Egodeath Yahoo Group – Digest 1: 2001-06-10

This core theory has been stable for several years, though it may be time to
rewrite and update this compact introduction to the core concepts. My recent
work has focused on mapping the mystery-religions and Hellenistic myths onto
this core theory.


============================================

Introduction to the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence

This Theory of Ego Transcendence is designed as a simple cybernetic device to
trigger the experience of ego death, with emphasis on self-control breakdown,
using the breakdown of self-control logic as the pivotal point. It is as
simple and to-the-point as possible, while vividly portraying and conveying
the main insights provided by the mystic altered state of cognition. This
combination of ideas is the most concise and selective expression possible, of
the essential insights involved in ego transcendence.

Contents
o The Virtual Ego and the Illusory Aspect of its Control Power
o Block-Universe Determinism and Autonomous Control
o The Instability of Self-Control Cybernetics, the Control Vortex, and
Self-Cancelling Control
o The Pre-set Stream of Injected Thoughts, Puppethood, and the Inability to
Control Future Actions
o Self-Distrust, Self-Violation of Personal Control, and Needing a
Higher-Level Controller
o Moral Agency, Theology, Levels of Control, and Delusion
o Mental Construct Binding and the Mind-Revealing Dissociative State
o Meta-perception and Solipsistic Perception
o The Egoic and Transcendent Mental Models and Advanced Rationality

_________________________________________________

The Virtual Ego and the Illusory Aspect of its Control Power

One real part of the ego system is the ego as representation, and another real
part of the ego system is the ego as a referent (including one’s actual body,
thoughts, and history). Asking whether the ego exists is too simplistic. The
real issue is “In what sense does the ego exist?” or “What is the real nature
of the ego?”

The mind is designed to accept the mentally projected self-representation as
literally identical to oneself. But the imagined, distorted concept of self
arising from this conflation is not the whole of the ego, so it’s not true
that “the ego is only an illusion”. The ego system includes an illusion, but
is more than that.

The ego exists, but in a way that is more limited and complex than is usually
felt. The Enlightenment conceived of the ego as an autonomous self-steering
entity, rather than as a slave or puppet of gods or Fate.

The cognitive structures of the semi-illusory ego must be preserved even while
discovering that its thoughts and actions originate from the underlying plane,
rather than originating from the ego. The ego exists virtually, or in certain
limited aspects, the naive concept of ego is distorted, accepting the
projected ego image as being as real as the egoic cognitive structures.

The ego-entity exists as a real set of patterns and dynamics, but the ego is
not as solid, continuous, or powerful as it seems. The ego is both a set of
real patterns, but also a projected, constructed image. In a way, the
perceived ego exists, and in a way, it does not. The mind usually projects and
constructs a fairly solid and simple image of oneself.

Seeing the illusory aspects of this mental representation and feeling the
absence of the accustomed sense of personal solidity can be experienced as
death, as literal cessation of personal existence, because the naive mind
strongly identifies with the projected image and the sense. Mental processing
is structured with the conscious ego-representation as the center of control
and experiencing. This representation of the ego is a dynamic set of mental
constructs. This deceivingly tangible representation of the self or ego is
only a part of the ego.

In a dissociative cognitive state, the usual cognitive structures constituting
the ego cease, and the projection of the ego image also ceases. Oneself still
exists in many ways, such as a body, a brain, a mind, possessions, and a
personal past. One genuine aspect of oneself has temporarily ceased to firmly
exist: the egoic cognitive processing, which is largely but not entirely
suspended.

The projection of the self-image is also partly suspended. Insofar as the mind
confuses the projected self-image with that part of the self which is genuine,
that projected self never existed, other than a perceptual illusion, and so
could not cease to exist. If the ego is defined strictly as the natural
assumption that the mentally projected self-representation is literally
oneself, then it can be said that “the ego is only an illusion”.

But such a narrowed definition of “ego” raises the question of what to call
the real cognitive structures that reliably project that illusion. The ego is
more than just an illusion. It’s a large, complex, and dynamic set of mental
processes, of which the deceivingly tangible mental representation is only one
part.

The will exerts control power, but this power is virtual rather than literal.
There is some control-power, but the normal perception of this power is
distorted. The sense of having control power is taken too literally and too
simply. Ego structures are refined after enlightenment, not eliminated.
Physics cannot provide a legitimate dwelling place for the ego entity, because
the ego is largely illusory.

Delusion or enlightenment are collective: first there is a uniform interegoic
control field, deluded about control agency, then the rational, cybernetics
explanation of enlightenment is discovered and communicated. There is a
shocking feeling of helplessness upon realizing the insubstantiality of the
cross-time ego.

_________________________________________________

Block-Universe Determinism and Autonomous Control

One controls one’s hand, but this control is driven by the pre-set path of
control-events injected by the block universe. The control stream manifests in
individual control-acts permanently, eternally located at each time-slice.

The time axis combines with the 3 dimensions of space to form a 4-dimensional
block universe, or crystalline ground of being. Even if the time axis is
warped, relative, or branching, and there are more than 3 dimensions of space,
one can coherently and usefully frame the experienced world as an ultimately
unchanging, 4-dimensional spacetime block.

Conceiving of the world as a fixed spacetime block leads to the astonishing
potential of experiencing ego death, because the logic of ego’s control power
is coherently disrupted. If one consistently adopts the mental model of the
block universe, the usual sense of exerting the power of choice disappears,
and the logic of personal self-determination cancels itself out.

Conventional determinism overemphasizes predictability in principle and
perfect seamlessness of the chain of cause and effect, and cannot tolerate the
slightest bit of true randomness or disjoint in the chain of cause and effect.
More relevant to discovering ego-transcendence is that each point on any
timeline is predetermined, and the future permanently exists, elsewhere in the
spacetime block.

The hypothesis about the eternally unbroken causal chain, in which the past
eventually controls the future, is excessive, delicate, and irrelevant to
higher experience. Even if there is some true randomness in the world, the
future remains predetermined, because of the illusory nature of the flow of
time, and the inability to the ego-entity to be an ultimate origin of its own
thoughts and choices.

Proper Fatalism emphasizes the fixity of the personal future actions, without
committing to an unbroken chain of causality. Fatalism overemphasizes final
outcomes. All the intermediate personal actions are fated, not just the
outcome.

The mind is virtually free: it is free on the practical, visible level, while
predetermined on the underlying, hidden level. The underlying block universe
is at a higher level in the hierarchy of control than the practically free
actions that take place within the stream of personal actions within the block
universe. The universe forcefully controls the stream of personal
control-actions, then the stream of control actions exerts its secondary
power.

One can postulate a god — a creator and controller — at an even higher level
in the control hierarchy, one would then hope that it’s a compassionate god
pulling the puppet-strings of the world and its creatures.

The choice of thoughts and actions is practically free, but thoughts are
forced into the mind from the underlying plane, the mind is a slave to the
free acts of will injected by the underlying block universe. Time, change,
flexibility, variability, and movement are all fixed at all points along the
time axis or branching axes.

The stream of personal control-actions such as decision-making is frozen and
predetermined at each point in time. The stream of consciousness and control
can be seen as a set of distinct time-slices, with the events at each
particular time-slice permanently fixed.

The world casts forth the entire set of time-slices of an object or stream of
actions all at once, actions at two adjacent time-slices are isolated, and
slightly different. The later action is not predetermined simply because it is
caused by the first, but because both actions have always been permanently
pre-set, the entire set of actions came into existence all at once.

The similarity of each time-slice of a stream of actions produces the sense of
continuity of the ego-entity across time and the sense of smooth motion
through time. Self-control is unable to forcefully reach across time to
control one’s thoughts, will, and actions in the future.

_________________________________________________

The Instability of Self-Control Cybernetics, the Control Vortex, and
Self-Cancelling Control

The ego is a nexus of cybernetic control in the apparent form on an inner
entity, but the entity cannot control the cybercontrol system of which it is
merely a helplessly produced component; the system produces the ego, in the
system; the control-system projects the illusion of an ego-agent that appears
to stand outside the system and control the control-system.

Personal self-control forms a cybernetic control loop. The ego-entity is an
essentially illusory homunculus, a self-steering helmsman dwelling inside the
mind’s self-control loop. Self-control controls itself indirectly. Alcoholism
and compulsions demonstrate the inability of self-control to reach across
time. Metaprogramming one’s mental biocomputer promises power, but leads to
the problem of controlling the source of one’s thoughts and will.

Control agents are embodied as self-control tunnels or streams, floating in
locked, stationary spacetime. Schizophrenia and mystic rapture both present
the sense of being remotely monitored and controlled by a dominant
observer-and-controller entity who is in a position of power, one becomes a
cybernetic puppet and the perceived locus of control shifts up to a separate
control agent who resides on a higher level in the control hierarchy.

