Home (ego death and self-control cybernetics)
In loose cognition, you feel not only dangerously unrestrained; you feel frightfully imaginative and creative - inability to contain one's crazily imaginative and creative thoughts and mental forces ie will -- will imagination break the will and result in disaster? not only crazily unrestrained, but crazily imaginative and ideationally/cognitively creative. can create entirely new types of cognitive structures/constructions; can create radically innovative mental constructs (devices) -- here's one, the ego-death singularity vortex. here's one, "control-coercion". In the "vision-logic" concept, must emphasize incredibly creative and psychotically'/dangerously imaginative vision. Out-of-control, hyper-, overwhelmingly creative and innovative vision -- and intense logic too. "10 eyes, 10 ears, and 10 brains, all working overtime." What happens when you suddenly are subject to the hyperactivity of 10 brains, all working overtime? Can you control that awesome firepower, pyrotechnics? trying to keep from sheer chaos of hyper-creative imagination-intensity.
The accustomed personal will is taken over and coerced, so that it is no longer your will, not the will of the usual, reliable you. That is, the essential minimal-sense 'will' force is there, but now, no longer colored by your egoic established character. It becomes genericized, characterless will.
Be prepared to pray to a puppetmaster god. This is powerful wisdom. If you are willing to humble yourself in supplication, you can trip harder. This is the experience of many people, including professional acid rock bands. LSD is the Holy Spirit establishing a relationship between the lower realm of humans and the higher plane of the transcendent. Having learned of this, you are now under the obligation/ability to blow your mind harder, but relatively safely. When the vortex of will-cancellation starts pulling you in, what can you do or think to save you? Mentally pray.
The mesmerizing fascination of instability - this hypothetical potential for control-singularity/breakdown exerts a fascinating hypnotic pull on the mind. Can control increase to a point in which it deconstructs? That would be amazing and fascinating, the key to all philosophy and self-knowledge.
Only the inexperienced are fools enough to scoff, from lack of intense experience. Such fools, being novices at Doom and at apprehending Fate, rush in where angels fear to tread. Learn, and integrate, this fearful respect, through establishing such a relationship. We're only human, and our thinking is based around ego-power, a power that is partly illusory. Divine powerlessness is part of the highest experience.
The following is not very blatantly about LSD itself, but focuses more on the phenomena encountered by using LSD. I intend these postings to be the most specific, helpful, substantial, and original postings in the drugs newsgroups.
LSD is absolutely the king of drugs. Its effects resemble psychosis, but based on my extensive reading, it is unproven and doubtful that LSD can push people into a permanently dissociated state. LSD dis-integrates cognitive associations and the mental structures that are built up using these associations. But it does not wash the structures entirely away, during the session; rather, it loosens the mental associations, effecting an assembly language reprogramming state in which you can easily re-construct and systematically adjust your mental model of self, control, time, and the world.
The cocky cyberpunk finds that his sense of autonomous self-direction fails him utterly and is forced to pray for a personal compassionate supercontroller entity, the puppetmaster, so that the cognitive cyberpunk's future actions and decisions are safe and harmless. All your power of self-control fails you, through a logical realization that your power is always partly illusory. Coming face to face with this realization is an ego-death experience that throws you into a tailspin. Your model of your control over your thoughts and actions deconstructs itself. 'Deconstruction' means turning the internal logic of a text against itself, in an explosive amplification.
You experience your train of thought as a runaway train: if you are going to think an awful thought and have a dreadful realization in 2 minutes, you realize, trembling, that there is logically nothing you can do to avoid this predetermined fate -- you discover the plausibility that your every act of will, of choice, of thought, is already lurking in the future, ready to hunt you down.
Posting is a great opportunity to immediately go public and "publish" -- better, an opportunity to be like an ancient Greek philosopher: a completely independent teacher.
Does loose cognitive binding simply make you or inspire you to run amok? Is that the bottom line? Would it do so in the name of Truth (that is, as a manfestation or Sign of the falsity and illegitimacy of moral-control-agency)?
