Contents:
- I Created the Egodeath Theory Because No Writers Properly Explain Transcendent Knowledge
- Dates of Incorporating the Block Universe into the Egodeath Core Theory
- Dates of Mapping the Block Universe to Mythology
- Searching for Intellectual Autobiography Dates
- 1997 Temporary Fallback Strategy: Publish an Outline Theory-Spec
- Amanita Photos 10:10 a.m. 10/10/2010
- About Mythemes
I Created the Egodeath Theory Because No Writers Properly Explain Transcendent Knowledge
All books that tried to explain mystic knowledge, were and are wholly inadequate, irrelevant, and unhelpful. If that weren’t the case, I wouldn’t have created the Egodeath theory, starting in 1985.
In 1985, I read the field of spiritual self-help and enlightenment books, and it was all too clear, that none of the explanations came anywhere near to what they should have been.
No writers on enlightenment were holding relevant, correct objectives or approaches. That was true in 1985 and remains true in 2021 (aside from my 1988 Cybernetic theory and my 2003 Mytheme theory).
That is why I rolled up my sleeves and said:
“Step aside; I need this knowledge.
“I’m sure Transcendent Knowledge exists to be found and figured out and explained clearly and properly, per modern, direct scientific and engineering explanation, with clear systematization.
“I’ll have to figure out Transcendent Knowledge myself.
“Afterwards, I’ll have to formulate Transcendent Knowledge myself, for everyone.
“I will figure out Transcendent Knowledge and then explain it properly.”
To figure out Transcendent Knowledge, starting in 1986, I read Ken Wilber and Alan Watts.
The Wilber & Watts books were given to me by my father, around 1985.
I also read a handful of other books that my father gave me, or that I got from the university bookstore.
In late 1987 and early 1988, I corrected the malformed explanations provided by Ken Wilber and Alan Watts.
Dates of Incorporating the Block Universe into the Egodeath Core Theory
See also this succinct short history:
About
https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/about/
In October 1985, I started theorizing about the mystic state, and studied how the mind works according to meditation and enlightenment, to try to gain non-self-defeating personal self-control across time. I read Ken Wilber’s early books, at my father’s recommendation, because Wilber covers many subjects.
I learned about the block universe in a Modern Physics university course in Spring 1987, 79 years after Minkowski’s 1908 article Space and Time. (I knew the Physics professor since high school, from a Greek Dance college class.)
In April 1987, I changed my approach to idea development about cross-time self-control: I used bigger ruled sheets of paper, and formed topically optimized terms such as mental construct processing, with acronyms for efficiency.
My father died during that Modern Physics class, and so I signed up to retake the course in Spring 1988.
During the second half of 1987, I read Alan Watts’ book The Way of Zen intensively and repeatedly, demanding to make sense of his loose poetic wording. Around December, I succeeded, as if properly re-wording his book, by using a kind of “determinism” that’s implied by the block universe “ground of being”.
On January 11, 1988, before retaking the Modern Physics course, I had my great breakthrough: that ego transcendence was not as Ken Wilber or the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology conceptualized it, but rather, more specifically and potently and forcefully, ego death and ego transcendence is actually a matter of changing the mental model of self-control and time, in the mystic state, to the no-free-will, block universe model.
As a simplified outline of the diverse conceptual resources and influences I had by January 1988, I combined concepts such as:
o Block universe from the Modern Physics university course.
o Ground of Being from Ken Wilber.
o Sudden mental model transformation from Alan Watts (his term is ‘satori’, in The Way of Zen).
o The cognitive approach from Marvin Minsky (Society of Mind) and self-help & the Human Potential movement.
Ramesh Balsekar in the 1990s, in discussions with Ken Wilber, similarly asserted that ego transcendence = no-free-will.
In my great breakthrough in January 1988, I mapped the block universe to the loose cognitive state experiencing of frozen spacetime and non-control. During my 1988 drafts, I settled on the theory-name The Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence.
I re-took the Modern Physics course in Spring 1988, now with my newly discovered Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence in hand.
My highly engaged retaking of the Modern Physics course, after discovering the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence, enabled me to go deep on studying Minkowski spacetime.
Retaking the course, so-equipped, also enabled me to get the highest score on the “Spacetime & Special Relativity” exam that any of the professsor’s students had ever gotten.
Later in the course, I challenged the professor; I rejected the Copenhagenism interpretation of Quantum Physics, and I read supplementary books, leading to David Bohm and nonlocal hidden variables “determinism”, and later to James Cushing’s books.