_________________________________________________

The Pre-set Stream of Injected Thoughts, Puppethood, and the Inability to
Control Future Actions

When the mind models the ego-entity and its control coherently and vividly,
the ego dies as a helmsman, the sense of being a self-governing entity
profoundly changes. The mind has a latent potential to discover the
self-control vortex, the strange-attractor vortex of self-control violation.
There is a sudden homeostatic state shift out of the egoic mental mode.

This vortex is the control singularity, at which point self-control perfectly
cancels itself out. One discovers the possibility of the self in the near
future deliberately violating one’s long-term intentions and wreaking the
worst havoc against oneself.

Such a demonstration would be intellectually and morally satisfying in several
ways, though disastrous by definition. A demonstration of absolute
self-violation could disprove the ability for self-control or self-restraint
to forcefully reach across time, prove the impotence of moral self-restraint,
and demonstrate the independence and isolation of each time-slice in the
stream of self-control.

Responsible moral agency is manifestly invalid upon perceiving the
predetermined character of the thinking that is injected into the mind by the
spacetime block at each time-slice. A demonstration of self-control violation
would also be of interest because it would concord with understanding that the
ego entity who exerts control power is largely an illusory projection of the
mind.

When the mind grasps its potential for control instability, the thinker
trembles from the cybernetic instability and is shakingly disrupted and thrown
off balance. The ego’s accustomed virtual power is cancelled by overly vivid
awareness of how one’s thoughts and actions could very well be pre-set by the
underlying block universe. Virtual moral agency collapses when the illusory
aspect of the ego’s power is vividly understood.

In pursuit of truth and self-understanding, it is tempting to make a serious
sacrifice of one’s deepest values in order to reflect one’s consciousness of
one’s true nature. Given the inherent insecurity of self-control over time,
due to the inability to reach across time and due to the fact that one’s
future actions are already defined at all future points in time, one might
begin to urgently wish to secure self-determination to forcefully extend
self-control over one’s near-future actions.

It feels like a trap, when fully confronting that there is logically no way,
no possible move, that would forcefully extend self-control to restrain one’s
near-future actions. Stable self-control inherently requires distorted
thinking, which obscures one’s nature as a product of the completely
predetermined block universe. Self-control can be stabilized by looking away
from the radical potentials of one’s near-future actions in the stream of
control, by stopping the apprehension of them.

One inherently cannot trust one’s own near-future actions, which are beyond
one’s present control. Dissociative cognition combined with advanced
rationality leads to the conscious experience of one’s permanent situation of
being a puppet of fate, a complete slave of the block universe.

_________________________________________________

Self-Distrust, Self-Violation of Personal Control, and Needing a Higher-Level
Controller

Upon discovering the perfectly coherent model of self-control extending along
a frozen stream in the block universe, one finds oneself in a submissive
position, and it’s effective action to pray, to turn one’s attention away from
the emptiness of the power at one’s core, and regain the deluded but stable
sense of controlling one’s thoughts and actions.

In the midst of the self-control singularity, self-control cancels itself out
and one is tempted to perform a sacrificial self-violation to prove this
astonishing potential and disprove the moral agency upon which life depends.
It would be ecstatic horror to make a high self-sacrifice of one’s integrity
as a moral agent, and perfectly violate one’s personal wishes, to disprove
moral culpability and reflect one’s grasp of the astonishing truth about the
nature of moral agency, self-control, and self-determination.

At the peak of grasping transcendent knowledge and fully confronting one’s
inability to restrain one’s actions in the near future, one can completely
lose trust in oneself, but it’s a cybernetically effective move to project a
trustworthy entity to a higher level in the control hierarchy and place faith
in that entity instead of in oneself, that is, let the entity take one’s
cybernetic helm of self-control.

The stability-producing prayer (a committed assumption and transmitted
communication) for this purpose is that the creator of the block universe
created it such that one’s future stream of thoughts and actions are not
disastrous to one’s integrity of selfhood as a cross-time controller with
values and investments. This assumes a personal god, because the universe
itself is not easily conceived of as a controlling agent able to hear and
respond.

_________________________________________________

Moral Agency, Theology, Levels of Control, and Delusion

There is a level of control beyond the ego that gives rise to the ego’s
control actions, which are not self-originating. Personal self-control is
secondary-level control. The ego effectively and apparently is the only origin
of its actions, but this isolated autonomy of the ego’s power is illusory. The
ego’s power is an epiphenomenon, a mere appearance that arises as a result of
the more ultimate driving factor beyond or outside the ego. The primary level
of control is the underlying ground of being, or block universe, which gives
rise to the ego’s entire stream of thoughts and control actions.

One hypothetical example of a control hierarchy is God, fate, the lower gods,
the block universe, creatures, and finally puppets, fictional characters,
virtual agents, and cybernetic devices. The same logic that implies that
creatures are predetermined seems to implies that the hypothetical God would
be predetermined as well, unless God were unfathomably different. Christianity
is largely about maintaining the delusion of our freedom, to make us
individual moral agents that we cannot logically be. Even the deterministic
variants of Christianity insist on moral agency and moral freedom.

If a god is at the higher level of control, outside of time, he is in a
position to prophecy. Prophecy is the revealing of what fate or a creator has
already created at a relatively “future” point in time.

The Creator, like a programmer, can disclaim direct responsibility for the
control-actions of his creatures, but he remains indirectly and ultimately
responsible. When a computer artist creates a fractal image, the artist does
not directly define every bit of the fractal, but defines general equations
and thus indirectly creates every detail. So has the hypothetical Creator
caused our every action, while denying direct responsibility.

Insofar as the Creator avoids direct manipulation of the details of our lives,
he can give Satan freedom, the freedom which is sin and delusion. The
Creator’s omnipotence permits only a practical, virtual type of moral freedom.

The coil of a snake represents the cybernetic self-control loop inside the
mind. Sin is our sense of self-origination of our thoughts and actions, and
our experience of ourselves as autonomous agents who are potential moral
subjects. The egoic mind is arranged with the ego-entity at the center of
personal experiencing and action, and assumes that the ego is the primary
origin of its actions. This ego-entity at the center includes the deceiving,
projected representation of the ego-entity.

The transcendent mind is not so firmly self-centered, but acknowledges the
priority of the underlying block universe, which controls or gives rise to the
ego’s stream of control actions. Moral freedom is legitimate as an experience
but not as a logical proposition. Enlightenment was artificially delayed and
withheld, buying some time for humanity to live as seemingly autonomous
agents.

_________________________________________________

Mental Construct Binding and the Mind-Revealing Dissociative State

Mental constructs are highly dynamic association matrixes, held together by
some degree of binding intensity. Deep re-indexing of mental construct groups
(such as concepts of “time” and “change” together) enables a wholesale mental
model shift or inversion to another mode. Normally, for convenience, the mind
uses linguistic and conceptual associations in a rigid, rutted, and repetitive
way, debates are permanent standoffs, because the same cliched assumptions are
carelessly adhered to every time words are used.

Mastery of semantics enables one to release one’s assumptions about every
single word in an argument, not just a key term in isolation.
The dissociative cognitive state enables deep-level symbolic re-indexing of
mental constructs. There are multiple triggers for the dissociative cognitive
state, including psychedelics, meditation, schizophrenia, sensory deprivation,
hyperventilation, temporal-lobe epilepsy, UFO abduction, and near-death
experiences.

The most powerful trigger for long sessions of cognitive dissociation is
lysergic acid, a key technology. Psychoactive substances should be of great
interest to theorists in many fields. The absence of such psychoactive keys
preserves delusion, to preserve the sense of freedom and autonomous agency.
The New Testament morally permits ingesting anything (Mark 7:6, Matthew 15:7).
Acid-rock mysticism vividly alludes to and resonates with ego death and the
dissociative cognition that leads up to it.

_________________________________________________

Meta-perception and Solipsistic Perception

Pattern-perception becomes highly flexible and innovative in the dissociative
cognitive state. Blatant perceptual distortion in the dissociative state
directly presents questions of epistemology and the philosophy of perception.
All that is presented to awareness is mental constructs, which point to
alleged referent objects which might or might not exist, or might exist in a
way other than the mental constructs representing them, which might be
distorted.

Meta-perception is the perception of the layer of mental constructs presented
to awareness. In the dissociative state, the world blatantly appears as mental
representations which are themselves frozen into the block universe, extension
of objects and the controlling ego-entity across time appears to be
distributed along a fixed and pre-set stream of time-slices. The vantage point
of awareness can be raised, or stepped back a level, to observe mental
construct processing and perception itself. Time is no longer perceived as a
flow, but as a frozen expanse.

