"the state of the art in New Age hokum"

[daniel]

James Kent, former editor of Tripzine, decided it would make him feel better about life if he wrote a frothing attack on my book that was short on specifics but long on fury:

http://www.dosenation.com/listing.php?id=1460

Book review: Daniel Pinchbeck - 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl
by James Kent
If you are looking for the state of the art in New Age hokum, you need look no farther than 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, by Daniel Pinchbeck. In this tome, Pinchbeck parlays his post-9/11 traumatic stress disorder and tales of globe-trotting drug abuse into a "thought experiment" on the nature of the eschaton prophesied for 2012. Pinchbeck claims that writing 2012 was a meditation on the nature of the coming transcendence, an academic quest to help save humanity from itself. Yet it reads more like the meandering drug travelogues that comprised his first work, Breaking Open the Head, with much more New Age mysticism and social novelty theory thrown in. Oddly enough, very little of 2012 is actually Pinchbeck's own wisdom; it is more a collection of all the bits and pieces of prophetic detritus he lapped up from other crackpot visionaries and social theorists along the way.

The thesis of the book itself -- that the great cycle of the Mayan calendar is ending and there is an "impending shift in the nature of the psyche" on the way -- is not even his. He cribbed it from Terence McKenna, who cribbed it from Jose Arguelles, who supposedly cribbed it from the Mayans themselves, which is corroborated by scholars like John Major Jenkins (Alignment 2012) and Lawrence Joseph, who lectures on the topic and just released the book... wait for it... Apocalypse 2012. Just take a quick search for 2012 on Amazon.com and you can see all the junk that floats to the top for yourself. Can we say millennial bandwagon here? This is starting to sound less like a prophecy and more like the great cash cow of the New Age. And though each of these 2012 prophets sees different things happening at the omega date, Pinchbeck astutely puts his money on complexity of consciousness evolving, an idea he cribbed from Vernadsky. In short, Pinchbeck's cribbed theory states that our outdated nation-state paradigms will crumble and our collective psyche will be catapulted into a noosphere of radically new consciousness. This sounds suspiciously like like, "People will care less about national identity and spend more time chatting on the internet," to me -- and he needs a Mayan calendar and bunch of head-slamming psychotropics to tell him this?

Despite having a stale topic that was half-baked to begin with, and only a handful of occult theorists to back him up on the precise date, Pinchbeck puts all his intellectual muscle to the self-realizing task of visiting these occult theorists to presumably do drugs with them and/or dissect the nature of reality, whichever comes first. But to Pinchbeck, dissecting the nature of reality starts with quantum physics and quickly devolves into every tried and true go-to well for mystical gibberish, including psychedelics, Stonehenge, crop circles, astrology, UFOs, channeling, alien entities, Maya cosmology, phi, psi, Santo Daime, the Hopi, and all the other bits of crazy mythology that New Age "get it" types have been flogging for years. All of this is wrapped in the narrative of his personal journey to find "truth" about the coming transcendence, a journey which becomes less academic exercise and more self-obsessed descent into paranoid psychosis the further along he gets. In many ways Pinchbeck's trip mirrors McKenna's own journey up the river, including the descent into timewave psychosis that consumed McKenna in the years after La Chorrera.

Though he claims 2012 is a work of rationalism, Pinchbeck never met an abstract symbol system he didn't immediately embrace, and naively greets every flimsy correlation between quantum physics, German social theory and crop circles with a gush of pseudo-intellectual glee, seriously thinking that he is on to something big. The fact that Pinchbeck so eagerly laps up every isomorphic archetype from every New Age school of wisdom and dumps them all into a bucket labeled "my rational case to be made" is very disappointing indeed. I was actually hoping for more from someone who presents himself as an intellectual trying to make a rational case, but this is not the work of an intellectual. This is the work of someone who deals out the superficial wisdom of other people's cracked-out philosophies like cards in his magic 2012 deck.

To his credit, Pinchbeck is a fluid writer and has taken enough drugs to write fluidly about drugs, so if you like reading about drugs and the crazy people who do too many you'll definitely find something to like here. But to his downfall, Pinchbeck obsessively over-intellectualizes everything, sometimes to absurd levels, and in the process both alienates the reader and completely misses sight of the "real" truth. For example, given Pinchbeck's fascination with crop circles and the musings of Gebser, I'm tempted to make similar revelations about the mysterious aesthetic convergence of urban musical ritual and spontaneous graphic representation of archetypal form. Surely the spray-painted images that pop up around our cities must tell us something about the coming transcendence of consciousness. How else can you explain the fact that these cryptic glyphs occur with increasing frequency in urban areas all over the globe, and yet nobody ever sees anyone painting them? Are we really supposed to assume that a handful of guerrilla artists somehow manage to drag ladders and paint cans through densely populated cities in the dead of night, painting elaborate murals in alien scripts on train cars and warehouses all over the globe without anyone ever noticing?

But this is what you get when you take the deluded self-important notions of a New York intellectual and pit them against the overblown psychotic absurdity of the psychedelic experience. In his elaborate attempt to convince us all that we stand at the doorway of great cataclysm and great change, Pinchbeck reflexively goes back to abstract theory and invokes social philosophers like Nietzsche, Marcuse, Gebser, and whoever else he can find to support his argument that our current paradigms are becoming toxic. Gee, thanks for explaining all that Mr. Downer, but some positive solutions please? Oh right, the collective psyche must be elevated with the return of Quetzalcoatl. We must all embrace a new integral planet-wide spirituality based on... the New Age dithering of Daniel Pinchbeck? This is Pinchbeck's explicit dilemma within the text. Has he been chosen by mystical forces to be a channel for this New Age prophecy? Will he damage his family by pursuing his destiny to become famous and have sex with a lot of women? I'm sure the suspense is killing you, but I will say this: If he is the channel for the new paradigm then he has five years to put up or shut up, because I'm tired of psychedelic prophets creeping up on the scene every few years promising to elevate global consciousness, yet never delivering the goods.

Clearly this is a time of great change on our planet, but what time isn't? I can see this myself without having to wade through page after page of integral theory and crop-circles and the tale of this man's superficially deluded life. The primary problem with this text is that Pinchbeck falls into the classic Tim Leary trap of thinking human consciousness can evolve if people just think differently. This is a flat fallacy, and Leary pretty much proved this one for me himself, because if he was right we'd be fighting our wars with flower power and living happily ever after in the Age of Aquarius. While it is true that individuals can rapidly change their behaviors (ref. brainwashing), and cultures can rapidly change their values if new ideologies are imposed by revolution or dictator (ref. China), even Pinchbeck should know that human consciousness is biological and evolves slowly over many generations. Even soft models of linguistic consciousness or political consciousness take some serious time and work to advance and trickle down through an entire species (ref. democracy). Tipping points in cultural ideologies come along at a crawl, inching forward on the ebb and tide of order and chaos, too slow and diversified across individual cultures for the species at large to notice on a daily basis, and certainly not arriving on-date as scheduled by the Mayan calendar. Pinchbeck may perceive some kind of rapid evolution brewing in the heady mixture of modern times, and he's obviously a perceptive guy, but it seems to me you can write a book at any time in human history claiming we are coming to a turning point and you would be right. However, that does not make you the chosen vessel of change; it just means you have finally opened your eyes to the way the world works. Welcome to the club, brother.

[daniel]

For context, here is a piece that Kent wrote on the DMT elves:

http://www.tripzine.com/listing.php?id=dmt_pickover

The Case Against DMT Elves

James Kent

James Kent attempts to tie a knot in the meme of autonomous elves and other DMT entities.

"Snippets of the Psyche" revealed in DMT space, by James Kent

The comments in this article are adapted from Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason, by James Kent.

The following is an edited version of an e-mail conversation written during a bout of insomnia, in response to DMT, Moses, and the Quest for Transcendence, by Clifford Pickvoer.

To: Clifford Pickover
Sent: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 02:51:05 -0700
Subject: DMT Elves

Hey Clifford, a friend recently pointed me to your article on DMT, Moses and Aliens. Since you asked people to voice their opinion I shall. I have studied this issue very closely for the past fifteen years, and though I have not published the results of all my research I would like to share with you some of the conclusions I've made about DMT and the dramatic phenomena it produces.

In short, I do not believe DMT is a gateway to an alternate dimension, nor does it induce contact with autonomous elves and alien entities. Yes, DMT produces a vivid other-worldly landscape when ingested, often including elves, aliens, insects, snakes, jaguars, etc. This is true for the majority of people who try it. Some people do not have such vivid responses, but many do. Although this may appear at first glance to be "shocking," it is actually no more shocking then the fact that most people dream at night, or that most people see geometric patterns (pressure phosphenes) when they close their eyes and press against their eyeballs. But the difference between pressure phosphenes and DMT is that DMT is illegal and very hard to come by, so most people never have the opportunity to experience it. If we could all hold our breath for a minute and produce vivid hallucinations of alien landscapes it would seem quite mundane, no more than a mere curiosity of the human condition. However, since this particular alien landscape is produced by a specific rare substance (DMT), people seem to think it is akin to unlocking the mysteries of the universe when they actually get their hands on it.

