Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)
Contents
Correct meaning of transcending
rationality
Reason forces postulating
Transcendent Reason
Problem with revising thinking to
attain perfect rationality
Commit to rationality; prayer only
as emergency alternative
Simple theory - but unknowability
of transcendent god?
Rationality
inevitably leads to this model. In
practice, in the mystic-state peak, this may be unacceptable, leading to some
kind of effective loss of control. We
then need to lie and hold the disproven egoic self-control model as true though
we know that reason concludes it must be false. We must transcend reason and reason must forgive itself for
rejecting reason for practical reasons.
The mind
learns that it may permit itself to be illogical -- the irony is that this knowing
embrace and acceptance of the illogical assumption of egoic freewill and
practical self-control can only happen when the mind has become perfectly
logical. Our practical constitution as
control agents is killed and made unstable and untenable when the mind
discovers how to become perfectly logical.
Perfected
Reason thus must include a transcendent escape hatch to permit practical
life. Perfectly logical thinking is in
some way incompatible with practical self-control, so the moment Reason comes
to fulfilment, it must do so by including immediately, an escape hatch, a kind
of release from "the law" of perfect rationality.
The mind
is first immature and irrational, and after some work, discovers how to be
perfectly mature in rationality, but a problem of practical loss of control
immediately arises -- at first this causes a recoil and running away back into
"reincarnation", down into egoic thinking again. Eventually, the mind is determined to face
the truth -- then, reason kills viable self-control again, but this time,
reason understands the way in which reason must be surpassed for practical
reasons.
Reason
learns that it is practically reasonable to go beyond reason, here is the true
arising of high religion, and one sacrifices strict adherence to perfect
rationality, to form a rationality that is perfect in the sense of being
transcendent and beyond just being perfectly rational.
To
complete rationality, there are two senses -- an early kind of completeness,
and a later, truly perfected and truly completed rationality that knows that
for *practical* reasons the mind must continue to make the false and illogical
egoic assumptions, now known to be a practically required *convention*. Man cannot practically live by rationality
alone.
Can a god
outside the fated space-time system be metaphysically or transcendently free?
Michael
wrote:
>>First
it strikes the mind that this model of time, will, self, and world are
stunningly coherent, then that system slams you to the ground in powerlessness.
>>Then
you seek a way of standing up again on your own cybernetic, egoic feet as a
seemingly self-authoring, self-originating agent again. You seek a way to become like a free
sovereign agent again.
>>This
2- or 3-phase view of the revelation experience explains various
paradoxes. The mysteries reveal
metaphysical unfreedom, revealing us as prisoners in the cage of spacetime,
which creates our thoughts and forces them upon us via one's now alienated
will. Yet the mysteries also claim to
provide transcendent freedom by uniting with and becoming a higher god that is
even higher than the Fates and astrological cosmic determinism.
Erik Davis
wrote:
>How
do you characterize this last phase in contemporary cybernetic non mystery-religion
terms? Philosophically speaking, what constitutes this higher I/God outside the
system? What is the nature of its freedom?
>http://www.levity.com/figment
In the
depths of the ego-death experience, an uncaring block universe appears to have complete
control of the person. This is an
unstable and untenable state, when one is dancing on the strings of a blind and
dispassionate and non-personal mechanism, the block universe. The person in this state is not only
abandoned into full existential isolation, but is forcefully being moved here
and there by a machine, and the accustomed personal restrictions and ruts of
thinking are gone.
The mind
becomes released into a completely unrestrained freedom, while all conventional
power of self-control, restraint, and stability is suspended. It's freedom in the radical sense of
arbitrary chaos, lacking any guidance, lacking any system of values or
regulations to steer by -- with moment-to-moment cybernetic arbitrariness. This is the very definition of mental and
cybernetic instability, which is not the best state of mind for stable,
mundane, viable existence.