Mere vulgar common running amok, loss of control? There is nothing to theorize about in that case, except to ask what ever prevents this from happening? "Normal egoic restraints. In loose cognitive binding these are suspended, gone, therefore, you can lose control and run amok." Assume the egoic restraints are what keeps me on track normally. Assume that egoic restraints are simply completely gone in loose cognitive binding. There is nothing to keep one on track; one goes off the track. One loses guidance -- but, one prays for control, stability, guidance; prays for the return of egoic restraints -- the effect of this prayer is to back away from complete disengagement of egoic restraints; prayer serves to re-engage egoic restraints. But what if one is not caused (by the Ground) to pray and thus to re-engage egoic restraints?
The controller loses the grip on the steering wheel, seeing that it really originates from beyond the control agent -- but the controller agent still has virtual control, so that's not the worst problem. The worst problem is that the agent's cross-time glue -- the egoic restraint and intention system -- is threatened as on the verge of suspension -- so that, whether the agent has control or the Ground controls the agent, either way, the problem is that egoic restraints are lifted.
Do people lose control of their mind, while their mind is so powerful/ hyperactive that it escapes its accustomed restraint, its accustomed propriety... loose cognition escapes the egoic forms of control, the egoic mode of control. Loose/T't cognition escapes egoic control. But is there a t't mode of control that is more suited to loose cognition? There is, certainly, at least in some sense -- simply by virtue of being "used to" loose cognition. To be "used to" loose cognition is to be more stable than the mind that is not used to loose cognition. "Don't resist; let go of control" really means "hold control loosely, don't think about it too much, don't press for absolutely secure control, or it will backfire; be humble, be meek, don't be overly bold and panicky and grabby at control."
THC combines strangely with LSD. Beware.
In a real LSD trip, you have tingling, vibrating fingers. Your stomach feels funny but rarely nausea. Often there is a moderate, temporary laxitive ("purgative") effect 90 minutes into it; have convenient access to a bathroom. Your accustomed, familiar sense of being you loosens and evaporates. The music sounds a hundred times richer and more beautiful than it did before. The pitch goes up and down. You see through a fish-eye lens. Everything bends and flows. At the peak, time freezes, you see the flow of experience as a simultaneous pile of static pictures, and then you see all the universe as one giant block, and you rise up to remembering God-perspective and become no one and everyone, then you shoot back down into your particular personhood again. The past "you" becomes reduced to just an unconvincing memory. You have the supreme classic philosophical insights.
You feel radically, even dangerously free and unstable, and also, paradoxically, you feel like a puzzle, part of the fated script -- completely unfree. Your "sense of freedom" goes away, yet also you feel free in an exagerrated way. White clouds become pink on one side and green on the other. White walls are smudged with a rainbow of discoloration. Sweep an arm in front, or watch a car go by, and these acts become objects arc'ing in front of you -- the trail is a fixed object that sits there for a whole second. You can't control your thoughts; well, self-steering becomes problematic. Your speaking comes out strange, like glossolalia. Your emotions shift and change crazily. Images blur and warp like looking through the windshield of a parked car while rain oozes down. Playing guitar, you become ultra-fluid and creative. Your imagination is on overdrive, for better or worse. You feel too warm and muggy, and you feel chills.
The beginning and end of the following email exchange have some descriptions of the standard phenomena.
The middle long part is about the philosophical discoveries available from the high doses such as 500-800 micrograms. (Any more than this amount tends to waste precious doses due to diminishing returns.) You might want to skip the long middle part, particularly any mention of trembling prayer due to cybernetic principles of self-control cancellation -- the self-deconstruction of self-control.
Sometimes there can be annoying whining from THC+LSD, as though there were a video monitor on nearby (they make a very high pitched whine sometimes).
Effect: Time wrinkles, auditory hills of pitch-shifting or "flanging"
Effect: the white light of the void: consciousness feedback as the camera of attention catches itself -- 3rd eye meta-awareness
Derealization of memories -- maybe you didn't exist 5 minutes ago; how could you know? Each time-slice is seen to be independent. "Be here now" -- "only now is real"
ego death
Everything goes into manual, metaprogramming mode, rather than automatic (still, it's robotic either way, though some type of freedom remains and can increase beyond the usual psychological constraints).