Now don't get me wrong, DMT is stunning in its effect, no doubt. But, like anything, when you do it many times the magic tends to wear off and reveal itself for what it is; an exotic aberration of the brain's perceptual mechanics. To illustrate this point I would like to offer the following observations:

1. DMT acts primarily at the 5-HT2A receptor, which is where the hallucinogenic tryptamines work their visual magic. Without going into all the details here, let's just assume for a moment that a molecule with the proper shape acting at 5-HT2A site can significantly disrupt and/or enhance visual sensory processing, depending on dosage. If this is the case, then dumping DMT into the perceptual wetworks is akin to messing with the logic that produces the display on the computer screen you are looking at right now. Any programmer can tell you that a single line of code consisting of only a few characters can drastically alter the way your screen presents the data coming from your video card. It can make the screen flicker, blink, warp, twist, or fall into infinitely recursive fractalline chaos. When this happens is your monitor now displaying an "alternate reality" or "parallel dimension"? No, it is not. It is simply taking the same old data and processing it with a new factor in the base algorithm (disruption/excitement at the 5HT2A receptor). Even a very small tweak could produce dramatic results. Since the sensory processing system is so delicate, any abrupt chemical perturbation can cause it to become excited, unstable, or fall into chaos. When the visual system is disrupted for any reason we get phosphene activity, which is the visual system's version of a "ringing in the ears." Phosphene activity is chaotic, but as we all know chaos does not produce random noise, it is familiar and predictable, and produces some damn trippy patterns.

2. The sensation of seeing aliens, elves, or being in the presence of God(s) is not unique to DMT users. Otherwise sane people who have never tried DMT report these sensations all the time, and it is generally treated as a sign of psychosis (see separate topic on Charles Bonnet Syndrome CBS). However, recent research has shown that by stimulating parts of the temporal lobe you can reliably reproduce the feeling of being in the presence of God (also known as "seeing the light," "feeling enlightened," or having a "religious epiphany"). It is an innate human sensation -- just like the feeling that "I'm being watched right now" is an innate human sensation -- we just don't catalog it as such because it is relatively rare, happening perhaps only once in a lifetime to those who do not artificially stimulate themselves, perhaps never in a lifetime. Some people have very dramatic religious epiphanies with angels and demons and all form of cherubim marching through with horns and such with no drugs whatsoever, and though it is a common event we generally treat it today as a psychological aberration; though back in the day it was the stuff prophets were made of. Since this kind of religious epiphany is something our brains can already do, the fact that a substance like DMT can reliably reproduce this single phenomena (in concert with other effects, of course) is not much of a stretch.

3. The archetypal DMT "entities" are pretty well categorized, with most people seeing elves or aliens or fairies or angels or some kind of loopy little spirits that dance about and tell riddles. Sometimes it is a spirit-animal like a jaguar or a snake, sometimes it is none of the above and goes totally off the map. But getting back to the elf thing (which is what many people find to be the most curious aspect), I initially found it very surprising to be confronted by elves in my DMT experiences, and on psilocybe mushrooms as well, and did indeed perceive them as externalized, morphing, disincarnate beings. I even managed to carry on rudimentary conversations of sorts. However, the more I experimented with DMT the more I found that the "elves" were merely machinations of my own mind. While under the influence I found I could think them into existence, and then think them right out of existence simply by willing it so. Sometimes I could not produce elves, and my mind would wander through all sorts of magnificent and amazing creations, but the times that I did see elves I tried very hard to press them into giving up some non-transient feature that would confirm at least a rudimentary "autonomous existence" beyond my own imagination. Of course, I could not. Whenever I tried to pull any information out of the entities regarding themselves, the data that was given up was always relevant only to me. The elves could not give me any piece of data I did not already know, nor could their existence be sustained under any kind of prolonged scrutiny. Like a dream, once you realize you are dreaming you are actually slipping into wakefulness and the dream fades. So it is with the elves as well. When you try to shine a light of reason on them they dissolve like shadows.

4. Which brings me to my last point. Psychedelics in general have an amazing capacity to activate the mind's eye, or what I call the imaginal workspace. In our day-to-day lives we have two active areas that are processing our perception of reality. The first is the primary workspace where all our sense data is compiled in our pre-frontal cortex to give us our waking picture of reality. The second is the imaginal workspace, where we can think about abstract thoughts or visualize the contents of our cupboards from memory (or whatever). The imaginal workspace is generally running in the background, helping us plan our actions by visualizing them in advance -- like driving to the grocery store for instance. We visualize the store, plan a route, and then go. All the while our primary workspace is taking up most of our attention. This balance flips, however, when we are caught in deep abstract thinking, like daydreaming or trying to solve a difficult problem. And when we sleep the primary workspace is actually taken-over by the imaginal workspace to process all the backlogged data that was set aside during the waking day. When this happens we dream, and our primary workspace is filled with imaginal data (memory compressed by the hippocampus), and suddenly we are immersed in an imaginal reality that looks and feels just as solid as waking reality. Since it is being processed in the primary workspace, the same high-end gear that we use to processes our waking reality, we can't tell the difference. The only difference between being awake and dreaming is the origin of the data that is being processed in the primary workspace. When you are awake you are processing external sense data in the primary workspace. When you are dreaming you are processing internal (imaginal/memory) data in the primary workspace.

I have done many experiments with lucid dreaming and self-induced visionary and hypnogogic states and I can tell you that the switch from external to internal data sources feeding into the primary workspace (and vice-versa) happens in a split second. It is too quick to notice unless you are waiting and watching very carefully for the neural hand-off. But it is there. It is a physical, mechanical thing. One second you are awake and listening to the faucet drip, the next second you are wandering through a dream parking lot listening to the sound of your keys jingling, searching for your car. If you catch yourself and wake back up again you are back to the drip-drip-drip of the faucet. Close your eyes and you are back in the parking lot (or wherever). So, knowing that there's this kind of murky area in between waking and dreaming where imagination feeds into working memory, it is not much of a stretch to assume that psychedelics can interact with the chemical signals which manage that hand-off between external sensory data and imaginal data flowing into our primary workspace. It may very well be that in the psychedelic state our selective sensory inputs are totally opened up so that everything is crashing in at once, making it impossible to parse the data and distinguish what is real from what is imaginal until the drug actually wears off. In short, concrete psychedelic visuals may be nothing more than chaotic visual patterns overlapped with images created from waking dreams.

So, within the framework of this equation one question remains: Why is the alien/elf archetype so common to the DMT experience? The only answer I have is that we humans must have innate evolutionary wetware that forces our senses to latch onto any piece of anthropomorphic data that pops into otherwise randomly uniform data -- like spotting the face of another human or a jaguar peering out from behind the bushes, or seeing another human moving through tall grass. The evolutionary advantage of such a trait is obvious, and in standard Rorschach tests even the most amorphous blobs are found to look like faces and/or people no matter what culture the observer is from. Now, given the amazing swirling kaleidoscopic imagery produced in the typical DMT trip, it is inevitable that anthropomorphic shapes will emerge and then express themselves in even greater detail as the mind latches onto them and "dreams" them into focus. With the imaginal workflow kicked into high gear, it is not surprising that these emergent anthropomorphic entities can then speak to us, revealing shocking details from our own subconscious in a conversational stream of visual theater. Given all of this, in a nutshell, the case for autonomous disincarnate DMT entities is closed. All that is needed to produce them is our own over-excited visual system and imagination, and thus Occam's razor wipes them right off the table and into the fairy-dust bin.

In conclusion I would just like to mention a couple more things. The visions produced by DMT are not solely elves and alien entities. A wide variety of archetypes and just plain-old whacked-out stoner shit creeps into the mix. It is highly individual and in many cases is heavily dependent on set and setting. This fact alone (more than anything else) leads me to believe that the DMT entities are mere figments. If, for example, everyone always saw talking penguins and only talking penguins while high on DMT, that would be much harder to explain and much more mysterious. The fact that DMT "consciousness" reveals itself in so many forms tells me that the "messenger" -- be it elf, alien, jaguar, or whatever -- is basically arbitrary within the context of the patterns and archetypes our minds tend to pick out of random noise. However (and this is the good part), the really interesting thing about DMT experiences is not the elves (messengers) themselves, but what it is they are saying (the message). And when you get to the heart of what the typical DMT message is, it is usually something about the environment or living systems or the vast plant consciousness that penetrates our world. The "Gaia consciousness" that infuses the experience is undeniable, and what to make of that I don't know, other than to entertain the possibility that this ancient plant consciousness actually exists and is attempting to make itself known through the DMT-enlightened mammal brain. If so, then this is the real discovery of the DMT experience, and this is the topic that should be looked at more closely. In the context of DMT being a two-way radio for plant-human communication, the "elves" themselves are nothing more than a cartoon interface for the exchange of information.

Clifford Pickover responds with some questions:

> Benny Shannon's excellent book has many pages telling us why DMT visions are NOT like dreams. What do you think of this argument?