_________________________________________________

The Egoic and Transcendent Mental Models and Advanced Rationality

There is a standard egoic mental model of the ego-entity and the world, and a
standard transcendent mental model. Delusion and transcendent knowledge are
both collective: first there is a uniform interegoic control field, deluded
about control agency; then the rational, cybernetics-based explanation of ego
death is discovered and communicated.

Transformation from the egoic to the transcendent mental model requires a
synchronized shift of the meaning of entire groups of concepts. The egoic
conceptual system thrives for a limited time, awaiting the right technologies
to end its illusion of sovereignty. The full development of reason in the
service of amplifying the ego’s control-power necessarily leads to
ego-transcendent knowledge. The rational systematization of ego death, as in
this paper, permits fast propagation of both ego-transcendent knowledge and
the experience of ego death.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — designing the most convenient path to an intense
peak experience of control-cancellation

Discussion participants mentioned these ideas:

>The ‘cross’ of the believer is a Cynic-Stoic proverb about enduring hardship

for the sake of one’s beliefs or the movement one belongs to. Forsaking
father and mother is like carrying a heavy, onerous cross to one’s demise.
The cross is not here a symbol of salvation connected with the death
specifically of a Jesus figure. This does not refer to a future, specific
death on a cross, but Jesus means it in a sense that includes himself.

>’Carry or take up a cross’ means a specific death on a cross, an instrument

of execution. Whoever is carrying a cross is on the way to his own
crucifixion. The saying makes no sense at all unless Jesus is seen as
carrying his own cross to his own crucifixion. Whether the crucifixion is
literal or not is the major question we need to resolve.


Michael:
Compare also John 11, where Thomas says “Let us also go [to Lazarus’ tomb],
that we may die with him.”
http://bible.gospelcom.net/bible?passage=JOHN+11

After he had said this, he went on to tell them, “Our friend Lazarus has
fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.” His disciples replied,
“Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better.” Jesus had been speaking of his
death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep. So then he told them
plainly, “Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so
that you may believe. But let us go to him.” Then Thomas (called Didymus)
said to the rest of the disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

New American Bible: “Let us also go to die with him.”
Amplified Bible: “Let us go too, that we may die [be killed] along with Him.”

In the Amplified Bible and New American Standard Bible, “Him” is capitalized
though it presumably refers to Lazarus rather than Jesus. The capitalization
seems to imply that Lazarus is identified or spiritually united with Jesus.

The mythic meaning when explained clearly provides the most compelling
alternative for the Historical Jesus view.

Carrying one’s own cross does not refer to mere ordinary sufferings. It
refers to the same sufferings as Prometheus suffered: the humiliation and
psychological torment of experientially discovering that one’s personal power
is nullified by the omnipotence of the gods or the Fates. This kind of
experience, this kind of cross, is the kind that is powerful enough to compete
with the idea of a Historical Jesus.

The mystic crucifixion experienced by the mystery-religion initiate after
taking the Eucharist of apolytrosis is specifically the suffering and
humiliation that is the essence of mystic ego death, when the will
(liver/heart) is slain by intensely visualizing cosmic determinism or
Fatedness, ultimately implying a closed future, which was the strongly
dominant worldview of that era.

After the mystery-religion initiate carries his own apprehended-rebel cross
and is crucified, the initiate’s lower self (the apparent self-willing agent
who authors his own future) is thus crucified as a false upstart rebel, a mere
pretender to the power of self-authoring.

o Like the archetypal form of Prometheus, the initiate is then released into
a new life with a newly re-formed, higher kind of will that is not susceptible
to the giant eagle sent by Zeus.
o Like the archetypal form of Mithras, the initiate is then born out of the
rock of astrological determinism, born into a new cosmos that is outside the
frozen-future cosmos.
o Like the archetypal form of Jesus, the initiate then arises and comes forth
from the tomb, born out of the frozen cosmic space-time matrix-womb with a
newly re-formed, higher kind of will that is not susceptible to being slain by
the (Roman eagle standard) spear.

The idea of the spiritual crucifixion of the seemingly self-authoring agent
fits well with the Hellenistic mythic concepts of the mystery religions of the
era. The initiate suffers demise as a steersman sailing into an open,
not-yet-settled future — that version of oneself, and the mental model
constructed around it with that idea at the center, is overthrown and soon
replaced by a higher identity and some other conception of the will and one’s
personal ability to control and author one’s own will.

Spiritual crucifixion is certainly not mere mundane suffering — it is the
suffering that follows *after* one has died; it is the suffering of Demeter
*after* the childish deluded conception of the self, Persephone/Core, has been
suddenly carried off to Hades, the realm of entities that no longer exist
except as ghostly memories.

In the reverse sequence from Literalist assumptions, the initiate actually
dies first and then suffers afterwards, just as Persephone was abducted to the
land of dead entities and then Demeter suffers afterwards.

1. First, the impossible self who would claim to author his own future dies
as a possibility and as a viable mental model of time, will, freedom, and
personal control.

2. Afterwards, the initiate suffers and mourns for the death of that
impossible, virtual-only version of himself — mourns upon seeing that the
future is already closed, existing, given or forced upon him, and is
pre-authored without his consent or consultation.

3. Finally, the initiate constructs a new mental model of self, identified
now with a higher will that transcends the individual person and transcends
cosmic astrological determinism or Fatedness.


The more mundane and physical kinds of suffering and crucifixion are less
specific, less compelling, and have led to oppression (Jesus was bodily
tortured, so his followers should seek and accept bodily torture as well).
The latter are low, limited, less interesting types of suffering.

A philosophy limited to such literalist types of suffering and death is not
sufficient to provide a compelling alternative to Literalist views.

Purely mystical suffering, identified and explained specifically, provides a
compelling alternative. The essence of mystical suffering is experiencing a
vision of the closed future and being thus stripped of the accustomed sense of
personal power to author one’s own future and one’s own life-script. Such
traumatically insulting spiritual crucifixion of one’s own power of will leads
to the need and the hope of constructing or discovering a new kind of will and
power that cannot be overthrown like the lower will.


References:
David Ulansey. The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology & Salvation
in the Ancient World. 1989
http://www.well.com/user/davidu/mithras.html
Carl Kerenyi. Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence. 1963.
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece.
1988. Chap. 1-5, especially chapter 3, Intimations of the Will in Greek
Tragedy.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — convenient method of eliciting a peak experience of
control-cancellation

Covert agendas and evasive conversational dynamics in the GnosticsMillenium
discussion group


Michael:
I don’t get helplessly caught up in flaming like so many people often do, but
I do have a weakness, and fondness, of studying conversational dynamics.
Actually, I think mastering conversational dynamics is mandatory for an
online-based scholar. These dynamics are fascinating in their own right, and
an interesting challenge to master. I’m constantly experimenting with writing
style and communication techniques.

After all, we do live and exist online; I am in my text. I am an arrangement
of ASCII. I am in ASCII. I am 1001001, which is I in ASCII. Yet I transcend
the text I manipulate and am not it.

George, to Coraxo, the GnosticsMillenium discussion group moderator:

>When I joined this list I was amazed at your refusal to acknowledge the first

and second century Gnostic Christians. I simply could not understand why you
would dismiss such a rich heritage as never having existed. Now I understand.
Your concept of the Gnostic experience is completely at odds with theirs. You
deny that union with god is gnosticism. To the ancient gnostics it was
central.

>You are correct about it being the knowledge of the true nature of one’s

self, but that knowledge is the realization that the true nature of one’s self
is that one is a part of God. That was the first and second century Gnostic
Christian experience and that is why you deny they were Gnostics.

Michael:
An important distinction or qualification is whether this “God” is the type
that is imbedded in the Fated (frozen-future) cosmos, and is thus a slave of
the Fates, or resides outside the Fated cosmos like Mithras, and is thus in
command of the Fates, with the ability to move the stars (the commanders of
our future) from their fixed positions.

Gnostics reject the God who is immanent in the Fated cosmos and become (or
become one with) the God who is transcendent above the Fated cosmos.

George:
[Though he may have adhered to the official description of the
GnosticsMillenium discussion list],

>Michael did misinterpret the [actual, covert] doctrine of this list. That

doctrine is, “Gnosticsm is what Crowley said it was, as interpreted by Coraxo
[the list moderator].”

George:

>You realize we must all come to Gnosis by ourselves and receive our own

Knowledge from our Gnosis, but [contradicting yourself,] if the knowledge from
our Gnosis differs from yours and Crowley’s, you deny it is Gnosis.