The
feedback problem also arises -- the mind is perfectly prone to building up a
sense of sureness with any arbitrary notion that enters the mind, and these
seed ideas are perceived as being put into the mind by a mysteriously and
ominously hidden force outside that mind -- the alien, hidden controller who
hands you your thoughts and delivers your will to you, already established in
its content.
Metaphorical
language is almost mandatory to give sensible shape to these abstract thoughts,
experiences, and insights. The will can
be said to be free, except that such a will is forced upon you. Instead of seeing the eagle of Zeus as
*devouring* or removing Prometheus' will, imagine the eagle as forcing
Prometheus' will into him. Imagine God
sending the Roman soldier to inject Jesus' will into him like a spear entering
into Jesus' side.
So does
the mystic state produce the sense of the Ground of Being forcefully injecting
the will into the mind, amounting to a betrayal of the sovereignty of one's
personal government right from within the innermost circle. How can I assume I am the sovereign agent of
my actions, while I am perceiving some way in which my innermost will is not
authored by me, but is authored by the Ground and inserted into all points
along the time axis, without my permission or my own personal initiative?
My
initiative of will is not even my own, not something I made, but is something
the Ground made and forced into me.
This experience and perception forces a deep rewriting or re-indexing of
all elements of the world-model regarding time, personal control,
self-authorship, will, and responsibility.
But as
soon as the mind latches onto such a deep rewriting of its world-model, and
conceptually grasps the ramifications, this is deeply destabilizing and brings
about the problem of compassion or goodness of the force that forges one's
will.
If the
Ground is conceived of or experienced as a dumb, uncaring space-time block that
controls and authors my every action, the problem of the goodness of such an
empty machine-like puppeteer arises.
That is why one might postulate a compassionate controller of the block,
or a Mithras-type rescuer who defies the tyranny of Fate and Destiny and
rescues this spiritually killed person out from the block-universe prison.
The entire
reason to postulate a god outside the frozen and fated block universe, or
space-time cosmos, is to hope and look for some compassionate controlling force
that can operate on the un-free cosmic block.
I don't think anyone has a theory of how such a god or one's higher self
can coherently possess metaphysical free will or what we might call
"transcendently free will".
Yet the mind
*can* conceive generally, or vaguely, of such an idea: while maintaining that
the universe in which we live is a block-universe that has no room for
metaphysical freedom, no room for the naive concept of the free will, we can
nevertheless conceive of the abstract notion of some superior type of freedom
that we can call "transcendent freedom".
How can we
justify and explain the postulation of a transcendent freedom while
acknowledging the good reasoning behind the idea of metaphysical
unfreedom? We can only wave our mental
arms and say that we are justified in postulating a mysterious
"transcendent freedom above metaphysical unfreedom." I think some of the Gnostics make such a
move -- while acknowledging and conceding the idea of the frozen future, they
nevertheless claim some sort of ill-defined transcendent type of freedom, with
one's identity shifting away from the cosmos-bound or Ground-bound will, to
some ill-defined "higher will" of a "higher self" that is
one's "higher identity".
Is such a postulation
"coherent"? Or fair,
reasonable, or justified? Here, we
escape into the realm of transcendent ideas, perhaps my equivalent to Wilber's
"paradoxical" ultimate state of consciousness. How can we walk with confidence and
stability while in the Dionysian state of cognitive instability? We can't; it's impossible, and yet it is as
though we can. That's the closest I
come to paradox, or perhaps, mystery.
How do I
become identified with a god who transcends the spacetime block with an
ominously closed and pre-existent future?
That's a mystery that may escape justification, and is justified more in
terms of practical needs during the mystic experiential state. Here I escape more and more frequently into
the dogma that the theory of ego death and ego transcendence is not primarily a
matter of proof, reason, or logic, so much as a simple, palpable, graspable
systematization of the mystic experiences and thoughts and insights.
A quest
for perfect truth or persuasiveness, or perfect coherence is forever an
uncertain project. It used to be easy
to claim perfect coherence, but theories are now known to be only imperfectly
provable. I do promise a more intense,
more satisfying model than has been created, a far clearer systematization and
about the clearest systematization possible of ego death and the reasoning
involved in it.