This is a discreet point so I will try to make it again. I agree that DMT visions are not dreams, but suspect they utilize the same brain organs and neural circuitry that dreams do to produce the internal imagery. Psychedelic visuals are generally kinetic geometric matrices (2-D or 3-D depending on substance and level of trip, DMT being very good at producing 3-D matrices) with "embedded images" which emerge from the matrix, morph, and fade along with the user's own train of thought or subconscious inclinations. The geometric matrices are a result of the visual processing system falling into a chaotic state, thus causing sensory feedback, overlapping frames and trails, and frame-translation errors such as visual flanging, perspective distortion, etc. The eye receives light on the retina in a series of concentric circles with the highest concentration in the center. We only receive about 80%-90% of the actual picture of what's in front of us on the retina, and the rest (like the stuff left out on the periphery and in the blind spot) is "added in" by our brain's ability to fill in the missing pieces of reality. This "fill in the blank" aspect of the brain is not perfect, and sometimes causes us to mistakenly see something "out of the corner of our eye" which on closer inspection is not actually there. Along the pathway from the retina to the prefrontal cortex, the sense data must be translated from a series of concentric rings of dots to a concrete image of outlines, fills, and shading that we perceive as reality. This process is called "frame translation." Hard lines are etched out on our retina by a process called "lateral inhibition", which allows one retina to take priority over the retina next to it if it perceives a hard line or shift in shading that infers depth or outline. If lateral inhibition is inhibited, the edges of what we see tend to drift and blur, causing perspective distortion, creeping light and shadows, and patterns that seem to crawl. At more dramatic levels of this kind of activity, the "frame" of reality actually begins to rotate and twist, and if you have "trails" on the outlines of an image that is rotating in space, you create a complex 2-D geometric lattice. If this lattice twists forwards or backwards it produces depth of field, thus a swirling 3-D matrix appears.

Okay, so that is part one. These shifting lines and shadows and geometric lattice imagery I have described should be familiar to anyone who has taken a psychedelic tryptamine. Now when you add an over-active "dream engine" trying to impose patterns and order on these morphing kinetic matrices, (not to mention visual synethesia) an infinite number of patterns and visions can emerge. They are unlike dreams in that they do not appear as a alternate version of hard reality, but this is because dream data comes from the hippocampus (compressed memory), which stores data from everyday stuff. DMT data comes from the brain's own pattern-matching systems trying to impose order on a chaotic patterns, thus "filling in the blanks" and trying to piece together what is going on. This is probably why "visuals" become more elaborate on the periphery (i.e. in the corner of the eye where there is more capacity to extrapolate missing data) and become less-so when examined front and center. For example, "elves" tend to hang out and bounce around in the periphery, and tend to disappear or "drift" with the visual field when you try to focus directly on them.

Since the patterns and imagery we see in the psychedelic state are so "alien" to our normal sensory input, it is no wonder that the landscapes and visions that our brain imposes on them are likewise very alien. That said, I have seen all kinds of mundane stuff in DMT visions: toasters, faces of people I know (usually family), people copulating, scenes of human suffering and warfare, clowns and harlequins, trains, skulls, trees, oceans, sunsets, animals, dancing cartoon rats, silken sand-dunes, spider-webs, strands of DNA, rotating atomic and molecular structures, etc. This is all very terrestrial stuff. So DMT visuals can be pieced together from bits of memory and imagination. The basic difference between dreams and DMT visuals is that dreams are snippets of incongruous memories forced into a consistent narrative by the pre-frontal cortex; DMT visuals are chaotic geometric patterns forced into a consistent narrative by the prefrontal cortex. The source of the data is different (though sometimes overlapping), but the process of turning random data into "contextual meaning" happens in the same place in the brain, weather we are awake, dreaming, or tripping.

> DMT visions have nothing to do with the psychonaut's life and they are not as chaotic or illogical as the plots of our dreams. They do not contain simple household objects that you see in dreams.

I disagree with this. You can impose any imagery you want in the DMT state. I know a guy who always sees tricked-out cartoon hot-rods when he smokes DMT. I know a woman who only saw hideous zombie-like faces and corpses. I have seen vivid images from my own life (memories, family members, etc.) as well as mundane objects in the DMT state. If the user stays "unfocused" the imagery tends to dribble out of the subconscious and swirl into the realm of the fantastic (hence the archetypes), but if you are "looking" for something within the visions you can generally make it appear.

> The DMTVerse seems completely foreign to the user. No matter how hard I try, I can not imagine the vast, intricate, ornate palaces and temples common in the DMTverse.

True! But this is because you cannot consciously "will" your visual system to collapse into a chaotic state, or you cannot "will" your temporal lobe to become excited and produce the presence of God (though perhaps long-practicing mystics can). There is too much neurochemical redundancy to keep your brain from falling into these states at any old time (unless you are schizophrenic). The ornate palaces and temples are heavenly archetypes, this is obvious when you look at ancient architecture, especially in the Middle East and Asia. This does not mean they are "real" in the sense that they actually exist somewhere in hyperspace, merely that they are imaginal blueprints, pleasing patterns forged from the subconscious. I think people sell the human imagination short when they say things like, "No one could ever envision such things on their own." Maybe people raised on the limited flotsam of TV and pop culture can't, but brilliant creative types sure can. That said, I am not adverse to the notion that there is some kind of "ancient alien architecture" embedded in our DNA somewhere that produces these kinds of visions, or that the heavenly archetypes (such as vast temples, angels, etc.) are actually representative of some kind of hyperspatial kingdom where souls dwell after death (or something like that), but such things are impossible to prove in any empirical way, so flatly saying that this is the case is highly suspect to me, especially when the content of the experience varies so wildly. What I will concede is that humans across all cultures have alien and heavenly archetypes embedded in their subconscious, and psychedelic tryptamines can access the archetypes with a high level of success. Where these archetypes come from or what they mean is the subject of eternal debate. The best I can figure is that they are sub-phenomena of our own visual systems, a hidden feedback filter that crystallizes inward and outward vision, and necessarily reflects some of our own internal structure back at us. The answer to the mystery is you. You are the amazing thing producing all of this... All the time...

> Many psychonauts have the distinct feeling that the visions are not simply products of their own mind.

True, but most psychonauts are just beginning to explore their own mind and are usually very surprised at what pops out when they they start messing around with it. The first people who discovered fractals had the distinct feeling that these amazing other-worldly images and patterns could not simply be the products of a few lines of code, and yet that's all they are. Complexity breeds all kinds of weird shit, and the human brain is the most complex system on the planet.

> The goal for future researchers it to determine whether the psychonauts can return to our world with new "factual" information.

I have attempted this experiment in many ways and with many people. The answer seems to be "No." I have had many people argue with me about this but none could provide a concrete example that was convincing in any way. The information retrieved from the psychedelic states is usally generalized common wisdom applicable to the user's own life (or human life in general). The notion that a rainforest shaman can divine "information" about a plant just by ingesting it in an ayahuasca brew illustrates to me the mind's amazing ability to extrapolate holistic data on a specific system when given only little snippets of data to work with. This ability is amplified by the psychedelic state, but it does not produce "new" information, just more refined and detailed analysis of what we have already observed. This is the "fill in the blanks" property of the brain I discussed earlier in the context of the visual system, but logic systems use this technique as well.

> I discuss in the book I'm doing that we should search out these entities just like scientists search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

I'm all for trying to get a grip on the phenomena, but have little expectation that anyone will ever make "absolute contact" that proves an autonomous existence of hyperspatial entities. I am more inclined to believe that they are very strange and unexplored facets of the human psyche, but I also believe in samsara and the transmigration of souls, which makes the notion that these entities could be "disembodied souls" floating around in hyperspace very tempting to latch onto. And yet, even wanting to believe that I have not been able to convince myself that this is the case even after repeated experimentation and confrontation with these entities. All I can come up with is that they are figments, or that if they are disembodied souls, the disconnect between their intelligence and human intelligence is such that they are not able to reveal anything lasting, tangible, or definitive about their own nature. In short, they say all kinds of things, some of it profound, some if it gibberish. But none of it points definitively to any deeper truth about what they are or where they come from.

> What do you think of the ornate palaces that people see and seem to be able to traverse?

I could ask you the same thing about J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. He (and legions of fans) could certainly envision this world and traverse it with very adept skill. The product he produced is very vivid, ornate, and fantastical. Does that make it real? No. DMT visions certainly do have their own very unusual aesthetic, to be sure, as do mushrooms, LSD, 2-CB, Mescaline, etc. Each one produces a distinct set of visual imagery, each one a slightly different variation on a basic fractally recursive theme. But this is no more surprising to me than the fact that two different fractal algorithms produce different results, and yet they all share the same intrinsic qualities and are instantly recognizable as "fractals." As I said, the ornate places may be heavenly archetypes, they may be the product of the mind imposing order or chaotic patterns, but I have seen nothing that implies to me that they are "real" places somewhere. They are by definition fleeting and ephemeral. The fact that DMT produces a consistent "style" of visions in human brains across all cultures is no more surprising to me then the fact that pressure phosphenes produce the same kind of geometric visuals in human brains across all cultures, or that a specific fractal algorithm will produce the same imagery no matter which computer it is running on. It would be more surprising to me if DMT produced wildly different visions in each person who tried it (as LSD can, which I find infinitely more fascinating). As it is, DMT appears to produce amazingly consistent visual patterns in all users. That is a significant fact, and it points to the conclusion that DMT is very simple in it's action without a lot of room for variation.