I don't think you can have greater intensity of the essential effect, which I call 'cognitive looseness', but there are more experiences to be discovered on that high "master-level of the video game", or "superuser level". You are exploring a space of mental phenomena, or exploring a game-level. There is not a higher level of the game, but there are more phenomena to encounter.
I am not yet able to rattle off a true explanation at the drop of a hat. However, I can very well portray the kinds of experiences and reasoning that many people have reported. This is half-describing, half-explaining.
There awaits a "potential" inside the mind. Not the potential to talk to spirits or bend spoons, but something more astonishing: the potential to apprehend a self-control vortex in the mind. This vortex is a potential structure made possible by the twistedness of our normal conception of ourselves as autonomous, self-steering agents who creat and choose our own thoughts for ourselves.
This is the Cybernetic Revelation, the revealing of the hidden dynamics and logical loops of self-steering.
The "spirit-entities" metaphor is a distortion and misinterpretation of insights into entity-ness itself. The mind contains an ego-image of "myself", but when the mind does not identify with that symbol, or token, then the agent-symbol is seen as what it is: a symbol posing as an entity. It would be very challenging to explain this precisely in a paragraph -- symbols and representations to interface the self, world, and other entities are so profoundly woven deep into our thinking, that a hundred topics and implications come up. So I say, roughly, that the mind dis-identifies with the ego-symbol.
Some people have reported a strange-attractor beacon as the most fascinating dynamic object up there, and people have reported praying to avoid their freedom going out of control. While the theory and expressions are hypothetical, the psychological phenomenon of grappling with this Dionysian vortex is a given datum of experience, calling out for explanation. An urgent, crucial problem is posed to you, personally, as a personal agent. The brilliance of creative vision combines with dangerously amplified logic. This "vision-logic" is dangerous because it is so powerful. You are forced to grapple with your own unrestrained freedom of thought and action. Normally you feel you have some power to control your thoughts and actions. You perceive them as free and under control sufficiently well. But this cognitive "sense of freedom" backfires and cancels itself out.
Here is a seeming paradox: you become totally helpless, at the mercy of time, of the future. The door leading to the future is black, and any possible action or thought could be on the other side of that door. It's already sitting there, and you now can do nothing to control, with sufficient force, the you who is on the other side: the near-future you. He is as free and unconstrained as you are. So, self-control across time disintegrates. Taken to its extreme, you are as helpless to stop your actual future actions as your past action. Both of them are seen to be fixed in concrete: stoned into the one stone of all time. You discover the hypothesis of block-universe determinism that includes but incapacitates freedom.
You now have a radically unconstrained freedom, but it is impotent to control the future you, because he too is radically unconstrained. But this implies that all your current radically free acts are beyond the control of you-yesterday and you-1-moment-ago. Then where did they come from? They just exist of their own power. Your free actions don't come from yourself, but just float in time forever. To completely understand this, is to encounter the great self-control vortex, the Dionysian maelstrom that gives rise to philosophical terror and insight. Only intelligent, logic-committed thinkers can really grasp this and blow up their ego-power. Ego power self-deconstructs; it disproves its own logic. Sartre has some ideas that plug right in here. You stand over the abyss of freedom, lacking all guidance. You forget the power of all guidance and constraint. You are condemned: condemned to be free. Radical freedom and complete loss of power are somehow the same.
Having recourse to praying strategically enables you to explore the full arena including the difficult slopes. This technique is effectively a shield against feeding-back into the vortex-problem of self-control. This is beseeching compassion from a conscious entity who is outside the system you are trapped in. At its fullest intensity, this results in trembling prayer; cybernetic trembling which forces you to choose between practical loss of control or some act of absolutely transgressing morality, in recognition of the true nature of personal power.
This is what ego death is about, specifically: rendering the will urgently problematic. I'm just summarizing ideas from here and there. To explain is too hard -- but it is all perfectly rational, requiring a cognitive mode that accesses "superhuman rationality".
What about the blissful experience of cosmic oneness? That is most fully experienced when it is most fully understood. Your mental model of the relationship between yourself and the world becomes adjusted and refined, as you learn to make important distinctions and connections regarding time, will, freedom, change, and self-control. The latter is better thought of as insight into self-control cybernetics. This is the highest aspect of the study of 'cybernetics': the self-steering helmsman, the cybernetic steersman homunculus.