>
>You are a narrow path Gnostic, no different from the narrow path Christians
>you despise. Look in the mirror I am holding up to you and see yourself, you
> will see a Crowley priest no different from a Catholic priest.

Coraxo:

>>The gnosis is not the mystical union of one’s self with God, one’s self
>>with the universe, or dissolution into some medium of other.

George:

>It was, according to the ancient Gnostics and according to many modern

Gnostics.

Michael:
Gnosis is the distinct rejection of identifying with the Fated cosmos, and a
rejection of the metaphysical enslavement inherent in the fixed-future model
of the cosmos. Gnostics did not deny that the future is fixed; they did not
deny that the cosmos is determined/Fated. They sought a way to exit such a
cosmos, rather than a way to philosophically disprove or refute the idea that
the cosmos is determined/Fated. They did not believe in naive free will as a
power exercised by the folk idea of the self as a controller/steersman. They
understood that the (properly conceived) Fatalist view was unimpeachable and
without flaw, as a metaphysical system.

The oppressive social and political systems of the classic era wanted a way to
justify oppression by spinning it as “cosmic order”. “I was destined by the
stars to rule over you, and you were destined by the stars to submit to me.”
The state religion wanted people to worship the cosmic order and become
passive by adopting a degraded version of Fatalism as passivism, by munging
together different types of freedom, without distinguishing between them — by
conflating metaphysical unfreedom with political and practical unfreedom.
“The cosmos is ordered, rather than free and chaotic, so you must submit to my
ordered social and political system, rather than be free.”

But metaphysical freedom, practical freedom, and political freedom operate on
entirely different and independent planes. Metaphysical freedom is false.
Practical freedom is true. Political freedom is good.

Gnostics rejected that conflation. They wanted metaphysical freedom, but knew
reason saw the cosmos as Fated and metaphysically unfree — this posed a
problem they sought to solve by transcendently postulating some way rising
above the cosmos itself, by envisioning a transcendent level of personal being
that is outside the cosmos (that is, independent of the frozen, Fated,
closed-future space-time block).

They had practical freedom, as we all do. Every philosopher agrees that we
undeniably make choices on the practical plane — all the debate is really
about the metaphysical layer underlying the undeniable activity of making
choices.

The Gnostics wanted political freedom — part of the approach to achieve this
was by rejecting the official State doctrine of “accepting the cosmic order”
(the political status quo of ruler and ruled).

Coraxo:

>>Finally, this is not a doctrinal group,

George:

>But it is. [This is covertly a doctrinal group, enforcing] The doctrine of

Crowley according to Coraxo.

Coraxo:

>however, I will resist [Michael’s] current attempt to impose the fallacy of

block universe on the group as doctrine.

Michael:
Gnostics do not think the block universe model is false. They think it is so
real, so true, it is the main problem they seek to rise out of. They *hate*
the block universe (the frozen, pre-existing future that is forced upon us),
but they do not consider it a false or incoherent metaphysical model of the
cosmos. Gnostics, like the Hellenistic world in general, conceived of the
cosmos as a fixed entity — their belief in the block-universe cosmos idea is
the very reason they so hated the cosmos.

George:

>It appears I was right about you all along. I figured you were the type of

person who would not put up with competing ideas for long. You have announced
you will now censor Michael’s posts because he won’t listen to the truth as
revealed by you.

>
>He is welcome to disagree with me as much as he wishes on either of my lists.
>
>And don’t worry about having to censor me. This is my last post to this list.

I will answer no more no matter how you or PJ misinterpret or misquote what I
am writing here.

Michael:
Yes, they are inveterate deliberate, willful misquoters. When I clearly
presented compelling arguments, several people on the list, instead of
attempting to refute what I said, invented stereotyped caricatures of other
schools of thought, imputed those to me, and then rejected those. Sometimes
they took my statements out of context when the overall postings on the
subject made my position fully clear.

They forcefully closed their eyes to what I said — they had to, because it
was the only possible way to appear to refute my sober and reasonable
assertions. I have conducted profitable discussions with many immature,
combat-driven people online before, but never have I seen this blatantly
willful misrepresentation of my statements.

The GnosticsMillenium moderator has a covert agenda and does not care what
people actually write — his first goal is to make other people look wrong by
any means possible, and his second goal is to promote his bizarrely limited
and truncated view of Gnosticism.

Such a tactic of refutation through deliberate misrepresentation is like
people who wish to appear to refute Fatalism by addressing an absurd
caricature of the position. They are unable to refute the genuine, properly
defined Fatalism that is clearly expressed by its adherents, so instead, they
cover their ears, close their eyes, draw the most absurd cartoonish
misrepresentation of Fatalism they can think of, and refute that instead, and
declare themselves to have vanquished the threat to metaphysical freedom.

George:

>I will lurk and read the posts… unless… you ban me from this list. If you

do that, so be it. Your and PJ’s biggest problem is you both refuse to read
what is written [by the discussion participants] and instead insist on
answering [instead] some preprogrammed doctrine which you attribute to whoever
is posting, based on your preconceived ideas about specific groups such as
Christians or whatever group your mind places them [the post’er].

Michael:
For example, his cartoon picture of the entheogenists’ position, “refuting”
the hypothetical position that entheogens are the only trigger for the mystic
state of consciousness — a position which surely no entheogenist has ever
maintained. Not even a madman would claim that entheogens are the only way to
experience the mystic state.

Sure, in the middle of a posting, I may have included a sentence that, taken
out of context, seemed to assert that entheogens are required for
enlightenment, but the moderator and his cohorts had to murder the overall
posting in order to artificially extract that sentence. Am I supposed to be
so on the defense, so overcautious, that I never construct any sentence that
lends itself to such vicious, willful, deliberate, ill-meaning
misinterpretation?

Am I really such a poor communicator that it was possible for them to miss the
many times I clearly stated that entheogens were *one* way (and the most
convenient way) to trigger the mystic state, just because one time, in one
sentence in the middle of a discussion, I omitted the qualifiers which I try
to always include? They apparently concluded there is only one way they could
refute me: by deliberately murdering my clear meaning.

My position included these points which the moderator sought to dispute:

o Gnosis in some sense often involved some sort of what was often referred to
as “spiritual death” of some sort of lower self. He claimed to reject this,
but then he would make some assertion, in the middle of his refutation, that
indicated support for the “death” metaphor.

o Entheogens are the most convenient way of triggering the mystic state. He
sought to belittle entheogens and “rejected” entheogens because “there are too
other ways of entering the mystic state” — the latter position, of course, no
one ever denied. So he was really just seeking to be disputatious — a
childish motive for discussion that I want no part of.

He exhibited perhaps seven different ways of evading a genuine refutation of
my actual statements and meanings. Saying I wrote too much so he wouldn’t
reply, or pulling some crazy misportrayal of someone else’s position out of
thin air and then shooting it down as though he had refuted my position, or
throwing a bunch of exotic foreign terms at me, or posting excerpts from books
that had no apparent connection with my concerns, or saying he was writing
poetically so didn’t need to be consistent.

Such an array of dirty debate strategies, I have not come across, over a
decade of online existence. Those were not flamers’ techniques; they were
worse: intellectual perversions, intellectual exchange for the purpose of
distorting the other person’s position. He gives Gnostics a bad name.

I was disappointed that no one responded to my posting that investigated ideas
about shades of ad hominem. I thought it was interesting, an intriguing
contrarian view (clearly and straightforwardly expressed). I made the
interesting assertion that avoiding ad hominem statements really has nothing
to do with Great scholarship. Only the petty would place such overemphasis on
superficialities like always trying to word things so that there is no
possibility of anyone taking offense.

One of the most solid points made therein was that ad hominem writing is not
an all-or-nothing, yes-or-no, total foundation of an argument — there can be
shades and aspects, and especially, there are some ad hominem aspects in many
or most postings in that discussion group, and others. Also noteworthy in the
overall situation is that the host was not defending some poor ordinary
participant from my criticisms — he warned me because (according to his
interpretation) I used some ad hominem statements about *him*, the host.

I did not expect this tough host to be such a delicate pansy that I had to
treat him with such kid gloves and restrict my range of expression to such a
degree. In the end, he came out looking so delicate — but I don’t believe
for a moment that he really found my criticism of him emotionally offensive.
Rather, his “ad hominem” complaint was in fact just a bluffing technique to
avoid addressing the substance of my postings.

I may not have lived up to some harshly critical standard for writing (“Never
slight the other person!”), but one thing is guaranteed from me: I am an
*extremely* straightforward person in dealing with others. I say clearly what
my position is, and I study carefully what their position is and address that.

My goal is to know and express truth, according to standards I hold, through
*constructive* conversation, not that this means superstitiously avoiding ever
slighting the other person. But many people online are motivated by some more
dubious goal: some psychological project of elevating themselves by negatively
portraying others. Such a social kind of elevation, I have no time for.

