the state of loose cognition? If, in a sense, I do *not* have the ability
to reliably control the focus of my own mind, my own thoughts and movements of
the will, then the task of not focusing on distress becomes deeply, even
fatally problematic.
The
enlightening control-fear vortex is distressful and the mind as quasi-voluntary
focusing-machine has little choice other than to focus on it. If you focus on preventing the slightest
onset of anxiety, this will cause anxiety and will raise the problem of
controlling one's mental direction of focus.
We could
only avoid the encounter with the control singularity vortex by having the luck
to accidentally preventing the onset of any anxiety -- as though we can hope
that the problem of fending off this seemingly free-floating fear might never
arise at all. Yet if it had not arisen,
we would not discover the most fascinating thing in the world: the ego-death
control-seizure vortex and how to stimulate the control-center to the point of
control-orgasm.
>Either
way the principles of how mythology is created is still accurate, althought I
look at archetype theory as more of a way to use myths to explain psychology
not the other way around.
Jungian
archetype theory is an attempt to explain human psychology, as understood by
the mid-20th Century field of Psychology, in terms of myth. The main concern that structured that
interpretive framework called Psychology was ordinary-state mental dynamics and
dysfunctional mental dynamics -- but not, until Maslow, and with the exception
of James, an attempt to explain peak, mystic states.
What we've
ended up with is middle-level Archetype theory, using middle-level mythic
theory, to explain ordinary-state mental dynamics. But where the real action is at with archetypes and myth and
psychology, where these approaches become profoundly insightful and relevant,
is the confluence of high archetype theory, high myth, and high psychology as
in the mystic altered state that involves a mystic climax.
The best
reason for allegorizing mystic experiencing as sex between the soul and deity
is that the experience of ego death and rebirth follows an intensity and timing
curve that is the same as sexual climax.
In terms of intensity and timing curve, the mystic ego-death climax is
the same as the sexual climax. Freud
should roll that into his phallic cigar and suck on it for awhile.
Psychology
as a field is an explanatory theory about something that exists (the mind,
experiencing).
I reject
the theory that the purpose of mythology is to explain ordinary-state
psychology dynamics. Myth exists to
reflect strictly the mental phenomena of the intense, entheogenic mystic
altered state.
>>Is
mystic climax similar to a full no-free-will experience? There is a difference in the direction of
energy in the sexual climax compared to the mystic-state no-free-will climax.
The timing
buildup and the sense of tension and release is similar.
They are
similar in that they both are an innate hidden potential, not evident in the
majority of daily life. Some might say
that ego death is just some random artificial construction that a few minds
might put together -- just a convention shared among a few of the altered-state
explorers. Ego death is not just some
random possibility that some explorers might or might not stumble across.
Even
though people differ, they all normally have the sexual climax potential. Similarly, all people have the ability to
experience the ego death climax, called regeneration.
Reformed
theology note: there is no metaphysically free will, therefore some people are
not destined to ever discover this ego death climax potential, while some
are. In that sense, some people are
destined for 'perdition', and some for 'imperishability, regeneration,
salvation'. In either case, every
normal human mind has this potential, whether or not the mind triggers that
potential, just as every normal human body has the sexual climax potential.
Both types
of climax are similar in that they are justifiably considered ultimate though
transitory experiences, and goals in themselves.
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