> There is also a sense of enchantment, of sanctity, of beauty, a sense of gaining privileged access to knowledge and that their intelligence is increased.

Yes! I agree that all these aspects of the human mind are amplified under the influence of DMT. One does not have to take DMT to have epiphanies of beauty and sanctity. DMT does increase intelligence, which I define as the brain's ability to retain many specific pieces of data in working memory while simultaneously performing analysis on them. DMT (and other psychedelics) certainly amplify this capacity, and thus amplify the brain's capacity to apply contextual meaning or "profundity" to whatever it may be experiencing. If the psychedelically amplified brain happens to be focused on an imaginary alien landscape, then the profundity of that alien landscape suddenly goes through the roof!

> To the DMT psychonoaut, the world around them appears to be constructed, composed with care like a work of art or an intricate hand-spun fabric, and guided like actors in a play. They feel as if a veil has been lifted and so that they see something that has always been transpiring.

Yes, this aspect of the experience is more relevant to me than the elves or whatnot. The exposing of the deeper fabric of reality that we don't normally see is the big secret of the DMT (and other psychedelic) experience. This is a product of the amplified mind exploring the nature of hard reality. The quantum levels of flux become apparent and the "hardness" of reality disappears into a vibrating mass of infinitely deep energy, emerging and crystallizing from the bottom-up into ever-changing states, which of course it actually is. The profundity of this realization is very heavy, yet it is nothing that we do not already know. But the quantum nature of our world made manifest for our otherwise limited senses is always a shock.

> Shanon tells us that the DMTverse appears to be another world with an existence independent of the psychonaut.

Well, the "real" world exists independently of the observer, what we perceive as reality is an abstract representation assembled in our brain from sense data. We just don't dwell on this fact very often. Why does a deeper understanding or vision of this world have to be classified as another world or a parallel world? Why not just assume it is a hidden (or hard to see) aspect of this one? Sensing quantum reality is not the same as entering another world. It is experiencing another layer of the same old world we already live in (like the infrared goggles metaphor). Giving this hidden layer of reality some kind of vague "mystical" properties only mucks up the analysis of what is really going on when we experience it.

> Many psychonauts return with a certainty that consciousness continues after death. They return with the idea of a soul existing beyond the body, somehow woven into the fabric of the universe.

I agree. This may well be the case. Time is an illusion of our senses. The soul may be timeless. Again, this conjecture is metaphysically savory but impossible to prove. The mystery just gets deeper when you probe it. My conclusion is that the things we see in the psychedelic state are a confusing mixture of a "deeper hidden reality" that is there all the time (the product of amplified senses), plus detailed imaginal renderings of our own subconscious desires and fears (made manifest by a combination of synesthesia and an over-stimulated brain trying to impose order on chaotic patterns). Sorting out which is which (separating the "hard signal" from the "chaotic noise" and "imaginal rendering") is the hard part of the psychedelic journey. Flatly accepting the entirety of the experience as "real" or "truth" is a mistake that makes many "psychedelic philosophers" appear to be little more than new-age jokes enamored with their own visions. The issue demands much deeper analytical thinking than that. It drives me crazy.

> DMT psychonauts may see a new world superimposed on the "normal world."

So do people suffering from delusions. This is interesting, but far from absolute evidence of parallel realities.

> This new world is completely navigable...

I disagree. This DMT world is fleeting and ephemeral, constantly shifting and morphing. You can "navigate" somewhat by choosing which direction you would like to "morph into" next, but the "imaginal worlds" of the DMT experience do not have a solid and consistent structure. They are transient and elusive. If you want to talk about total waking immersion in a hard imaginal world, you need to get into the kind of experiences people have on Datura and other delirients. These substances can make you think you are standing in line at the grocery store when you have actually walked into your own coat closet. These are what I refer to as "concrete" hallucinations that are fully immersive. In contrast, the DMT visions appear as "perceptual distortions" which produce stylized renderings of the reality that is in front of us. Close your eyes and you get a swirling, highly detailed alien landscape. Open them and you see a very distorted view of the space in front of you overlapped with these same swirling geometrical lattices, with the occasional "hard" object such as an elf or something popping out of the mix.

I think in general people like to romanticize the DMT state and make it more than it is because they desperately want there to be a hidden hyperspatial world filled with mischievous sprites and god-like entities. However, when you closely study the experience over time you come to see that a lot of the romanticized notions are not actually going on in the state, and people tend to "editorialize" the content of their psychedelic experiences, or they create a narrative filled with concrete objects and entities in order to compress the experience into language, meaning, and memory.

I've done DMT a number of times, each time with the intent to find some deeper truth or insight about the experience. The only thing I can say for certain is that it is different every time. The aesthetic of the visual phenomena is consistent, unique, and wonderous, but the content that is generated within the experience conforms to no hard or simple rules like "entering a hyperspatial dimension" or "visitation from alien entities." Everybody experiences something slightly different, and yet they all want to apply it to some kind of "Alice in Wonderland" trip down the rabbit-hole and convince themselves that they've been exposed to a hidden world or something of vast spiritual significance. In doing so they revise the experience to fit into a narrative that makes sense, thus creating wishful non-truths, such as the statement that DMT worlds are concrete navigable spaces, or that elves appear for everyone every time. This is simply not the case. It is a mis-representation of the actual experience. It would be cool if it was true, but the truth if far more elusive and complex then the simple metaphysical fairy-tale notions we like to apply.

Gotta go...

[daniel]

Another piece by Kent:



http://www.tripzine.com/listing.php?id=978

Moving Beyond God

by James Kent

Special Excerpt: Psychedelic Information Theory

When discussing entheogens and the role of psychedelics in religion, it is often said that the highest or most desirable aspect of the entheogenic voyage is becoming one with God. This union may be literal or it may be figurative; it may happen via channeling the voice of God; by awakening the presence of god within; via merging into the one-light of the universal mind; or sometimes you actually get to have an audience with the almighty himself, a good old-fashioned face to face chat.

Some people experience God on every single psychedelic trip, some people never have this experience. Some people experience God once and then are never able to repeat the experience no matter what variety of drug combinations and doses they try. Some people try many trips and get nothing, but then one day when they least expect it they finally tap into the Godhead and "get it". For people who use the term "entheogen" as opposed to "psychedelic", the concept of "awakening the godliness within" is placed as primary over all other aspects of psychedelic use.

The exact nature of the Godhead state has been debated for at least a couple thousand years now, but to me it seems to be a highly active, highly focused, highly attentive state with resonant EEG coherence spikes in the high beta and gamma ranges. As opposed to the transient high-speed "pulse" and "attention" consciousness that we typically experience via our multi-threaded parallel neural sense-processing network (brain), the high synaptic activity and rate of recurrent feedback stimuli facilitated by psychedelic excitation creates something more like the idealized solid-state "field consciousness" we would expect to see when talking about spiritual awakening, expanded consciousness, enlightenment, Godhead, and the like. But that is just my opinion.

To be clear, this Godhead state is very different from Zen states of deep meditation or the highly-tuned physical "flow" states where mind and body become one. While Zen and flow states are clearly representative of classic mystical experiences, my own personal description of the Godhead state is synthesized from years of experimentation and research with psychedelic drugs and mystical technique, but I consider this description to be fairly accurate and extremely reproducible under everyday circumstances, so I'm sure forward-looking research will bear me out or correct me on this description in short order. But whatever the most accurate description of the Godhead state might be, it is still one of the most fascinating mysteries of the mind, and arguably one of the most important influences on Human culture to this day. And to be clear here, everyone in some way or another desperately wants to "get it", even though they might not really understand what "it" is.

Over the course of my psychedelic experimentation I have been lucky enough to "get it" more than a few times, and each time I "got it" it left me wanting more. You see, the funny thing about becoming one with the mind of God is that it is really awesome, so awesome you want to do it again and again and again. And since I had armed myself with a head full of knowledge and a handful of powders, pills, plants, and potions, when I came knocking on heaven's door God was always home, and we would chat. Oh how we would chat.

Although I didn't get to visit very often I really enjoyed the time I spent with God. God would show me secrets about the universe; let me see how the little things worked; he'd tell me things about myself I didn't know; scold me for being selfish; praise me for being kind and noble. God would also relentlessly hit on me, often taking the form of nubile young females and other objects of desire just to get some traction off my action. Looking back over the history books I have discovered that this is actually one of God's favorite tricks, though you don't hear about it much anymore.