So ultimately, I was disappointed with the all-too-typical dominance of social
goals over serious intellectual goals. I was a fool; I dreamed that I had
found a group that steered by serious informational goals rather than social
games.

I enjoyed the posting about the technique of “slow reading”, in which the
reader first learns to agree with the author and live in his point of view,
before refuting him. However, I don’t think the moderator misunderstood me at
all. He understood the strength of my position full well, and he knew he
could not refute it, but could only evade it.

He had to really dance around to try to avoid contradicting himself, but of
course he couldn’t avoid contradicting himself since his position was not
driven by the serious quest for coherence, but rather, by the effort to make
other people appear to be wrong and himself appear to be right, by any means
possible, including self-contradiction.

Even if I had posted short, succinct postings that never made a misstep —
perfect, flawless, constructive, and so on — he would have evaded my
arguments one way or another, as was very clear before everyone’s eyes, when
he deleted my actual statements more than once and inserted a completely
invented portrayal of some stereotypical position instead, and refuted that as
though mine.

George:

>Why am I saying all this? To change your mind? If that were all I wouldn’t

bother. You have a closed mind and will open it about the same time the Pope
opens his. Not impossible, but hardly likely.

>
>No, my purpose in saying all this is to inform all the lurkers on this list

that the Gospel of Crowley according to Coraxo and sometimes PJ is not the
only Gnosticism. In fact although he to some degree started modern Gnosticism,
Crowley and his followers are a very minor part of Gnosticism today.

>The Gnostic experience is an individual thing. Let no person tell you that

you are or are not a Gnostic. That is for you alone to decide for yourself.

>
>… you will misinterpret what I said to mean [that] I got my idea of the

Gnosis from first century Gnostic Christians. Then you are likely to rant
about [the irrelevance of] book learning

Michael:
What are they doing at that group? They are certainly not discussing ideas in
a direct and straightforward exchange. The main activity there is to project
crazy views onto other people and then shoot down those views, and declare the
other person wrong. That is not just one trend or tendency of the group; that
is the main, driving activity, the functional purpose, of the discussion
group. It’s really weird, a real weird vibe at that group — it’s a big game
of “put words into others’ mouths, then condemn them”, repeated over and over.

That alternates with the usual contentless newage spiritual vagueness, which
the host may loathe but which he engages in as well, partly because it’s a
good evasion strategy when a sober, specific, clear philosophical position is
presented and contradicts his statements — that’s “the mush-out defense”,
when you escape from difficult philosophical conversational situations by
running for cover into the Louisiana swamplands of spiritual vague-speak.

>or modern Christians and are likely to quote something from one of Crowley’s

books to prove your case. I know that is what you will believe regardless of
what I say, but for the sake of the lurkers looking on I must explain that
that is not the case at all.

Michael:
It is good you clarified the situation for the lurkers.

George:

>I discovered my Gnosis all by myself with no help from Crowley or the Gnostic

Christians or anyone else. It was only several years later that I discovered
Gnosticism on the internet are recognized they were talking about the same
experience I had had.

>I don’t agree with Michael,

Michael:
(Note that I don’t know which points you disagree with.)

>I just believe he has the right to disagree with the moderator on an

[supposedly] unmoderated list such as this. If you want to censor, then change
it to a moderated list and at least be honest about it.

The GnosticsMillenium group does smell of dishonesty — claiming to discuss
one set of topics in one way, to draw people in, but then covertly enforcing a
different way of discussing a different set of topics. And the purpose seems
to be not to investigate cooperatively or persuade through scholarly and
intellectual means, as advertised, but to appear to win arguments, through any
possible technique or manipulation.

I thought at first that this Gnostics group could clarify Gnosticism for me,
but clarifying Gnosticism turned out not to be the actual goal of the group,
and overall, they have nothing significant to offer me, and no way to justify
spending time there. I have plenty of excellent scholarly books that
communicate such ideas to me in a straightforward manner.

I am now able to start connecting my ideas to Gnosticism, despite the group.
Who ever heard of a Gnosticism that seeks to cut itself off *entirely* from
early Christianity? Such a position that all of early Christianity is
entirely incompatible with Gnosis is inherently too sweeping of a rejection,
too sweeping of a view, to cohere.

Everything the moderator said directly contradicted Pagels’ portrayal of the
Valentinian Gnostics’ interpretation of Paul the Apostle’s early,
held-authentic epistles. Whatever Gnosticism he’s enforcing in his “open”
discussion group, it’s artificially distanced from that which my books
describe, as far as Christian aspects. He seems to have an absolutist, mad
grudge against Christianity, that renders him unwilling to use nuance.

He’s an extreme dogmatic counter-Christian, a counter-dogmatic. A kind of
dogmatic adherence to certain specific principles is fine, in my view, except
where reason and direct straightforward debate are discarded when reason and
dogma conflict — as I saw repeatedly in the GnosticsMillenium group. In
practice, it’s more like a Crowley cult (roughly) than what you would expect
in a general Gnosticism discussion group.

I was essentially considered guilty of creating a different, contending
cult — trying to take over his community, by the nefarious scheme of
proferring and seriously defending a system of ideas that generally match what
I have read about early Gnostics — those Gnostics which, according to George,
the moderator rejects and artificially distances himself from.

There is no way to develop online discussion skills without jumping into the
fray and learning a wide variety of interactive dynamics. I learned more
about conversational dynamics at that quasi-Gnostic group than about general
Gnosticism.

——————

After considering it ever since Yahoo took over the previous discussion
groups, I decided to create an egodeath discussion group, initially to
conveniently archive my daily postings, since writing and posting via email
utility is so much easier than updating my web site. It seems I don’t write
web pages directly: all my writing has always originated as Net postings,
which I later organize onto Web pages.

I love posting, love writing in an online discussion environment. In
1985-1989, I developed my core theory, gradually moving from handwritten
brainstorming to shorthand idea development in word-processor files, to heavy
posting in 1989. I have never just sat down in a word processor or webpage
authoring environment to write a polished article to publish or upload. By
the time I created my first postings in 1989, I already had my complete core
theory. Most of what I’ve done since then has been cracking the code of the
mystery-religions.

My writing has been either in the form of shorthand notes (handwritten or
keyed in), or Net postings which I later convert into webpages. I am addicted
to the immediacy of posting; I’d always rather write another posting than work
on writing a polished article. Posting as publishing, I love that Howard
Rheingold or WELL way of looking at online discussion. It’s so awesome: I can
strive to make key philosophy connections on a daily basis and immediately
publish them in an interactive conversation environment.

That is why it makes sense for me to finally start my own discussion group. I
tried it before in Deja groups, but that was far inferior to the awesome
YahooGroups framework which enables such integrated and controllable use of
email or Web-based interfaces. I made my discussion archive fully open to the
public, so I can create URLs as pointers then simply organize and re-sort the
pointers at my normal website.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — convenient method of eliciting a peak experience of
control-cancellation

>(Michael:)
>> 1. First, the impossible self who would claim to author his own future
>dies
>> as a possibility and as a viable mental model of time, will, freedom, and
>> personal control.
>
>(Frank:)
>OR, the very limited self dies to its limitations, having reached a point
>where the very thought of his barriers is hateful and demeaning;

That sounds like a Ken Wilber somewhat vague portrayal of how we are
dissatisfied with the “limitations” of the “limited self”, and what kind of
“barriers” these are. The visionary-state is far more intense: it is an
intense full confrontation with the concept of the fixed future, as against
the power to steer oneself into the personally-created future as one chooses.
I consider my description above to be compatible with yours, and largely
equivalent, but much more specific.

>(Michael:)
>> 2. Afterwards, the initiate suffers and mourns for the death of that
>> impossible, virtual-only version of himself — mourns upon seeing that the
>> future is already closed, existing, given or forced upon him, and is
>> pre-authored without his consent or consultation.
>
>(Frank:)
>OR, the initiate suffers and mourns for the safety, security and EXCUSE of
>his former limitations. Now he sees that they were a crutch. And he sees
>that limitations of thought and action are a blessing to the Lower Self;
>they allowed it phoney peace of mind and excused its rationalizations.

This reminds me of one important dynamic: seeing the fixed future and becoming
thereby destabilized can send the mind fleeing downward in an effort to avoid
seeing the killer vision of one’s death as a metaphysically free agent. The
mind then seeks, in a state of emergency, to thrust itself back down into the
deluded worldmodel, and it is a tremendous relief when the light fades and the
naive deluded child-mind returns, with its limited visionary horizons and
uncomfortable, confusing self-contradictions regarding personal control.