The cognitive scientists have written about the confusions of the homunculus. The little man that you are, who lives inside of your mind: how does he control his self-control? There is an infinite regress. I can spew the language in which people have discussed this topic: control there is, but no one who controls. Self-control exists, forever, along the time axis, frozen.
Metaphors aside, I'm referring to very specific instabilities inherent in our faulty self-conception as cybernetic steermen. It's a problem with will-power, fatedness, self-control, transgression of moral constraint, and frozen time. These problems show up in much "transpersonal psychology" literature and most clearly in acid rock. I am the first to formally systematize and gather and organize these ideas, but I am not the first explorer. The consensus is, watch out for the pride of "I control my own thoughts". The cognitive scientists believe that cognitive self-control is highly problematic, not nearly as simple as we normally assume. In Zen, ego is caught in its own trap. This includes ego-power, or will. Ego is a complex of cognitive dynamics, which all get caught in their own trap.
Can this ever really be explained, fully and rationally? I would emphasize modelling it -- yes, you can engineer a model of the self-control delusion and its breakdown and conversion. The religious experience of conversion is essentially about changing your mental model of your locus-of-control.
It's safest to start with many smaller trips and work your way up.
Do a small dose, and beware of combining it with THC - that has a very wacky effect that is only for the intrepid.
For a good trip, hang out in parks and cool pads where there is minimal interaction required. Being out in public can actually be more anonymous and relaxed than being near people you know who are not in the scene. If you glitch in a public interaction, it just gets lost in the hubbub. Mostly it depends on what you're into. Most everything is interesting. Jam on acoustic guitars.
It is hard to control thinking during cognitive dissociation.
Control and self-control are inherently problematic. A major theme in psychedelic experiencing is the destabilization of control. One's control becomes so powerful it escapes itself and control is effectively lost. Alan Watts wrote "Zen and the Problem of Control" in the book "This Is It". Try reading that on LSD.
Daniel Dennet argues that though there might be no free will, there still exists control dynamics in the universe. The issue is the nature of control, not simply whether it exists or not.
Transcendent knowledge, as a mental model of control, enables you to see and experience ego death, even though ego death is still somewhat tentative (you can always say "I retained control even whle going out of control") -- ego death is not "loss of control" so much as "loss of stable cross-time control" -- the skillful destabilization of control and transcendence of that stability. It's vague and misleading to say that ego death is "loss of control". Ego death is "loss of stable cross-time control." Rather, "destabilization of cross-time control". "Loss of control" really means "destabilization of cross-time control, problematization of the source of will, and metaphysically problematic invariability of future will-acts". The problem of controlling thoughts and will during dissociative cognition
Can you control your thoughts?
Is Satan already in complete control of your interpretation of reality? Is God? Are you? Who is this controller-entity -- are they for real?
Many people find that praying to some religious figure, in complete submission and contrite dependence, helps them get through this sort of thing. In fact, for many devout believers, this is the blessed beginning of their faith.
Afterwards, you can always chuck the religious figure in the trash can.
There are probably many people using this moniker online. The most important user of the moniker is the person who can best explain and justify their use of 'Egodeath.com'. 'Cyber' means "control", not "computers". Self-control cybernetics is the foundation for my entire system of thinking; my treatment of 'control' is as original as anything could be. 'Egodeath.com' sounds like 'cyberpunk'; implying the anarchic, anything-goes approach to attaining mystic understanding. Such understanding can only be achieved when you ignore everything that has ever been said about mystic phenomena, and use whatever methods you can get your hands on to find enlightenment. The punk mystic does not submit to any master except the great Tao that flows everywhere, even into the decision-core of the punk monk's mind. Like the cyberpunk, the control-conscious monk breaks into information systems: in this case, he cracks the code of the puzzle lying at the core of his own identity as an autonomous steersman. In striving to access the superuser level of his own mind, the egodeath.com discovers a level of original control that forever eludes his own area of control.
Was Buddha a monk? If so, from what master did he receive his transmission of enlightenment?