Yes, those were good times, very good times, but one day something interesting happened. I was having my usual visit with God -- sitting on his throne, basking in his infinite wisdom, running my fingers through the sands of time -- when I suddenly wondered what there was beyond God. The thought had seriously never occurred to me, even though I had studied philosophy and ontology and epistemology and metaphysics and all the other schools of thought that proclaim there is always another beyond beyond beyond.

So I got up off God's throne and walked beyond, beyond God, beyond the tower of infinite wisdom, beyond the gates of omniscience, and out into what lie beyond. And as I passed through the boundaries of God's kingdom I turned back to see something odd. When viewed from a distance of beyond I could see that God's eternal palace was nothing more than a two-dimensional set fabricated of plywood and chicken wire; and God himself nothing more than a mute statue upon a rickety throne. God, heaven, the eternal kingdom... the whole thing was obviously a set-up, a sham perpetrated by someone obviously far more powerful and imaginative than God. But who could that be?

I walked away from the holy ghost out into the darkness, wondering what could possibly be out there beyond God. If God was just a creation, then who had created God? And as I asked myself this question I came upon a window hanging in space; but it was not a window, it was a mirror. And as I looked into the mirror and pondered the notion of who could possibly be more powerful than God, I found myself staring back at myself, ad infinitum.

And then I woke up.

After all God had taught me, after all he had given me, he decided to teach me one more lesson. He taught me that he was only an illusion, fabricated by me for myself. He was an amalgam of everything I had ever been taught about God, but tailored just to my liking. He always had me all figured out and always had just the information I needed. He was the idealized version of me; the elder me; the me who was wise and had all the answers; the me who felt no physical or temporal limitations holding me back. He was the essential me, the eternal me.

And so that's how I discovered that I am God, just as you are God, just as we all create our own personal God in our own image. And many of us simply take for granted that God is a higher power, yet the whole time the trick has been on us. We are the higher power, and when we are praying to God we are really praying to ourselves, praying to the God within. For as a wise person once said, that is where all true change comes from.

[daniel]

I find it interesting how so many writers who should be allies in the effort to open up the contemporary discourse jump to attack or dismiss my work. This happened with Geoff Stray, who reviewed my book for diregnosis (his website), and with John Lash of metahistory, who put down the ideas in "2012" without looking at it in his first piece on the Mayan end-times (but changed the text after our email exchange). It seems to be the masculine desire to mark territory - the genetically inherited chimpanzee desire to hurt potential competitors rather than collaborate with them.

James Kent is clearly intelligent, although there seems to be a solipsistic bent to his thought. Reading his DMT piece, I suspect we have many areas of agreement -- above all, we are both compelled by our curiosity to explore the area of psychedelics and consciousness, utilizing whatever intellectual tools we can muster. It is astonishing, and indicative, that his review of "2012" includes almost no specific criticisms - he is so eager to reject the whole project out of hand. Does he really think that "abstract" theory has no validity at all? Couldn't Kent, Stray, and Lash, etcetera, recognize that the success of my work opens a space for their ideas to reach a wider audience as well?

[drew hempel]

Hey Daniel -- thanks for posting this stuff from Kent, as the other day I found myself reviewing the difference, described in one of those little self-published yoga books of yore (from the 1920s in Chicago or something by Swami White-guy with a fake Indian name, etc.) between

THE ASTRAL TUBE and Astral travel.
original source:

http://time-travelers.org/page19.htm

I've found the concept of the "Astral Tube" to be highly relevant. The idea of the Astral Tube is that the individual's 3rd Eye is open -- i.e. the pineal gland in the center of the brain resonates to the 4th dimension of space -- and this enables the person to communicate and see things and even do distance healing -- WITHOUT LEAVING THE BODY.

I've seen Master Chunyi Lin do this -- the "astral tube." He can even keep his eyes open and he just focuses his attention back to his 3rd Eye. All he needs is the person's name, age, and sex and location.

With those details he can read the person's energy and do long-distance healing, while just standing in front of the class! It's instant results. The successful results have been verified and so dramatic that I've seen the person asking for help, on behalf of the hospitalized sick, freak out due to the dramatic healing.

In such a case I saw Master Chunyi Lin then send out his Chi -- electrochemical--electromagnetic energy -- to calm down the person who couldn't believe the previous "Astral Tube" healing had been so successful! He did this through the center palm chakra -- "thunder palms" technique.

Astral Travel, in contrast to the Astral Tube, is best done while in full-lotus as, according to self-organized criticality (read Mark Buchanan's book on quantum chaos) there is

Greater Amplitude at a Lower Frequency.

This "greater amplitude at a lower frequency" is due to the vortex resonance of the Tai-Chi symbol in 3-D form -- the Full-Lotus or Pyramid Power aka the zero-point energy of the tetrahedral macro quantum water molecule that creates the quantum "rainbow snake" liquid crystal gradients.

So all these scientists trying to apply Western math and biophysics without even understanding the radical philosophy of asymmetric complimentary opposites that violates the basic one-to-one correspondance of set theory, can not even

IMAGINE

the power and practicality of shamanic healing!

Clearly enough shamanic drug use, as we discussed in 2012, in a traditional shamanic context, could open up the 3rd Eye, either for "Astral Tube" visions and powers or, in a deeper state, through full-body chakra transformation, for "astral travel" visions and powers.

[_JR_]

Yeah Daniel, you "over-intellectualize" way too much. You need to think less. Watch a bunch of TV or something....then maybe you will be can shit out hubris with the likes of Kent.

[K.J]

James Kent is clearly intelligent, although there seems to be a solipsistic bent to his thought. Reading his DMT piece, I suspect we have many areas of agreement -- above all, we are both compelled by our curiosity to explore the area of psychedelics and consciousness, utilizing whatever intellectual tools we can muster. It is astonishing, and indicative, that his review of "2012" includes almost no specific criticisms - he is so eager to reject the whole project out of hand. Does he really think that "abstract" theory has no validity at all? Couldn't Kent, Stray, and Lash, etcetera, recognize that the success of my work opens a space for their ideas to reach a wider audience as well?


That about sums up my thoughts on this piece. Why doesn't Kent attempt to connect with others on commonalities shared instead of being so divisive?

[Caprinardo Delirio]

well, i'm a bit split here. i agree or empathize with most of what kent is saying, especially on dmt, but sometimes didn't it seem like kent thought that everything we need or would like to know about consciousness and the brain-mind is explainable by somewhat cheap (played-out!?) computech analogies? he hardly wishes to be so presumtious, but i essentially sympathize as i myself feel tremendously dissapointed by the psychedelic culture i set out to find a couple of years ago. especially about dmt and the cult(ure) around it.. i agree wholeheartedly with kent that lsd is infinitely more interesting than dmt, and my own suspisions about the dmt-state are essentially his. not that i don't believe that information ("knowledge") can be spead in various highly interesting and important ways with psychedelics along what could be neural pathways of consciousness (thinking about the various rapports of people experiencing photosynthesis, for example) and i still think psychedelics are as much a miracle as any, and actually cutting the dmt-elves thing down to brass balls will probably do a whole amount of good. there could be foreign intelligence in the dmt state, i'm sure, but i really don't think that that is what should be the focus of our psychedelic inquiry. i had this funny paranoid revelation not long ago about the whole dmt mess. i believe it was when reading "true hallucinations" where one particular passage mckenna wrote about it found me thinking, or rather "seeing" (for that moment) how dmt seemed like this one-way street of ontological reconfiguration, much like how robert downey jr explains it in 'a scanner darkly': "you're either on substance d or you haven't tried it" - where in case of dmt, once you've done it, there's a switch being flipped and you're forever after rewired. much like people state it themselves, but looking at it from the other way around; not as the startling implications from the empirical data on that of your soul, well yes, that's it too, but treating it as somekinda intense causality-trauma whereby one is placed so heavily in the center of "all things" that after the warp, synchronisity is all one seem to see. well, kent for one shows that that deterministic idea doesn't float very well, as determinism rarely does.

it's a shame and i'm sad that he was so harsh in his "2012" review, and didn't care to really "understand" the message, but i also have strong difficulties with hypothesises like a radical shift in human consciousness and cognition occuring on a fixed date. now, i know daniel isn't fixed on the date, and isn't really firmly believing whatever he reports, but to most people who aren't at least a bit versed in mysticism and/or psychedelic lore, attempts to make sense past the fact that the author is channeling prophecies from mythological creatures and talking ufo's (however sensible and smart the treatment indeed is, in relating to the kafkaesque and modern estrangement) crop cirles (i admit i got all "maybe" about it, mind-manifest-style) and predictable, yet unknowable, planetary ascension in the color-crazy pharoah sanders/alice coltrane cosmic celebratory sense (that the nicest way i can say: "not exactly new-age but nearly!" since i think daniel's sense of aesthetics and his general intellect is so much beyond the standard new-age makeup of mind) seems pretty hard to hope for, and the wish that at heart what is gained from 2012 is a message of metaphysical non-duality, compassion, poetic resistance to monocultural consumer-crazes and society's quasi-fascistoid ideological value-jacket, head and heart centered soul searching and world worshippings, ect. seems, to me, also very unlikely, sadly. that being said i wholeheartedly sympathize with daniel's quest. just as wholeheartedly as i sympathize with kent, and i see daniel's writings as the sublime poetic yearnings of a romantic spirit, who also, in 2012 in particular, is striving to make sense of, and in a sense, be saved from, the occult realities he broke into. like daniels initial impressions of mckenna, which i believe he described as "trashy, cartoon-like and excessively absurd" that i shared, until, with daniel's help, terence finally managed to charm me into another prototypical fan-boy, i too had similar negative connotations with the occult and occult philosophers and too have shifted my perspective on this, though maybe not as radically as daniel. when daniel is as his best, is when he is himself, meaning incredibly honest (everybody notes this when they return his books to me), passionate and engaged, capable of representing the self-reflective and self-relating processes of modern souls as few can, and in his shorter pieces such as the one on dinesh d'souza, his intellectual integrity reminds me of that of one of my longest running heroes; noam chomsky. hopefully this reads as an enormous compliment.