But the mind starts growing and pushing upwards: transformation cannot happen
until it is more uncomfortable to remain at the old, secure, accustomed level
than to proceed forward through the painful birth to a new level of mental
structuring.

>(Michael:)
>>3. initiate constructs a new mental model of self, identified
>> now with a higher will that transcends the individual person and
>transcends
>> cosmic astrological determinism or Fatedness.
>
>(Frank:)
>3. OR, the initiate, now a being aware of his lack of limitations, now must
>fact the responsibility and fact of his liberation. He must rearrange his
>thoughts and habits to conform to his new reality (And find the courage to
>face the downside of freedom, which is often a crushing sense of duty.

A downside of freedom is instability of self-control — control beyond
control, or control chaos, an elevated unrestrained wildness which cannot
sustain a viable life.

Existential emptiness is also a life-and-death problem to grapple with and
somehow overcome.

>Whether Michael is right or wrong in his version I won’t dispute; I can’t
>because I’m not a fatalist.

We’re moderns and you probably think like a modern but don’t know how to think
like the ancients. We must remember that the ancients *were* (properly
defined) Fatalists. This key fact lends a lot of weight to the views I put
forth. How would the mystic altered state be experienced by determinists (or
Fatalists) who believed that the future was closed and locked into place as
surely as the stars are fixed in their movements? You have to learn to be a
Fatalist or think as a Fatalist in order to fathom what sort of “escape from
the rock-cosmos” the ancients sought.

I strive to explain exactly that, with reference to the myths of the age.
What attitudes did they have about the presumed, or mystically observed,
fixity of the future? It gave them both security and the feeling of stifling
oppression, including political oppression that was justified in terms of
metaphysical unfreedom. Why did the Christianity movement take off fairly
well, in light of these mixed feelings about astrological determinism? How
was the idea of the fixed future experienced before, during, and after the
mystery initiations? These are questions posed in the native conceptual
categories of the ancients rather than questions expressed in the terms of
modernity and answered in such terms.

> I’d only point out that everyone I’ve known who
>was initiated in any system (including Catholic confirmation) always looked
>at it as a step forward into growth, and viewed with trepidation the fact
>that it freed them to more responsibilities.

>Mourning the innocent, more
>carefree “self” that died in the initiation is probably the most interesting
>part because it’s usually neglected.
>
>Frank

That smells like a modern, psychologist, perhaps Jungian explanation rather
than using the conceptual categories (terms) that were active in the ancient
mind.

There are three crucial elements missing from most spiritual analyses:

o The will
o The determinist/Fatalist fixed future
o Entheogens

The puzzle of the meaning of the mysteries for the ancients is solved by
introducing these three elements.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — convenient method of eliciting a peak experience of
control-cancellation

Why cracking the mythic code is mandatory to convince Historical Jesus
believers of the greater likelihood of the Mythic-only Christ


Michael:

>>Has anyone read this? Arthur Drews: The Legend of Saint Peter. I might

order it to read about the similarities of Mithraism and Christianity.

>>The book is a work of German Enlightenment scholarship of the early 20th

century. It demonstrates that Saint Peter is a literary invention of early
Christianity and was not a historical figure. Includes sources that make
Drews’ argument more compelling. Has an illustration, Hercules as Crucifer.

>>The publisher claims this work has been unjustifiably forgotten by mainline

biblical scholars and freethinking critics. Drews presents classical,
biblical, and patristic literature regarding the question of the historicity
of Saint Peter. Simon Peter is a fiction created by the church. Simon Peter
evolved from Janus and Mithra, who carried the keys to the gates of heaven.
Cover the Tyrian Hercules (Melkart).

>>Like Drews’ book The Christ Myth, this book argues for the non-historicity

of Saint Peter, a central character in Orthodox Christianity.


Frans-Joris:

>I’ve got “Die Petruslegende” (3rd revised edition, Jena 1924)… ‘tolle,

lege’ i.e. buy and read! I learnt amazing things… there was a pope Peter on
the very Vatican [grounds] a long time before Catholic papacy became into
being.


Michael:
I naturally assume that this “rock” of Peter is the rock out of which Mithras
is born: the rock of cosmic astrological determinism/Fatedness. That is the
rock which he, in some way, leaves or comes out from, like we leave and come
out of the cave/womb, like Jesus in the story comes out of the cave after his
quasi-death on the cross. And isomorphically, this would be the same “rock”
to which Prometheus is chained.


Frans-Joris:

>…”No doubt: the Christian Peter is nothing but a reduplicated and humanized

Persian Petros or Mithra, who got that way into the Gospels. The papal Church
is nothing but the immediate continuation or the Christian substitute of the
old Petros cult. The Archigallus, the highest priest or pagan Pope of the
Mithras-Attis cult corresponds to the highest or archpriest of the entire
Catholic Christendom. He had his residence on the Vatican, worshipped the Sun
as Saviour and in the Kybele the ‘virgin’-Godmother, who would be represented
sitting with a baby boy on her lap having the Virgin Mary as her Christian
counterpart.”

>Besides “Die Christusmythe” I possess Drews’ “Das Markusevangelium als

Zeugnis gegen die Geschichtlichkeit Jesu” (1921), where he claims to have
proved that ‘not a single word’ of Mark’s Gospel has any basis whatsoever in
historical facts.

>As for the thesis that gnostic Christianism preceded literalist “Die

Entstehung des Christentums aus dem Gnostizismus” (1924) could be of great
interest and for the use of dating; naming; construing ‘facts’ according to
astronomy/astrology both in pagan (and derived therefrom in Christian)
religion “Der Sternhimmel in der Dichtung und Religion der alten Völker und
des Christentums” (1924).


Michael:
What has all this irrelevant idle myth-comparison have to do with whether or
not Jesus existed historically? Discovering such isomorphisms is tantamount
to cracking the code of mythic symbolism of key myths that lie at the
foundation of the Jesus story. When we learn how to fluently think in the
language of these myths, we can better discuss and understand the Jesus story
and its meaning.

Many contemporary investigators try to use a shallow kind of “historical
scholarship” method that limits itself to a certain style of detective work
that is stiffly forensic without grasping the very language of the “crime”
being investigated — but superior detective-work requires getting into the
headspace of the people involved, which we largely *can* do and *must* do to
understand the motives of the incident.

In our case, the incident is the “crime” of creating the lie of the Historical
Jesus. To determine if there was such a crime, we must become fluent in the
mythic language and build it up inside our mental repertoire of evidence for
the case. Can you find the criminal while utterly lacking the ability to
think like the criminal? To prove that Jesus was mythical, we can and must
think mythically, otherwise our case will be as unconvincing as a stack of
copies of The Jesus Puzzle is to narrowly historical scholars who really only
are a shallow contemporary parody of scholarship, lacking the ability to think
mythically.

Researchers who learn to think mythically are likely to recognize the mythic
nature of the Jesus story and conclude that the mythic-Jesus scenario is
completely compelling and plausible. But researchers who try to only think in
a contemporary hard-headed detective way are like ordinary police who are
stumped by the crime — they cannot understand what the criminal’s motives
were, so they cannot relate to the criminal and follow his trail in order to
successfully locate him.

Mere “historical” detectives will be prone to assuming a Historical Jesus.
Detectives who also possess the facility of mythical thinking will be prone to
conclude a Mythic Jesus.

Researchers who maintain the Historical Jesus view are unlikely to find the
book The Jesus Puzzle persuasive. Ultimately the only way to build a fully
compelling case for the mythical nature of Jesus is to build a complete mythic
explanation in addition to a complete contemporary, forensic, and narrowly
historical explanation. I postulate that the earlier Christ Myth books had a
more potent and comprehensive approach: they built a solid case by covering
both components and building a substantial mythic explanation along with a
substantial narrowly-historical case.

Today’s approach to the problem attempts to build a compelling case while
omitting the mythic dimension of the explanation in its own right — the
mythic dimension is treated as an afterthought, something we helplessly throw
our arms up at, in a too-hasty defeat. The
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JesusMysteries discussion group cannot ever,
despite thousands of narrowly scholarly postings, convince, compel, and
persuade people on a narrowly historical basis. The limitations of such a
1-sided approach eliminates the possibility of success at compelling the
Historical Jesus crowd — what do we do, at this impasse we have reached?

How can anyone still believe the Historical Jesus view, after having read The
Jesus Mysteries, The Christ Myth, The Christ Conspiracy, Pagan Christs, The
Jesus Puzzle, and Deconstructing Jesus? The narrowly historical approach will
never persuade such believers, no matter how many solid arguments are amassed.
The only effective way to break through this undeniable stalemate and make
real progress, the only untilled soil and virgin ground left, is to move the
conversation toward the direction of mythic codebreaking.