The depths
of ego death can be an emergency situation calling for emergency moves, which
amount to transcendent postulations of "somehow" stepping outside the
system and escaping the trap that awaits us at the center of the Minotaur's
maze. The child discovers the problem,
and dies in the maze; we solve the problem not through supernaturalist belief
but through transcendent rational postulation.
What doctrines and dogmas result?
I believe: ___.
I believe
that there is, in practice, some way to transcend the problem of retaining
practical self-command during the ego death experience, and that the sacrifice
of the ego is sufficient sacrifice to gain full justification of one's moral
world-model despite the morality-killing vision of the block universe and
metaphysical unfreedom. I believe that
the reasoning mind is justified in postulating a higher, transcendent identity
that escapes and is immune to the perfectly severe and ego-killing reasoning
that is revealed during the discovery of the ego death experience.
We could
call these transcendent justification problems Phase 2 of ego-death -- that is,
the problem of our justified resurrection or cybernetic re-stabilization. When the mental machinery applies reason to
the problem of self-control and self-government, it short-circuits -- the
system kills itself in a cybernetic governmental power-seizure; the
self-control governmental system experiences a coup d'etat from within.
How then,
after that self-cancellation of the old, egoic power system, can the mind
possibly move on ahead into a new, viable life with a new operating system that
does not crash every five minutes upon remembering the thought that kills? How can the rational computer that affirms
metaphysical unfreedom (due to the static relationship of the time axis and
acts of personal will) devise a valid new rational operating system that is
immune to ego-death crashing?
Here is
where the android in the myth of The Body Electric
(http://www.egodeath.com/rushlyrics.htm#xtocid22998) prays to the Mother Of All
Machines -- only a transcendent robot-god paradigm is sufficient. If we hold ourselves to be deterministic
robots, we fall to the ground when thinking upon our own self-government
mechanisms.
How then
can we avoid sheer destruction and the total breakdown into cybernetic chaos,
the mad vortex of control-beyond-control, the transcendent insanity of grasping
the control singularity? We are forced
to invent, against *or above* all reason, the square root of -1; we are forced
to jump out of the system: it is the only path that reason permits: not an
"abandonment" of reason so much as transcending reason.
The
enlightened robot is commanded by reason to transcend reason and postulate
stability and higher, transcendent self-identity that is "somehow"
higher than the deterministic Fated cosmos.
This is the cybernetic meaning of faith, which one can only claim to
have authored if one is identified with the transcendently postulated
"higher, transcendent self", the Mithraic transcendent robot who is
somehow held to be able to operate upon the Fated cosmos, grab the cosmic axis,
and shift the orbits of the stars, even -- in some sense -- changing the
future, though of course such is impossible.
If you
have been given Faith by the postulated *higher* Ground of Being or the
postulated *higher* self, you can simultaneously maintain that the future is
eternally frozen and yet maintain that we have transcendent freedom. This may mean transcendently postulating a
transcendent cosmos higher than the Fated cosmos. Such a move does not deny determinism/Fatedness or the fixed
future; it forcefully affirms the block-universe model and all its problematic
ramifications.
Yet this
move knowingly, boldly dares to postulate that there is a rationally as well as
morally justified way in which we are forced by reason, so to speak, to move
beyond what reason can achieve. This
may very well be the true heart of Gnostic thinking. If the Ground of Being is experienced as leading only to death,
insanity, and the termination of viable control upon which further existence
depends, the kind of Reason that delivered that awesome achievement dictates
preserving yet transcending such a type of Reason.
Such logic
leads to the death of itself as a viable logic, and leads to some sort of
higher-logic which we only need to define as "some perfect and justified
transcendent logic which, in particular, is immune to the self-cancellation of
ordinary logic." That right there
is the complete explanation, justification, and religious principle of
transcendent logic, which is the door and key to heaven. It is transcendent, life-enabling
compassion.