i really hope to see some discussion between these two at one point or another. i'm sure erik davis would do wonders as some sort of middle-man. i think it's great to have some psychedelic intellectuals who remain earth-bound and calm about these matters. in fact i think we're in need of more of these. daniel both is one and he isn't.. (the task of summarizing and judging "2012" is pretty impossible to me) i think that this will help steer the discourse of better pathways: therapy, rites of initiation, healing, liberation from deterministic personal identity anxieties, more creativity, religious and scientific mediations and so on, rather than cartographing occult realms and hierarchies of astral entities, alien intelligences and so forth. this is just my concerns and my priorities and i know a lot of people are just waiting for starship earth to blast off, and i can't and don't blame them for wishing it so, but it is also this fact that has made me so dissapointed and disencouraged about "the psychedelic culture", which i really did have so very high hopes for before i found in it so many embarrassing examples of classical human unpleasantries...

kent does seem too solipsistic, but i welcome his angle on psychedelic culture.

[pepe3leches]

What if 2012 hypoteticall omega point or whatever exists only for a low percentage of world population -- not for everybody ?

[Caprinardo Delirio]

how could that possibly be?? that sounds like the not very ancient idea of the rapture, which isn't worth discussing either.. i really can't follow, try and elaborate.

[sidecross]

It certainly is eye opening to read and hear ones best put thoughts to be so poorly misunderstood and maligned.

Unfortunately this is not a rare happening for those who willingly make the effort to explore what is not common agreement.

It is never an easy task to walk point in a hostile environment.

[graffitirun]

If, for example, everyone always saw talking penguins and only talking penguins while high on DMT, that would be much harder to explain and much more mysterious.

of course there is Ayahuasca, which of course contains DMT, on which people often encounter the same animals, regardless of set, setting, belief, language, culture etc




I find it interesting how so many writers who should be allies in the effort to open up the contemporary discourse jump to attack or dismiss my work...

From my perspective, regardless of and due to their assertion that '2012' is 'new age hokum' ..they themselves come into view as being the new-new-age-stuck-in-the-past-hokum and seem to miss the point almost entirely. It is really a shame that they do.

Marking territory, perhaps,
The attacks stink of urine nonetheless.



Why doesn't Kent attempt to connect with others on commonalities shared instead of being so divisive?

perhaps he's smoked too much DMT



But, like anything, when you do it many times the magic tends to wear off and reveal itself for what it is; an exotic aberration of the brain's perceptual mechanics.

Oh yes that must be it! and hark! there be a linear road to stroll down..


I find the above quote to be similar to Alan Watts' assertion regarding drugs/psychedelics, (often repeated by Douglas Rushkoff)

"When you've got the message, hang up the phone."


I love Alan Watts, but the problem here is in the arrogance of assuming that you've 'recieved' the whole message. That it is that cut and dry.

How do you know the messenger wasnt pausing for effect or simply allowing one time to digest the message or that there might be another call, more to the message, more to what meets the eyes or that there are weirder wilder things occuring on this planet than can be so easily 'explained'

-




yours elf, mys elf, ours elves, twentytw elves

[Mars]

James Kent is clearly intelligent, although there seems to be a solipsistic bent to his thought. Reading his DMT piece, I suspect we have many areas of agreement -- above all, we are both compelled by our curiosity to explore the area of psychedelics and consciousness, utilizing whatever intellectual tools we can muster. It is astonishing, and indicative, that his review of "2012" includes almost no specific criticisms - he is so eager to reject the whole project out of hand. Does he really think that "abstract" theory has no validity at all? Couldn't Kent, Stray, and Lash, etcetera, recognize that the success of my work opens a space for their ideas to reach a wider audience as well?

Disagreements between family members are almost always more heated, more loaded, more reactionary than with strangers, acquaintances and even good friends, in the same way that civil wars tend to be the bloodiest and most brutal conflicts. After reading Mr. Kent's emotional critique and recalling the discord between Daniel and Doug Rushkoff some months back, I am inclined to think of them all as being within the same "family," only bound by ideas, by worldview, by shared adventures instead of upbringing or blood. I doubt Mr. Kent would have responded with such ire if the subject of discourse had been a topic less dear to his heart - say, mulching.

[pepe3leches]

Well I don't know Caprinardo, it is as plain as it sounds. Changes in the world are not for everybody, there's always a group that achieves that changes first.

I don't really know what's gonna happen --actually i don't know if it is going to happen something-- but maybe is something that involves not human kind, but only a few humans.

Only a little thought.

[Caprinardo Delirio]

well i suppose it could be some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.. i don't believe in chosen peoples and all that, unless they're their own agents in the matter. hmm, no i really don't think anything is gonna happen in 2012 of that transhumane initializing nature, but i do believe that we're moving in the direction of christ consciousness, post single-individuality and all that other funny stuff pretty naturally and some people are christ now and some probably never will be. food and shelter really help bring out the good in people, that's why i don't set fire to it all..

[magicbean]

I find it interesting how so many writers who should be allies in the effort to open up the contemporary discourse jump to attack or dismiss my work. It seems to be the masculine desire to mark territory - the genetically inherited chimpanzee desire to hurt potential competitors rather than collaborate with them.


They are opening up discussion, just not agreeing with you. I find the things Kent et al. have to say a relief - sensible, accessible, rational, wise, exploratory, interesting, and requires little in the way of "believe me". His article on the Godhead experience was spot on. He gets at the meat of an issue that many crazy make-em-up believers are afraid to examine. Actually, the DMT article was excellent too, I've read it before.

Nothing he wrote sounds like marking territory to me, but it does sound like you feel your masculine territory has been infringed upon.

It is astonishing, and indicative, that his review of "2012" includes almost no specific criticisms - he is so eager to reject the whole project out of hand.


It isn't astonishing if you see it from his perspective. If someone presents to you a work of fiction and then asks for your critique of it as a scientific treatise, there's just no point in saying that on page 329, um, dragons don't have 17 eyes. If you see the work as not at all sensible, you can't offer specific criticism or find much commonality.

[graffitirun]

They are opening up discussion, just not agreeing...


that might be nice and close, but why then is there a legion of otherwise reasonable articles and arguments that generally begin with "this is the worst new age hokum etc etc et al"

that is where it gets annoying and weak.


what grabbed me and where i found a certain degree of common ground and interest is along the trail leading to and lined with abstract expressionism, the beats, kerouac et al

this is what many miss out on with '2012' and in general with Daniel's perspective

(at least from my perspective)

so you end up with pseudo-neo-new-new-agers denouncing the book and the whole thing according to 'new age' principles.

it is absurd and wasteful and full of tunnel vision

btw Im not trying to blow (dmt) smoke up anyones arse..

but my own experience with the book, the subjects, Daniel and so on is one full of wild synchronicity, time, adventure, Ayahuasca, buckminster fuller, kerouac, planetary citizenship and so on.

only After running & swirling through all of the above did I actually read '2012'

which makes it all the more interesting to me

and makes all these articles with accusations of new ageness ultra dull and bland by comparison

[Isaiah Mpski]

Daniel.You really are out of touch.
If you are the "bird headed" man,what are your plans for the future.
Another party?Where you spout some shit and sit around trying to look important.

And what about your followers etc.Other than some continious verbage have they gotten any positive reward other than having access to the big Q.
Say dude.It's time to buy some land in Mexico or Oklahoma and open it up to us.

[graffitirun]

Isaiah Mpski, with comments like that, why are you even here on this forum, wasting time with close to 2000 posts?

[drew hempel]

Here's a fascinating DMT vs. Salvia report. Someone combined the two and found out the DMT ELF land turned out ALL WRONG -- the body parts were switched, etc. Pretty strange..... and the person states that Salvia got the "upper hand." I finished off my 17x extract last night -- about 1/6 of a gram. I blacked out for 5 minutes -- twice. Staying in full-lotus the whole time. That was AFTER I took precise time readings because I took one strong hit and from what I could tell was blacked out for 25 minutes! Holy smokes! haha. When I came to... I thought that the whole drug-full-lotus thing was just some dream experiment being observed by my family, friends, etc. in some other astral realm. So I asked these people who were watching me do this...."Hey you all where are my glasses?" I always grab those before coming out of full-lotus. One time when I came back from black-out I heard my friends, family voices going "I don't know what opening the 3rd Eye means but I think you should try to do it." That was repeated over a few times until I realized I could feel my head normally again -- with my two eyes -- ....