Personal self-control forms a cybernetic control loop. The ego-entity is an essentially illusory homunculus, a self-steering helmsman dwelling inside the mind's self-control loop. Self-control controls itself indirectly. Alcoholism and compulsions demonstrate the inability of self-control to reach across time. Climbing up a level to metaprogram one's mental computer as a superuser promises power over one's thoughts and actions, but leads to the problem of controlling the source of one's thoughts and will.
Using loose cognition as a tool for fundamental self-programming, the mind attempts to surmount the mental operating system and re-program the mental operating system to obtain greater control. But raising the locus of control, which is a core part of the ego system, is an attempt to split apart the self-control center to raise it above itself. The ego-center cannot be lifted above the self-control function, because they are the same subsystem. This attempt causes a short-circuiting of the practical logic of control, and the egoic operating system crashes. To restabilize control, the mind has to lower the ego-center back down, rebooting or resetting the egoic mental mode.
Control agents are embodied as self-control tunnels or streams, floating in locked, stationary spacetime. The loosened mind can feel remotely monitored and controlled by a dominant observer-and-controller entity who is in a position of power; one becomes a cybernetic puppet, and the perceived locus of control shifts up to a separate control agent who resides on a higher level in the control hierarchy.
Near the control vortex, events seem to be leading toward an increasingly compelling singularity point of encountering a dangerous realization of something devastating about one's nature as a controller. This is a logical cancellation of creation-power - my ego, as an entity, is denied as a 1st-order creator. One's every action seems driven by the world, with the personal will as a mere intermediate gear. The ego remains a steering-related system, but its steering actions are experienced as being driven by the all-inclusive world, rather than feeling like an independent steerer within the world (an ultimate origin, unmoved mover, ultimate cause, or 1st-order cause). This intuited devastating insight lies ahead on the worldline, on the pre-set path of one's personal control-actions.
Personal guidance systems can be malfunctioning, while interpretation ability can be actually increased. Part of the reason why guidance is reduced during LSD is that interpretation can be more perceptive. The loosened mind is able to see the weaknesses of our accustomed mental structures of control.
The next thing on my research list is the theory of dominance and submission. Bondage and slavery, helplessness and dependence, autonomy and maturity and our childlike relationship to the higher source of control. To know truth you must become like a child -- like a slave: completely dependent on a Father level of control. They say the Lord is king of kings: that translates into cybernetics as "the ultimate source of control is the controller of the controllers."
Tolerance timing might depend on personal chemistry. Some people seem to be hypersensitive, and others seem to be unaffected, according to reports here. For most people, 3 1/2 days is adequate recovery time, and 1 week is certainly completely beyond the range of the tolerance effect. But for those elsewhere on the bell curve, your mileage may vary. Therefore, you have to test and discover your own personal parameters.
LSD + THC = wacky. It puts the peak in your peak. Highly recommended for those who wish to tread where angels dare not. You will find that your strings are being pulled. By the CIA? By the aliens? By God? By demons? By your plotting cohorts? By evil scientists? Who knows, but they are being pulled. I propose that your strings are being pulled by the Ground of Being, which thrusts forth our sense of being an autonomous helmsman piloting the ship of our own thoughts and actions. Every move of my hand upon the helm is an emanation from the ground of being. But is the ground of being a compassionate puller of your strings? Only a personal Controller could be a compassionate puppetmaster. This is why electrified mystics are more likely to pray to a personified entity than to an impersonal conception of the ground of being.
I recommend listening to "Chemistry" by Rush from the album _Signals_. It has hidden allusions to pot and mystic phenomena that unfold when you are in the proper decoding mode.
I don't like being doped into a pot stupor, because I can't waste so much time. The only time I smoke pot now is 3 hours into a serious research session.
The first posting in this thread is only available in rec.drugs.psychedelic. If you missed it, I think you should check it out. Otherwise, you might fail to blow your mind the next time the walls are shifting and ominous implications are leering at you. Also in that posting is a recommended mental bodybuilding program so you don't pull a muscle lifting too many doses to your tongue and pushing yourself to hard. After all, if you go berserk and fall to pieces, you can never fully understand the interesting phenomenon in the world: EGO DEATH and the ego transcendence that follows in its wake.
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