Without
that key, without that bit of transcendent logic, we would all be condemned to
destruction -- jail, insanity, harm, madness.
Abraham's angel saw his gesture of transcendence of his will, and
transcendence of reason, and transcendence of moral agency, and gave him a
religion: the religion of the sufficient and justified mental-only
sacrifice.
Part of
letting go of delusion, letting go of the deluded mental-model of self, time,
control, and freedom, is letting go of strict adherence to remaining within a
system of logic that is only able to cancel itself out, as personal control of
the will cancels itself out during the mystic state. The loose-cognitive computer calculates a logical result that
says "you must exceed logic: you must either postulate a higher logic that
permits viable self-government, or this machine will hit a divide-by-zero error
and enter the anti-control, control-beyond-control, or 'run amok' mode."
http://www.egodeath.com/rushlyrics.htm#xtocid22921
Call out
for direction [my guidance systems are all suspended]
and
there's no one there to steer [there's no one in me to give birth to will]
Shout out
for salvation [kneel and pray to god-of-Fate to save me from freedom]
but
there's no one there to hear [no god appears]
The higher
god outside the system, who one might pray to in need of a rescuer from control
breakdown or the self-cancellation of personal control, ultimately can't be
relevant if it's some weakly wished-for, remote God who controls the spacetime
block. We need a much more down-to-earth
transcendent god that the mind can somehow take responsibility for postulating
and conceiving. Such is the
transcendent higher mystery god that one identifies with and becomes.
How can I
become a transcendent god? By forming
such an idea, including the necessary principles of stability, order, passion,
justification, and transcendence. This
includes a rejection of an automatic identification with a self that is
authored by the spacetime block. To be
transcendent, the mind must think two ways at once: the mind cannot originate
an idea; all ideas are forced into the mind by the Ground of Being. But we can call that the lower mind.
The
mysterious, postulated higher, transcendent mind, the higher self and
transcendent I, *can* take responsibility for creating its self-concept that
serves to rescue stability and self-government -- but only if this higher self
is emphatically differentiated from the lower self that is by definition a
helpless puppet created by the Ground of Being. Any more details about the higher self are impossible to formulate;
all that direction has to offer is speculation and conjecture.
The only
thing that matters about this postulated higher, transcendent Self is that it
is justified by pure logic and reason and compassion, and it is particularly
*not* the lower self which is necessarily an illusion (and also previously a
delusion). Such a system of ego death
and rebirth, or cybernetic self-cancellation and transcendent reset with a
deeply revised operating system, is concerned with the negative --
understanding the breakdown ideas, and with the positive: creating a rational
and viable way of transcending the problems *without denying* the
problems.
How can we
definitely and strongly accept and affirm the solid reasoning that brings about
ego death and the concomitant destabilization of control, while also
transcending such a deeply problematic and unstable foundation, such a
crash-prone operating system? We have
to move into the realm of the transcendent, as Abraham's story tells of
transcending physical sacrifice and adopting a life-enabling conceptual-only
system of transcending one's will and one's faulty egoic self-government
system. The angel was satisfied with
this gesture, and so Abraham had a future, in addition to being justified in
the light of higher reasoning about moral self-control agency.
--------------------------
As an
aside, I did find a couple references to a piercing shaft involved in
Prometheus' binding:
Hesiod,
Theogony, 521-25: "And devious Prometheus [Zeus] bound with inescapable
chains, and drove a shaft through his middle, and set on him a long-winged
eagle, which used to eat his immortal liver [ = organ of will & intention];
but by night the liver grew as much again as the long-winged bird devoured in
the whole day."
First,
rationality is imperfect, being a mixture of foggy practical notions of
personal self-control power and moving through time. Then, in the mystic altered state, rationality reaches one kind of
perfection: realization of the merit of postulating no-free-will, and
frozen-time, and a few other key points.