Also I had some 4 internal full-on, dick pulsating orgasms again, while in full-lotus....

http://www.lavondyss.com/donut/j9.html

Now the Freemason mad scientists are using an amnesia drug to erase specific memories -- fearful memories that are associated with certain tones of sound! http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070305/full/070305-17.html

[Caprinardo Delirio]

wow wow, easy on the dick pulsation, drew, what the hell!?

[drew hempel]

Cap -- this dick-pulsating climax is in contrast to the typical clitorial climax O at a D that people freak out about when I explain. For example last night's "bus yoga" had 3 O at a Ds but those what I call clitoris climaxes versus G spot climaxes. It's strange to use female descriptions but the internal orgasm is based on female physiology -- through the vagus nerve from females with broken spines. In normal stimulation, between males and females in O at a Ds, there are cycles -- several clitorial climaxes -- smaller, yet orgasmic and definitely a climax -- and then one bigger full-body, dick-pulsating, full-on climax. Then the cycle starts over. After several of these cycles the heart chakra opens up and finally the 3rd Eye.

In actual tantra the guy is supposed to suck the clitoris until it's hard and flowing with sex juice and then drink the female sex juices in order to build up his magic power. This is the "secret kernal" of tantra explained in the recent academic Tantra book by UC-Santa Barbara professor David Gordon White (1998). Hence his title: Kiss of the Yogini. His book includes an overview of how tantra was central to the early city-state dynasties in Western, Central and Eastern Asia.

[Caprinardo Delirio]

seems like one win-win of a thing!

[drew hempel]

Cap check this out -- Mr. spirit molecule himself did a Meditation on Salvia study and those "be-aches" (excuse the street slang) weren't even doing strong extract, nor sitting in full-lotus. FAKE!

http://www.maps.org/research/salvia/sdmeditation.html

[drew hempel]

OK this is the best description of an overall Salvia trip dynamic. This is the same person who did Salvia and DMT at the same time and the Salvia won out over the DMT vision-realm.

Anyway this person mentions the power of music in the Salvia trip -- and that's one thing I forgot to mention that my hearing abilities greatly increased on the Salvia last night -- I could hear this really high overtones in the Sun Meditation c.d. from http://springforestqigong.com My previous trip I mentioned strong ringing in the ears, activating the kidney life force energy and so hearing those embedded overtones confirmed that my hearing ability had increased. It has similarly increased from previous deeper qigong sessions as well.

http://www.lavondyss.com/donut/Jindx.html

[Caprinardo Delirio]

i think you're over emphasizing the significance of the full-lotus position, it might be ideal for energy flows ect, but it very unlikely hold some special key-shape to some special astral lock.. i really think that is the same kind of misreading and misunderstanding that f-mental christians and f-mental indivi-duals be doing.. i mean, how esoteric, occult and sophistic does one have to be about the world? truth can be simple you know..

[magicbean]

you guys are either singularly the best parody artists I've ever read or you're completely off your well-worn rockers. I can't figure it out. Good show.

[drew hempel]

Cap -- what you say is correct but I recommend that you read Professor and Master Nan, Huai-chin's books on the fascinating cover-up of body-mind dynamics for shamanism.

The simplest practice is the most powerful. Consciousness creates energy and all thoughts start with the origin of the I-thought.

When we repeat I-I-I over and over we create a VORTEX of natural resonance back into the formless awareness -- the space between the I-I resonates into ultrasound creating great heat that ionizes the body's chemicals and the increased density turns into the full electromagnetic spectrum of energy. First great heat is created -- with strong bliss. Then strong electromagnetic fields -- shooting out of the body, out of the hands, etc. Then spirit-light that bends spacetime.

The problem is that the mind, on its own, does not have a lot of amplitude. It can easily resonate into high frequencies but if there is any emotional blockage then the mind is overwhelmed. It's best to focus on the HEART -- the greatest oscillator of the body -- specifically the right-side of the Heart Center -- the right side of the body -- while practicing self-enquiry -- or vichara of I-I-I. You just LISTEN to the source of the I-thought coming from the HEART and a vortex is created to the Formless Awareness that is the source of the BODY-MIND. In Taoism it's called the

HEART-MIND.

The top of the body and the lower half of the body CREATE A VORTEX OF RESONANCE. So if you stand with knees bent and put one hand in front of the top of the body and the other hand in front of the lower body and then you slowly switch the hands positions, a natural resonance of vortex energy is created.

So that's the 2nd simplest practice, called "moving of yin and yang."

The 3rd simplest is the "small universe" -- the 12 harmonic nodes along the outside of the body. You play the "scale" of the body, starting with the first node, cycling around and each cycle the energy is compounded. 1) belly 2) bladder 3) bottom of torso 4) tip of tailbone 5) bottom of back 6) kidney area 7) top of back 8) base of head 9) top of head 10) middle of forehead 11) neck 12) heart.

Sit on the edge of a chair, with back straight, and be relaxed. Follow "small universe" guidance tapes from Mantak Chia or http://springforestqigong.com and for the ultimate results -- spirit travel, turning the body into consciousness, etc. read

Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality by Charles Luk.

So the principles of Natural Resonance are based on the complimentary opposites of 2:3 and 3:4 or the Perfect 5th and Perfect 4th in music -- creating the 12 notes of the music scale as the small universe.

Now the Full-Lotus, which I'm sitting in right now, is the Tetrahedron, with 4 equilateral triangles, each made up of two 2:3:4 triangles, resonating as 2:3 Yang and 3:4 yin.

Because of the vortex dynamic -- it resonates back into the 4th dimension of space -- the Formless awareness as consciousness. This is modeled in the origins of the West as the TETRAD of 1:2:3:4 -- asymmetric complimentary opposites.

When the Pythagorean Theorem was created this collapse of the triangle back into formless awareness was LOST and therefore the secret to free energy was buried beneath the lies of Freemasonry. The source of the I-I of the One-One Pythagorean Triangle is NOT symmetric (i.e. the square root of two) -- but resonates as complimentary opposites that creates free energy.

[magicbean]

I'm falling to the parody artist side. No...definitely crazy...no, wait I GET IT!

The 17th chakra of the EARTH is VIBRATING according to the prophesy of the MASONIC pythagorean underground alliance with the aLiEnS. They are trying to open our hearts within the vortex of dimensionality in full consciousness! The collective third eye needs to be aligned with the influx of lotus energy from the Sun AND the mooon on the proper date and we'll all be SAVED!

Holy shit! My god. Why didn't I see it before? smacks forehead.

This is awesome.

[drew hempel]

Magicbean -- you must be clued in on the great secret. This year is the Year of the Golden Pig -- it comes only once every 600 years!

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/culture/200612/kt2006123119133111710.htm

[magicbean]

I am in on the big secret now. I have it on Good Authority (i.e it came to me in a dream, re-affirmed scientifically by a trip to the grocery store where I bought 23 cans of cat food as an offering) that this is actually the year of the Light Red Mountain Lion, which only comes in 17,367 year cycles. The Lion is asking us all to eat popcorn and dress like Inspector Clouseau for 6 months in order to align our hearts properly. You should do it. It works! I tried it myself.

[Caprinardo Delirio]

NOW, you see! it's all about converting ALL experience, ALL thought and ALL memory into abstraction and theory, understanding the fractal nature of TRUTH: that between any two points of constituent meaning there is embedded another occulter compressed hense superior truth and superior meaning, and within that and another, even more true truths of more compressed and tighter meanings, which you can then trade in for your pathetic and meager mere being in the world of simple suchness! yes, it's true, the buddha obsessed with the torah, best of both non-worlds, step right up!

the realization of the self requires every note of paper ever written, OBVIOUSLY!

[craazyman]

Either that or a good summary in an Encyclopedia.:p Cutting down on the reading relieves the eye strain.

[magicbean]

I find random cutting and pasting of buzzwords good fun. And often people believe it.

where in case of dmt, once you've done it, there's a switch being flipped and you're forever after rewired.

heroin'll do the same thing for some folks. not so good.

kent thought that everything we need or would like to know about consciousness and the brain-mind is explainable by somewhat cheap (played-out!?) computech analogies? he hardly wishes to be so presumtious, but i essentially sympathize as i myself feel tremendously dissapointed by the psychedelic culture i set out to find a couple of years ago. especially about dmt and the cult(ure) around it.

I didn't read that solipsism in Kent, myself. Where did you get a sense for that reductionism? I could see it maybe in the Godhead piece...

Agreed on the cult(ure).

[Caprinardo Delirio]

hey bean, i'll reply somethin-soon..

but yeah, although i thought of a better way to read "beyond god" and i'll read it all again, first. he still seems like the guy that wants to close the case and claim the name.. like another adolph hitler and me!