In Quantum Mechanics: Historical Contingency and the Copenhagen Hegemony, Cushing argues that Physics needlessly and too hastily embraced the Copenhagen interpretation.
I have formal university graduation photos showing me holding an article draft of The Theory of Ego Transcendence.
Dates of Mapping the Block Universe to Mythology
All of my writings from early 2001 to 2020 have dates at the Egodeath Yahoo Group, and later posts have links to the the first posts in which I formulated various of my discoveries and developments. Hundreds of people have emails with these postings and dates.
I don’t have the exact posting dates handy at this time. The usual pattern is that I try to pinpoint a date at which I first posted an idea, but there are always earlier roots when I had the idea but less clearly, with fewer connections.
So it’s somewhat of a judgment call, of the date on which I first posted and announced an idea, such as the Maximal Entheogen Theory of Religion. Usually, when researching the date of a discovery, I exclaim “Wow, I discovered and posted about that several years earlier than I’d guess!”
For example, I have a circa 1996 ink-brush drawing of a block universe with a snake protruding, with speech bubble of the snake saying “Liberte!”, but I didn’t have full understanding then, of the complete November 26, 2013 discovery that “tree vs. snake = Possibilism vs. Eternalism“. That idea developed and gestated traceably over some 17 years. This is the topic of how idea development works, in the theory of knowledge.
During 1999-2006, I mapped Minkowski’s block universe idea to experiential religious mythology, such as rock and snake.
In November 2011 and finally during Thanksgiving week of 2013, I contrasted tree vs. snake; I contrasted the mundane-state experiencing of “steering through possibilities branching”, vs. the mystic-state experiencing of “being helplessly frozen into a non-branching block universe”.
I thus discovered the meaning of the most archaic mytheme-contrast, of tree vs. snake. This November 2013 breakthrough was through looking at two paintings side-by-side while studying mushrooms in religious art:
1. A black-and-white copy of half of a painting of Eve and the serpent/snake, and a deer with branching antlers, Eve holding an apple and a branch, at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In Joseph Campbell’s book The Power of Myth. I had been fairly dismissive of Campbell, and was not well-read in his work, but this particular page of his book, showing a quarter of the data from the painting, was the greatest jackpot of all time, and so the book more than earned its title.
2. A mythology book cover showing a painting from a kylix saucer-“cup”. The kylix (mixed-wine mushroom-wine drinking cup) shows Jason dead, coming forth from a dragon-serpent guarding the non-branching ivy “tree” with the ram’s Golden Fleece hanging on it (sacrificed on a rock altar), in the garden of the Hesperides with Athena and her owl, spear, gorgon-medusa death-head breastplate and its snake-fringe.
Searching for Intellectual Autobiography Dates
For more info, search for key dates, among my writings, including in this Egodeaththeory WordPress weblog & the Egodeath Yahoo Group posts from around 2010-2018.
Egodeath Yahoo Group posts are currently unavailable since Yahoo is about to discontinue the groups on Dec. 15, 2020. Update: December 26, 2020: I have now uploaded a representative subset of the Digests of the Egodeath Yahoo Group to this WordPress site.
Thread title, to search for the long thread of my Egodeath Yahoo Group posts: “Intellectual autobiography”.
The Egodeath Yahoo Group has a long, major thread centered on the tree vs. snake breakthrough, like “the meaning of snake/serpent”.
January 1988; January 11, 1988 – 1st peak breakthrough: block universe non-control, experienced and conceptualized in the loose cognitive state, = ego transcendence.
November 2013; November 26, 2013 – 2nd peak breakthrough: {tree} vs. {snake} = Possibilism vs. Eternalism. You could minimize this as “merely” collapsing my 2006 main article’s mythology decoding for greater efficiency, but it felt extremely major, a week of shaking; involving massive reconnections of associations in my explanatory framework, as Paul Thagard’s anti-mysterious theoretical model of paradigm transformation would describe it.
Heading
See also
Minkowski’s Block Universe
https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2020/11/05/minkowskis-block-universe-computational-framework/
Book:
Conceptual Revolutions
https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2020/11/15/conceptual-revolutions/
1997 Temporary Fallback Strategy: Publish an Outline Theory-Spec
Self-control Cybernetics, Dissociative Cognition, & Mystic Ego Death
Titles:
– Self-control cybernetics, dissociative cognition, & mystic ego death
– The Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence
1997 Core theory summary/specification posted at the Principia Cybernetica website
I posted the above, partly as proof of Priority of Discovery; and partly because I just needed to get something published, as explained below. I couldn’t manage to compose a viable article; every time I tried, it exploded in length and ambition.