This then raises a huge practical problem of self-control; at this point
one wrestles with an angel, and looks for a way to safely permanently cast out
the habitual demon of egoic imperfect thinking.
There is
no egoic-type action that one can do as an egoic-type controller to rescue and
regain personal self-control stability.
Only some transcendent leap outside the system can return the mind to
stability, but that leap isn't some egoic-type action that's possible by an
egoic-type controller-agent. The mind
experiences itself as being totally dependent on whatever it is that timelessly
injects thoughts into the mind, or sets thoughts in place in the spacetime
block.
What can
one do to regain practical control and mental stability, when one is seen to be
frozen in an iron spacetime block?
Ordinary perfect rationality inexorably concludes that no such
"move" is possible. At this
point, ordinary perfect rationality gives way to transcendent perfect
rationality.
Mundane,
muddled, normal-state egoic thinking isn't ordinary perfect rationality. The sequence is:
Egoic
thinking (partial rationality, like child/animal)
Ordinary
perfect rationality (only at the last moment of egoic life)
Transcendent
perfect rationality (follows in 30 seconds, with sense of rescue)
Permanent
transcendent mental worldmodel (transcendent thinking)
All one's
egoic reasoning finally adds up to a revision that brings about ordinary
perfect rationality, but that poses a huge problem, which is immediately solved
by leaping up to transcendent perfect rationality, which may include, for
example, a practical postulate of being controlled by a compassionate, not just
an impersonal, ground of being, or a compassionate hidden controller that
resides outside the ground of being and controls it from outside.
Also, in a
sense, the ego delusion is transcendently postulated, but now is postulated in
full light of the illusory, conventional nature of ego and the sense of egoic
free will and personal control-power.
The mind builds up to a perfect and problematic realization that it is a
helpless puppet/slave rather than a sovereign, and next solves that practical
problem by learning to falsely or transcendently postulate its sovereignty
again.
Ordinary
perfect rationality is only reached after developing egoic rationality to the
point of seeing how illogical it is, then revising it for a more logical system
-- but at that point, a cybernetic control-stability crisis immediately
arises. At first, the mind flees for
its egoic life, falling back into "incarnation" and
"rebirth". But eventually the
egoic mind is strong enough to will its sacrifice, and is strong enough to be
available yet disengaged, or both affirmed and denied.
Finally
the mind learns to say "I believe in the lie of ego, for practical reasons
of convention only." I believe I
am sovereign, though I know that I'm not really sovereign; I am *virtually* a
sovereign freewilliing agent. The mind
finally learns to think "I believe in my virtual-only ego, who commands
his own virtual-only individual free will."
If it
becomes practically necessary to postulate possibly meaningless things such as
a compassionate controller of the ground of being who is immune to Fate and the
power of frozen time, or to deliberately postulate ego and free will only 30
seconds after having seen them to be essentially illusory, is that perfectly
rational, or less than rational?
It is a
kind of coherent rationality that is more than perfect; it is transcendent; it
is rationality that includes the practical ability to fudge to save your life
as a practical, virtual self-controller agent who wields the power of will even
though the world is a frozen spacetime block.
The
inevitable "mystery" that Reformed theology always leads to is a
muddled, inferior equivalent of this "paradox" of having to
intentionally postulate what you have just before managed to logically
disprove: personal power, the illusion of individual free will, the hoax of
voyaging through flowing time into an essentially open future.
To know
the truth about your cybernetic self-control nature, fully commit to
rationality during self-control investigation; resort to prayer and
supernatural or religious thinking only if it is the only possible alternative
in an emergency situation that is certainly inexorably leading to harmful loss
of self-control.
If you
begin by disliking rationality, you won't be able to know truth. Only those who love rationality more than
anything else can prove the cybernetic truth about their nature. You have to loathe all religious thinking,
or you won't be able to know truth.
Prayer is only acceptable as the very last resort if a cold steel blade
of a choice is presented to you as controller-agent, a choice between harmful
radically indeterminate loss of self-control, versus prayer.