(every person is hitler 367 times a second, it came to me during deep extrospection once..)

[Caprinardo Delirio]

ok bean, i think i was to eager to call it a case of solipsism with that james kent.. i initially thought he had pretty presumptuous ideas about how the mind, and psychedelics through the mind, worked, in a way that would surpass his or anyone's actual knowledge about these things. i think i was wrong, he seems very sensible (in the good way) and not as (and this was the point i was centering around) eager to rule things out or in, as it seemed to me initially.

[Caprinardo Delirio]

check out the table of contents for his book psychedelic information theory", it looks very ambitious and possibly even funny:

Table of Contents

James Kent

Contents: Psychedelic Information Theory

* Prologue: Late Night Notes from the Alien Hybrid Messiah

* Preface
o In Search of Answers: A Personal History and Context
o Basic Premises, Goals, Methodologies, and Defintions

* Part 1: Psychedelic Overview
o Psychedelics as Primal Medium: A Brief History
o Delusion vs Reality: On the Validity of Psychedelic Experience
o Psychedelic Information Theory
o Modes of Psychedelic Use
o Pyschedelic Rules
o Words of Caution to the Would Be Shaman
o So What is Shamanism?

* Part 2: Brain, Mind, Perception, and Altered States
o Mechanics of Perception and Thought
+ Neural Basics: Structure and Function
+ Neurotransmitters & Neuromodulators: the Psychedelic Connection
+ This is Your Brain
+ Parsing Reality: The Senses
o This is Your Brain on Psychedelics
+ The Metabolic Tripping Curve in Detail
+ Psychedelics, Dissociatives, and Delirients : Different Drugs, Different Dosages, Different Actions
+ Strange Brews: Psychedelic Cocktails & Multi-Drug Effecting
o Neural Models of Altered Perception
o Neurologic Deconstruction of Psychedelic Phenomena in Detail
+ Cognitive Phenomena
# Expanded Consciousness: Lifting the Veil
# Hyper-associative States, Synchronicities, Isomorphisms, & The Universal Pattern
# Grokking, Deep Interpretation, & Hyperprofundity
# Epiphanies & Moments of Clarity
# Schizophrenia & Control
# Messianic Ideation & Delusions of Grandeur
# OBEs, Astral Encounters, & Deep Trance States
# The Cosmic Punchline
+ Emotional Phenomena
# The Dark Side
# The Pathos of Homo sapiens
# Fear, Anxiety & Paranoia
# Mania & Hysterical Freakouts
# Isolation, Despair, & Alienation
# Obsessive, Compulsive, Impulsive, and Passive Aggressive Behavior
# The Light Side
# Confusion & Enlightenment
# Distortions of Self & Ego Loss
# Empathy & Soul Bonding
# Integration, Harmony, & Unity
# Epiphany & Ecstacy
# Catharsis & Release
# Bliss, Peace, & Love
+ Somatic Phenomena
# Dilation & Respiration: The Autonomic Responses
# Heightened & Diminished Somatic Awareness
# Body Image Distortion & Tactile Hallucination
# Coordination & Grace
# Anxiety & Restlessness
# Nausea, Malaise, & Somatic Heaviness
# Body Transparency & Boundary Dissolution
# Hypnogogic and Lucid Dream States
# Catatonia & Deep Body Consciousness
# Catalepsy & Spontaneous Yoga
+ Audio Phenomena
# Sharpened, Dulled, or Distorted Hearing
# Audio Babble & White Noise
# Garbled Parsing, Gibberish, & Audio Flicker Distortions
# Ringing Tones, Ascending/Descending Tones & other Smooth Wave Functions
# Pitch & Tonality Shifts
# Loops & Echoes
# Disincarnate Voices & Laughter
# Phantom Music
# Audio Synesthesia
# Frank Audio Hallucinations
+ Temporal Phenomena
# Speeding up and Slowing Down of Perception
# Frame Skipping and Sequence Inversion
# Strobing and Flickering
# Timelessness & The Illusuion of Linear Time
# Missing Time, Dimensional Splits, & Extreme Temporal Anomolies
+ Open-Eye Visual Phenomena
# Visual Accuity & Magnification
# Halos & Superluminesence
# Trails, Double Vision, & Frame Flanging
# Altered Perspective & Spacial Distortions
# Cartoon Perception & Visual Rotoscoping
# Creeping Carpets & Melting Walls
# Fractal Textures & Geometric Overlays
# Fluid Patterns & Emergent Imagery
# Visual Synesthesia
# Frank Visual Hallucinations
+ Closed-Eye Visual Phenomena
# The Imaginary Theater: Turning on the Light Inside
# Phosphenes, Fractals, & Mandalas
# Tunnels, Matrices, Morphing Fields
# Active Memory, the Lucid Dreamspace, & Imaginal Rendering
# Spirits, Angels, Demons, & Helper Entities
+ Dream States, Regressive States, & Frank Hallucinations
# Frank Hallucinations: Getting Fully Immersive
# The Dream Journey
# Immersive Memory & the Deep Dreamspace
# Memories Past, Future, and Other Parallel Dimensions, Past Lives & Alternate Universes
# The Void and Beyond
# Death & Rebirth: Rebooting the System
o The Symphonic Trip: Putting it All Together
+ Spirit Guides and Heroic Journeys: Roots of Psychedelic Narrative & Thematic Presentation
+ The Pan-Global Experience: Examing Psychedelic Archetypes in Detail

* Part 3: Metaphysics, Magic, Mysticism, & Medicine : Practical & Paranormal Applications of Psychedelic Mind States
o Psychedelic Super Senses: Enhanced, Augmented, and Irregular Functions of Brain
+ Expanded Consciousness, Sensual Acuity, & Open-Channel Awareness
+ Metabolic Control, Harmonic Homeostasis, & Resonant Expression
+ Temporal Depth, Deep Structural Awareness, & Quantum Perception
+ Immediate Precognition & Reverse Causality
+ Beating the Odds: Hyper-Lucidity, Intuition, Luck, & Synchronicity
+ Gnostic Insight & Enlightenment
+ Making Contact with God, the Alien, or the Other
+ Genetic Identity & Root Imperatives
o ESP, Emotional Communication, & Brainwave Entrainment
+ Alpha, Beta, Delta: Brain State Fundamentals
+ Entrainment: Drivers and Receivers
+ Body Language, Pheromones, Animal Magnetism, and other Non-verbal Amplifiers
+ Harmonic Vibrations & Resonant Interactions Between Minds
+ Empathy, Non-Verbal Communication, & Ego Transparency
+ Psychic Bonding, Transpersonal Intuition, & Mind Reading
+ ESP, Telepathy, & Group Mind
+ Hypnosis, Mind Control, & Brainwashing
o The Living Field
+ Chi, Gaia, God: The Force & The Flow
+ Getting to the Bottom of It: What is It?
+ Genetic Memory: What's DNA Got to Do With It?
+ Spirits in the Material World
+ Manipulating the Field
o Psychedelic Medicine, Therapy & Shamanic Healing
+ Healing the Ghost in the Machine
+ Psychosis as a Therapeutic Agent
+ Navigating the Healing Journey
+ Psychedelics as a Diagnostic Tool
+ Psychedelics as Autoimmune Stimulator
+ Chi, Energy Channels, & Hands-On Therapy
+ Language Therapy & Metaprogramming
+ Repression, Blocked Channels, & Obsessive/Destructive Loops
+ Karmic Cleansing, Removed Perspectives, Empathy, & Forgiveness
+ Entheogens & Catharsis
+ Restoration of Faith & Vision
+ Catalyst for Creation
o Spurious, Specious & Suspect Claims
+ Somatic: Shape-Shifting, Faith Healing, Mind Reading
+ Spirit: Elves, Aliens, Angels, Demons, Fairies
+ Astral: Channelling, Spirit Hosting, Remote Viewing, OBE, Shape Shifting, Dimension Walking
+ Temporal: Time-Travel, Long-Range Precognition, & Past-Life Regression
+ Messianic: Hipster Gurus, Self-Styled Messiahs, & False Prophets

* Part 4: Psychedelic Culture, Community, Society, & Religion
o In Search of The Divine Whatever
o Deep Mythology and the Old Ones
o Alienation & The Modern World: Notes on Pathological and Anti-Social Behavior
o Pagan Revivals & The Awakening of Transpersonal Identity
o Cultural Experimentation & Spontaneous Communities
o Have our Elders Led us Astray?
o Who is the Psychedelic Community?
o Underground Research in Delicate Times
o Pop Culture Eats the Weird
o Pushing Through 2012, and Beyond
o The Promise of a Psychedelic Future

* Appendix 1. Notes
* Appendix 2. Full Disclosure: About the Author
* Glossary of Terms
* Bibliography

[brock]

kent dismisses the elves ok. but it goes to deeper levels than hes thinking. if in our dna we have encoded the entire history of everything all the way back and dmt does "nothing more" than reveal what is already encoded in us then WOW what a tool...regardless of the iconography of the infobearer