So instead, in 1997, I took an alternative approach: only design/ compose/ publish an outline/ theory-specification, as such!
Ever since my Jan 88 breakthrough discovery of block-universe loose-cognition non-control ego-transcendence, I was attempting to write an article for the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, showing what ego transcendence is really about.
But it was hard to write-up adequately the so innovative, so revolutionary Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence; so this outline posting was a stop-gap to get something published while continuing work on the article.
Then in my distinct, Phase 2 theory-work (1998-2006), I added whole giant other half of the Egodeath theory: the Mytheme theory.
I ended up publishing the result in 2006, as my Main article at Egodeath.com, helped to focus, by the specific scnario of working with the Editor of a Salvia magazine:
The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death
Michael Hoffman, 2006
http://www.egodeath.com/EntheogenTheoryOfReligion.htm
2020 copy at WordPress:
The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death
https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2020/11/30/the-entheogen-theory-of-religion-and-ego-death/
That 2006 article, at last, took from 1988 to 2006 to write, finally fulfilled my January 1988 intention to publish my great breakthrough of January 11, 1988 — now, with its “other half”, its “started in 1998”, co-corroboration theory, the Mytheme theory.
Amanita Photos 10:10 a.m. 10/10/2010
Photos of Amanita Muscaria Mushrooms
Subsection:
Amanita Photos by Michael Hoffman
https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2020/12/13/photos-of-amanita-muscaria-mushrooms-to-identify-mushrooms-in-greek-christian-art/#Amanita-Photos-by-Michael-Hoffman
The first time I came across Amanita, it was a bright bunch, all around, and those are my best photos, and my best photo perfectly matches decoding the leopard drinking fountain as upturned Amanita chalice containing water, including rippling in the rain, a pair of drinking water chalices for Dionysus’ spotted leopard.
I remembered to log a datetimestamp, so I looked at my phone. The display read: 10:10 a.m. October 10, 2010
I got my best patch proliferation view at that point, and my best photos, and my best photo matches perfectly to indisputably be a strong, full, complete match.
[todo: clarify date “yesterday”, ~November 14, 2020 then December 14, 2020:]
This patch at this 10 10 datetime was perfect for yesterday completing beyond expected, my photos showing the rim and fountain water collectiion of a pair of specimens, exactly as I had been wishing for, “the rim problem” b/c Heinrich’s full-upturned photo had a mis-match: the art shows a rim (Heinrich’s photo shows no rim, thus failing to match the mosaic).
My own photo, of a less extreme upturned chalice, plus my watter pools, unlike his dry upturned Amanita.
I outdid his photo, by showing water gathered, with ripples in the rain, my first encounter, perfectly achieves a near 100% anatomical morphological morphology form-match with the specimen I saw firsthand and photographed here showing the complete match to support further corroborating evidence that the Greco-Roman art mosaic of Dionysus’ triumph with 4, then 5 clear mushrooms, and the grape-basket shapes, and now solidly proven the Amanita proof in my own best photo on 10/10.
- best patch seen
- best photos taken
- best photo solves “the rim problem” mismatch with the Heinrich photo, along with also
- proving by water collection
- proving by color-match in the gold/orange not red
- proving by spottedness of leopard & toadstool fountain.
- providing solid corroboration of identifying the 4 mushroom-tigers + 1 left garment hem
- demonstrates concept of “degrees of match”, which is useful for confirming as deliberately mushroom-shaped, the grape-basket arrangements:
- {mushroom-shaped grape-basket} is an Art Mytheme; an Arttheme
About Mythemes
- A Mytheme is the story of flying ram rescuing bro but not sis (king’s children with cloud goddess of rain, who is jeolous of other affair from sacrifice soap opera of the gods of myth, mythic-scale gods, mythic-scale soap opera.
- {mushroom-shaped grape-basket} – as always, I decoded this mytheme by attack vectors of Greek + Christian myth, specifically those two. Not one of them, not World Mythology is purely a backdrop of expertise, not core-crucial knowledge. Look at specifically Greek myth + Christian myth, and the problems of decoding are solved. The two are necessary, and sufficient.
Then, 2013, a major breakthrough to further Complete & expand the Mytheme theory (not really changing the 1988/1997 Core theory, the Cybernetic theory, though!)
The Egodeath theory 