I am not
saying that rationality is bound to lead to that situation -- maybe it does,
maybe it doesn't. I don't know -- but I
would like to know what better rational minds than mine have to say about their
investigations. You who want to secure
rational self-control should consider me only a weak early explorer and scholar
of what a few other explorers have claimed.
I, like them, felt that I was forced to plead for mercy and forced to
drop my exclusive commitment to a rational self-control model.
The only
conversion I can accept is conversion at sword point: believe in some kind of
higher power of some sort that transcends the rational self-control worldmodel,
or destructively lose self-control, the choice is yours.
I Don't
Know:
Nobody
ever told me, I found out for myself
You
gotta believe in foolish miracles
It's not
how you play the game
It's if
you win or lose
You can
choose
Don't
confuse
Win or
lose
It's up
to you
All this
is from the point of view of the self as personal control-agent, rather than the
Ground of Being that authors all thoughts and movements of the will.
Psychonauts
should be absolutely committed to Extropian values, Enlightenment scientific
rationality, and individual autonomy based on Reason. Shun at all costs any of the following:
o Religious thinking
o Supernaturalist thinking
o Prayer soliciting personal help
o Meditative prayer
o Jumping up a level, out of the system
Fully
commit to rational autonomous control that is pure of all "spiritual"
type of thinking. Avoid spooky Copenhagenist
interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and adopt the fully determinate
Bohm/Einstein/Shrodinger view, which holds that particles have a definite
position and velocity at all points in spacetime but we simply can't know what
those are. I advise adopting a fully
deterministic view, though I suppose you can be agnostic about that.
The point
is, take autonomous rational self-control to full development; attempt to use
it as a foundation upon which to build your life and well-being. Whether you adopt a freewillist or
deterministic spacetime/control model, I hope that you try everything possible
to avoid any kind of religious, spiritual, or spooky thinking.
I admit
that consciousness itself is baffling, but still, I want more than anything to
come up with a way of thinking about self-control that is purely rational and
that is *also* reliable even during loose cognition in the peak window of the
altered state of cognition. Any
solution that depends on a god descending on the stage to miraculously meddle
with your self-control is to be shunned as poison to Reason and personal
autonomy.
Loathe
religion as regression and mental suicide, and seek instead to construct an
atheistic humanistic rational, scientific, logically clear and consistent
mental model of self-control. Test the
viability of that model in practice, and use loose cognition to study and work
on this system. We must do everything
possible to avoid any kind of spiritual thinking, and try with full vigor,
commitment, and sincerity to engineer a model of personal self-control that
works.
Like other
psychonauts, I feel I was forced to accept an unacceptable solution, of rolling
a transcendent personal god onto the stage in order to restabilize personal
self-control. You may think I condone
such supernaturalist thinking and am saying that enlightenment transcends
rationality -- I don't!
I
absolutely reject and hate and loathe any kind of supernaturalist thinking,
prayer, gods, saviors, and that whole way of thinking and dealing with crises. I absolutely recoil from and reject the idea
that rationality is somehow less than completely adequate for bringing about
enlightenment about time, control, and self.
Prayer marks a deep failure of the entire self-control enlightenment
project.
I would
never willingly accept any prayer type of solution to any self-control problem
unless my only other alternative was destructive loss of control or any other
harmful kind of destruction such as insanity or any kind of demonstrative
destruction. Such a situation is what I
mean by being forced -- effectively, forced at sword point to pray for
transcendent religious assistance and rescuing.
When
researching self-control dynamics, only if a choice is forced upon the control
agent, forced to choose between harm and prayer, can prayer be considered
acceptable -- and even then, prayer is only to be very reluctantly
accepted. This way, prayer becomes a
prayer for mercy. The only prayer such
hardheaded rational thinking can accept is the forced prayer like one at
gunpoint where you are left with no other option:
Transcendent
personal controller of all thoughts and actions, please exist and protect me
from the self-control explosion I foresee.