We’ll never prove the fictional nature of the Jesus story until we can explain
what the story meant to those who constructed it. If you say that we are
unable to understand what the Jesus story meant to those who constructed it,
then there is no hope of ever persuading the Historical Jesus believers. No
amount of such limited and helpless thinking and discussion will ever attain
persuasiveness.

Researchers who assume that we are unable to determine what the Jesus story
meant to those who created, developed, and propagated it, assume a helpless
and weak view of the scope of scholarly power. Such a diminished and reduced
notion of “scholarly evidence” is inherently incapable of building a
convincing case. Such an approach dooms itself to defeat from the start.

Essentially the Christ-Myth theorists must crack the mythic code, then teach
the Historical Jesus researchers how to think mythically, because what stops
the Historical Jesus crowd from accepting Earl Doherty’s book The Jesus Puzzle
is not some deficiency of Doherty’s sober, modern “forensic” evidence, but
because of their lack of ability to think mythically. In practice, a
historical thinker who lacks the ability to think mythically is likely to
maintain the Historical Jesus view, while a researchers who has the ability to
think mythically as well as historically is likely to adopt the mythic-Christ
view.

A person whose mental repertoire includes mythic thinking is able to see the
full self-sufficiency of the mythic version of Jesus as the complete
foundation of Christianity. A person who is unable to think in the mythic
language is unable to see how Christianity could possibly have been created
and propagated without a historical Jesus founding Christianity.

The Historical Jesus crowd’s main objection to the Christ Myth amounts to the
belief that a merely mythic Christ cannot be sufficient to explain the origin
of Christianity. The Historical Jesus crowd does not understand the
conceptual language of myth, so they cannot understand that mythic motives are
completely sufficient to explain the origin Christianity. The *cannot*
believe Doherty; they are *incapable* of believing Doherty, because he does
not teach them how to think mythically and therefore he cannot ever prove to
them that mythic thinking can provide a sufficient basis and complete
explanation of how it is possible for Christianity to begin as a myth.

This is my prophecy: only when the Christ-Myth researchers provide a fully
serious and complete case on the grounds of the sufficiency of myth to explain
the origin of Christianity, will the Historical Jesus crowd accept the Christ
Myth view. Until then, they are unable to accept the Christ Myth view,
because they underestimate the mythic dimension of human thought and cannot
understand how mythic thinking could have given rise to Christianity.

Without a *full* and substantial mythic-thinking based explanation of the
origin of Christianity, you can disprove the Historical Jesus view on narrowly
historical grounds forever but that only disproves the conventional
explanation of the origin of Christianity, *without providing an adequate
alternative* in the form of a sufficiently compelling mythic-thinking based
explanation of the origin of Christianity.

The JesusMysteries discussion group is determined to pursue the problem in
only a narrowly historical mode of research, and therefore will never make any
real progress, because it can only nullify the Historical Jesus explanation of
the origin of Christianity; it can never provide a proven-sufficient and
demonstrably plausible alternative explanation of the origin of Christianity:
the entirely plausible mythic-only basis.

There is really only one practical solution: there needs to be two moderated
newsgroups or two distinct areas of the moderated newsgroup: one that is
dedicated to disproving the Historical Jesus explanation of the origin of
Christianity, and one that is dedicated to proving the sufficiency of the
mythic origin of Christianity, including cracking the code of the meaning of
the Jesus myth in light of the mythic language of the time.

Now that the discussion group has become proficient at keeping the narrowly
historical discussion on-track and constructive, it needs to expand its
conception of “historical scholarship” to the more classic understanding of
that as philology: the study of the meaning of classic writings. In the
discussion group, the conception of what “historical scholarly evidence” is
has remained limited to the printed evidence that there is insufficient basis
to conclude that Jesus existed as a bodily, historical person.

But that negative project only nullifies and disempowers the Historical Jesus
explanation, without providing a fully plausible alternative explanation, so
the Historical Jesus believers will continue to maintain their views for lack
of a *convincing* alternative. So far, the building of a positive case for
the sufficiency of myth to provide a basis for the origin of Christianity has
been anything but convincing, because that alternative has been put forth as a
default alternative without fully and seriously fleshing it out.

As Doherty’s proposed alternative, he offers what comes across to the
Historical Jesus crowd as only a vague and diminished “myth”. The Christ Myth
scholars must become theorists who are adequate to the task of fleshing out a
fully detailed, compelling, and vital alternative scenario, to put forth a
mythic Jesus who is sufficiently fleshed out to become a real threat to the
Historical Jesus scenario.

Doherty must present, reveal, and thus resurrect a Mythic Christ who regains
enough vital substantiality to enable us to reasonably sacrifice the
Historical Jesus. In contrast to the Historical Jesus, we must present a
convincing enough positive case for the Mythic Christ that he can been seen to
have a real body which even the disbelievers in him can see and touch.

We must explain in a convincing way, unlike before, how Paul saw Christ so
compellingly that he created Christianity. Without such a fleshed-out
scenario, we are left with two equally null and dubious explanations for the
origin of Christianity: the implausible Historical Jesus for which we have no
significant evidence, and the equivalently implausible “Mythic Christ” which
today’s scholars deny we can even explain or understand.

Given the choice between two such feeble explanations, people may become
doubters in the Historical Jesus scenario but they will not become believers
in the Mythic Christ scenario for the origin of Christianity. In the
restricted approach that has been dominant so far, an approach that is not
wide-ranging enough to deserve the name of “historical research”, the most
that the discussion can ever really hope to achieve is to weaken the certainty
of the Historical Jesus crowd; the discussion has no chance of actively
pulling them toward favoring the Mythic Christ scenario.

The Christ Myth theorists can never achieve satisfaction by using their
existing approach, because they assume that all they need to construct is the
negative side of the change of understanding: getting people to see the
implausibility of the Historical Jesus view. It’s a matter of how you
conceive of “the mythic explanation” — does “myth” merely the nonexistence of
Jesus, or is myth the active existence of a mythic kind of Jesus?

There are two distinct senses of “the Christ Myth position”. One is negative:
Jesus didn’t exist, he was only a myth. The other is positive: Jesus *did*
exist, in a compelling and substantial way — as a specific mythic being who
was encountered in a mythic state of experiencing. But this positive case has
not been seriously and thoroughly attempted yet.

The positive case combined with the negative case is far more powerfully
persuasive than the negative case alone. The Historical Jesus crowd will
loosen their belief in Historical Jesus but it is not possible for them to
adopt a Christ Myth scenario on a purely negative basis; they can only change
to some form of the Christ Myth position when the Christ Myth scenario is
fully filled out, even if they are currently locked into the Historical Jesus
worldview and are alienated from mythic thinking.

They cannot become interested in mythic thinking until it’s presented with
full convincing detailed explanation, and they cannot switch from the
Historical Jesus view to some CM view until they are brought to become
interested in mythic thinking well enough to see how convincing and plausible
the Mythic Christ scenario is. As long as Historical Jesus believers are
uninterested in mythic thinking, they cannot possibly switch to a Mythic
Christ view.

The negative or neutral form of the Mythic Christ view cannot succeed, cannot
convince people to let go of the Historical Jesus view. Only the positive
form of the Mythic Christ view can actively pull people from the one scenario
to another. The mission and mode of operation of the discussion group is to
get people to switch from the Historical Jesus view to the *neutral* Mythic
Christ view, but that project is evidently doomed to failure. We must present
a much more detailed and coherent alternative that compels people’s interest.
Otherwise, this status quo cannot change.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — convenient method of eliciting a peak experience of
control-cancellation

The Jesus Mysteries discussion group members try to investigate the existence
of Jesus as historians but not as philosophers or philologists.

The historian mentality by itself is insufficient to explain how myth can be
more potent than a historical figure. Their kind of historian mentality is
the vulgar form of history, which considers philosophy (particularly the
philosophy of myth) to be outside of rational intellectual research. Great
historians are also philosophers and are able to insightfully trace the
history of ideas.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — convenient method of eliciting a peak experience of
control-cancellation

Current breakthrough of the hour: “death penalty” as metaphor for mystic
death. “Death penalty” for revealing the secrets of the mysteries: just a
figure of speech? Prometheus as suffering (ego death) *unjustly*.

The genuine mystic may ask: Why do I deserve to die*, when all I did was hold
the delusion of my own metaphysical sovereignty?

*mystically


I have been on one long breakthrough recently. I have cracked the code, have
learned to think in the mythic framework of the Greeks.