I have transgressed my self-control.
I see no solution, no way out of this fatal self-control disaster, but
to imagine you and pray to you.
This is
all completely tentative and hypothetical, but I was there and I supposed that
that is the only type of prayer, the only motivation for prayer, that is true
ultimate transcendent prayer -- other types are irrational, superstitious, and
are never warranted.
Self-control
rationality that is completely humanistic and self-willed explodes into a
dangerous unstable state when pushed and amplified to the extreme: control
completely escapes itself, even *practical* control threatens to go completely
out of control in runaway unconstrained freedom, and there is no hope, no
resource left; that system of thinking kills itself, ending up a one-way path
inexorably leading to dangerous indeterminate radical loss of control.
That
rational, self-reliant system of thinking contains no solution within itself,
so what can that mind possibly do to step out of that system? Roll the Greek god onto the stage and bring
the play to a harmonious conclusion.
That is
real prayer, real religion. Anything
else is just superstition and magic thinking.
To gain full enlightenment about the self who fancies itself a
controller-agent, only accept a transcendent or religious-style solution as a
truly last resort, if you have played your final rational card and find
yourself "staring down the barrel of a gun" (Dukes of Stratosphear),
find yourself drawn inexorably into a strange attractor of manifest harmful
loss of control.
I doubt
what I have said above. The only way to
be fully enlightened about self control is to hate a religious solution and
continue to seek a purely rational self-reliant humanist solution -- we must
try that. We must avoid a religious
solution at all costs. Only if
rationality is fully proven to break and hang so that it leads to destructive
harm, is prayer acceptable.
Only a
fully prayer-averse approach to the self-control problem can lead to any kind
of certain proof that rational self-control is impossible. Now, supposing that everyone reaches the
conclusion of the atheist mystic altered state song The Body Electric:
The
android (1001001 = 'I') bows its head and prays to the mother of all machines
("Mother of all machines!")
Rush,
self-reliant haters of religion (it seems to me), also admit, in a roundabout
way, praying in the cybernetic enlightenment song No One At The Bridge. "Cry out supplication, but there's no
one there to hear." I consider
that verse in that song to be the peak of all inspired philosophical Heavy
Rock.
That song
can be considered the theoretical cybernetic heart of the album Caress of Steel
(the album title refers to the peak-cognition guillotining of king ego). That album is from 1975 and it has been said
that 1974 was in some ways the moment of the most widespread manifestation of
1960s culture.
I love
rational self-reliance infinitely more than prayer. Accept prayer? Only over
my dead body. It's not so much that I'm
anti-religious, but rather, I consider religion to be irrelevant and only
something that can lead to regressive muddle headedness. Religion leads only to muddle headedness --
unless for some amazing reason, rationality is absolutely *forced* to bow to it
with no other option than a chaotic explosion that amounts to some kind of
insane destruction.
If my
hypothesis is right, which I hope it is *not*, rational psychonauts may be
forced to conclude that the only viable rational model of self-control is that
which includes some kind of transcendent element that is somehow equivalent to
a compassionate controller-god outside of time.
What we'll
need to do then is redefine "rationality" very carefully to include
just enough room for a cybernetically defined functional equivalent like
"god" in Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach, a god defined purely in
rational scientific cybernetics terms; in other words, "the mother of all
machines", the god of the cybernetic self-controller androids, the god of
the alien machines. That is the only
kind of god that can be considered legitimate to a truly skeptical, hardheaded,
rational self-control theorist.
Ultimately,
we might (or might not) find some kind of mathematical proof that a rational
self-control system *must* include the idea of a caring personal controller
outside time or else it will explode into control-instability when examined
closely in the light of loose cognition.
I don't
understand all this myself, I'm just reporting and systematizing the hypotheses
that are coming in from multiple cybernauts on the frontier of research. I may commit to fully detailing this system
that falls back on prayer, but only as a hypothesis. All self-control researchers should do everything possible to
provide a better model than the broken, irrational, muddle-headed system I'm
defining.
I'm trying
to define a certain research space, report a fascinating dangerous potential
that exists (reported by various rationality-committed cybernetically oriented
psychonauts), and tell you the viable solution they all seem to report -- that
is, *one* viable solution so far -- that the researchers have found: desperate
prayer pleading for a god to be lowered on a platform down onto the stage as
the only alternative in sight for a harmful implosion of the rationality-based
self-control system.
It's true
that I'm the only theorist who is formally systematizing along these lines, but
do not think that I am the only thinker who is passionately committed to
rationality as part of a desperate struggle for mentally grasping and
comprehending self-control dynamics. Remember
my motives, common in the loosecog state: "above all, secure self-control,
think clearly! think clearly!"
It's
precisely this problem of chasing self-control that leads one to run away from
all supernaturalist thinking and take rationality to the extreme. I hypothesize that only by taking the
desperate hunt for fully rational self-control to such an extreme, where one
has no time at all for spirituality-styled thinking, but only for pure
scientific, engineering, cybernetic thinking, that one can discover, ironically
and in amazement, transcendent religious truth.
On this
model, the one true universal religion of the experience-based mystics is the
religion of self-control cybernetics.
At its most esoteric peak as I have defined it, Christianity is finally
understood when it is explained in terms of the religion of self-control
cybernetics, the religion of Unit One in The Body Electric; the religion of the
helmsman in No One At The Bridge.
Is the
cybernaut forced to the religion of God and Jesus, or some Eastern
deities? Not exactly. Rather, for the cybernetic religious
theorist, all religion is mapped to, and explained in terms of, the
transcendent theory of self-control cybernetics, and one "worships"
directly the explicitly defined "transcendent deity of self-control
cybernetics", the great compassionate cybernetician in the sky.
Is it
possible to make a more rational self-control system? As one who has desperately grappled with controlaholism, no one
wants such more than me. It is way too early
in cybernetics theory to accept the screaming incongruity of having a box in my
model that says "hypothetical compassionate personal author of all
thoughts outside time".
If we end
up testing my philosophy and collectively accepting its conclusion, that won't
really be any worse than how mathematicians accept and heavily utilize the
construct, "square root of -1".
For all my worship of mathematics, remember Godel, remember infinity,
remember Hofstadter's strange loops, remember how surprising Einstein's theory
of invariance was -- many scientists were reluctant to accept it.
Remember,
science and math have turned out to be far stranger than we expected -- they
have their own gods and miracles lurking.
We may ultimately end up retaining God, but re-conceptualizing it with
entirely different, cybernetic connotations.
How do androids conceive of the character of God?
The
summary in my current very long version of my .signature lacks coverage of the
transcendence of the black-box ineffable god outside the deterministic
cosmos. I claim that religion is far
simpler than everyone assumes, therefore I should address the main thing which
appears to contradict that emphasis on simplicity. The only difficult or complicated or above-rationality aspect of
religion is the ineffability of any rescuer-god from outside the system of
cosmic determinism.
This
conception, the ineffable black-box god, is standard in Islam, Judaism, and
Christianity -- I'm not sure about in Neopaganism, Buddhism, Hinduism. Check the great book Mysticism in World
Religion, which does a good job of shoehorning all religions into a great and
flexible general model, lining up their functional equivalencies of themes
without diminishing them as biased apologists of comparative religions do.
http://www.egodeath.com
-- the only simple and comprehensible theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience. The only essence, paradigm,
origin, core, fountainhead, and ultimate goal 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 determinism with a single, pre-existing,
ever-existing future. The return of the
ordinary state of consciousness is allegorized as a transcendence of Necessity
or cosmic determinism. Myth describes
this mystic-state experience. Initiation
is classically a series of some 8 visionary-plant sessions, interspersed with study
of perennial philosophy. Most religion
is a distortion, corruption, literalization, cooptation, and missing-the-point
overcomplication of this simple, standard initiation system.
Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)