I have finally made full connection between the Greek mythic themes and the
theory of ego death. I can trace Paul’s “we die and rise with Christ”, to
Mark’s “we are metaphysically like Jesus: upstart rebels who carry ourselves
as sovereigns and are crucified mystically with Jesus”, to the orthodox “We
are all sinners in rebellion against God and are rightly subject to the death
penalty. Only Christ’s death, as us, can clear our sins and make us right
with God’s perfect judgement.”

The historical study of the origin of Christianity leads us back to Dionysus,
Prometheus, Mithras, Paul’s Christ, Mark’s gospel crucified Historical Jesus,
to the Orthodox Jesus Christ. Either you can explain the mystic code behind
all these, or none — and they are each distinct.

Explaining the metaphorical allusions to mystic experiencing in Paul’s
framework (the early, “authentic” epistles), is different from explaining the
metaphorical system in later Orthodox Christianity, just as much as Dionysus
and Prometheus are different permutations or a different dialect of
essentially the same mystery-language.

It is interesting to see this same mystery-language encoding in acid-rock
lyrics. Acid-oriented rock is the authentic mystery-school of our time.

Now I am entering a period of *systematically* mapping out each myth in terms
of the theory of ego-death, just as, once I cracked the code of acid-rock
allusions to altered-state phenomena, I was able to sweep across the lyrics of
many Rock artists, to identify the clearest examples of such allusions.

Now I do the same with myths: armed with the interpretive framework of the
cybernetic theory of ego transcendence, including the code of the mystery
religions, it becomes routine to spot these mythic patterns in myths I have
only recently heard of. Research is now reduced to pattern matching, and by
this point, I don’t even really need to follow through. Here is the key that
does unlock the doors — try it yourself.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — theory of ego death and rebirth in mystery
religions



Ride the Lightning


Guilty as charged
But damn it, it ain’t right
There’s someone else controlling me
Death in the air
Strapped in the electric chair
This can’t be happening to me

Who made you God to say
“I’ll take your life from you!”

Flash before my eyes
Now it’s time to die
Burning in my brain
I can feel the flames


Wait for the sign
To flick the switch of death
It’s the beginning of the end

Sweat, chilling cold
As I watch death unfold
Consciousness my only friend

My fingers grip with fear
What I am doing here?

Flash before my eyes
Now it’s time to die
Burning in my brain
I can feel the flames


Someone help me
Oh please God help me
They are trying to take it all away
I don’t want to die

Time moving slowly
The minutes seem like hours
The final curtain call I see

How true is this?
Just get it over with
If this is true, just let it be

Wakened by the horrid scream
Freed from the frightening dream

Flash before my eyes
Now it’s time to die
Burning in my brain
I can feel the flames


http://www.egodeath.com

>I have just been reading your interpretation of Rush lyrics and with respect

most are way off mark.

>I simply disagree that any lyrics are alluding to LSD etc….”Witchhunt”

which you say is about the “drugs war” is about the evils of racism,xenophobia
etc and has absolutely nothing to do with LSD,it’s blatantly clear from the
lyrics.

>Rush are probably one of the cleanest living bands in rock and always have

been,drugs have never been on there agenda.


What is your position regarding the song Passage to Bangkok? You didn’t
address that, but should have. Without addressing it, your message lacks
credibility.

http://www.egodeath.com/rushlyrics.htm#xtocid22938

Do you have any evidence that Peart and Rush in the 70s were clean, rather
than heavy drug users? I have a lot of lyrical evidence that Peart was
intimately familiar with the phenomena that occur in the mystic altered state.
With no evidence, your assertion is a preconception, an empty opinion,
carrying no weight and possessing no ability to persuade.

If you are not familiar with the phenomena of the mystic altered state and are
not familiar with the mystery religions and Hellenistic thinking, you are in a
poor position to evaluate whether the themes and wording in Rush lyrics
include allusions to the phenomena that are common in the mystic altered
state.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — theory of ego death and rebirth in mystery
religions

Cracking the code of the mystery-religions

I’m currently reading the latest 25 books I purchased a week ago, and some
library books:

o Hellenistic myths and mystery religions
o The controversy over Copenhagenist quantum mechanics
o Tenseless (illusory) time
o Several ~$85 books on determinism, including in Stoic thought
o Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category

The Gnostics, like the mystery initiates, understood the threat of
block-universe fatalism to human freedom, and were motivated mainly by hating
such a metaphysically disempowering jail cell of “astrological” cosmic
determinism, and by *wanting* and *attempting* to find a way of transcending,
in some sense, the frozen space-time cosmos.

Whether they succeeded, in some sense, at transcending the ego-killing trap of
illusory/frozen time is a matter of debate and a matter of investigating the
notion of transcendence. All the hatred and loathing of my block-universe
idea exhibited by some contemporary Gnostics only serves to confirm the
plausibility of my portrayal of how the ancients had mixed feelings about the
Fatalism they perceived and believed in.

I’m not interested in truth per se, but by making sense out of
mystery-experiencing. I’m constructing a simple, consistent model of how our
personal power of will and self-control sits with respect to the time
dimension, and how the ancients experienced initiation in the mystery
religions. The ancients were concerned above all with the problematic
metaphysical aspects of personal freedom.

We cannot say, with low-level detail, that their myths had only one meaning,
regarding our metaphysical freedom or lack of it, or our transcendence of
metaphysical unfreedom. But we can certainly say that the Gnostics and
mysteries had one high-level, overarching meaning: grappling with the
problematic nature of personal metaphysical freedom.

Each Gnostic group or thinker, and each mystery tradition, and each myth, may
have drawn different conclusions or told the religious story in different
ways, but there is one commonality across all this diversity: they all were
concerned primarily with the problematic nature of personal metaphysical
freedom. When certain contemporary Gnostics rail against my model of the
frozen block universe, they only add support to the above thesis of what
concern, what issue, what *problem* unites all the variant traditions of the
diverse Gnostic groups and mystery traditions.

I have cracked the code, penetrated the mysteries, and solved the puzzle, by
identifying the question, the problem, what was really at issue. The way to
finally make sense of the various Hellenistic myths in an encompassing way is
through reading them as encoded allegories of mystic-state encounters with the
problematic nature of personal metaphysical freedom. Cries by certain
Gnostics against the frozen block-universe model only strengthen this thesis.

o Is the universe in fact frozen, with time being illusory?
o Is our power and freedom a frozen illusion as well?
o Can we meaningfully transcend such deathly freezing or rock-embedding of
the entire time axis?
o Is there a legitimate and coherent way that we can, like Mithras, exit from
the rock-womb and become legitimately free?

These are matters for debate and do not overthrow the value of my model of
time and personal control, as a fundamental and basic model to consider as a
hypothesis and reference point that all initiates must know. No one should
believe that time is an illusion, along with our personal power to author our
own future, but *everyone* should *know* this idea as a fundamental hypothesis
and point of reference.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — theory of ego death and rebirth in mystery
religions

Corresponding history of fatalism and entheogens

The model of time and personal control I have elucidated is a fundamental and
basic model to consider as a hypothesis and reference point that all initiates
and theorists of the origins of religion must know. No one should believe
that time is an illusion, along with our personal power to author our own
future, but *everyone* should *know* this idea as a fundamental hypothesis and
point of reference.

If you don’t know the idea of block-universe fatalism, you have not begun to
engage with the ancients in their own terms; you cannot understand them as
they understood and experienced themselves. People try to understand the
ancients in terms of modern freedom or modern determinism, but the only way to
understand them is how they understood and experienced themselves: as trapped
in frozen, illusory time, with a pre-existing future forced upon them, seeking
to somehow find freedom and escape from such a frozen tomb.

The ancient version of reductionistic determinism was probably only a later,
proto-scientific way of thinking about a much older idea, of Fatalism as the
fixity of the future and of the entire time axis. The ancients were
block-universe-, frozen-time-, preexisting-future-Fatalists long before they
were reductionist determinists. People believed in the frozenness and
preexistence of the future, and our metaphysical inability to change our
future, long before they created atomism and the atomist concept of
‘determinism’.

We can set a specific date for the end of the shared tradition of perceiving
the frozen future in the mystic altered state: around 410, when the mystery
religions were crushed. On that date, the open future was (for awhile)
declared open for business. Yet, of course, the problematic nature of our
personal control with respect to time was bound to thrust itself up
embarrassingly again, traitoriously overthrowing the pretense of our personal
power of will — the phallus wielded by some god or devil speared the
liver/will controlled by our personal agency.

As always, the will (organ of personal control), and the member of rebellious
uprising remained at war with each other, and Augustine eventually embraced a
kind of determinism and predestination that remained at the center of
intellectual concern during the rest of the Christian era.

The mainstream did not engage with the issue of personal control and the
presetness of the future, and they did not have access to the mystic altered
state, so they continued, in a naive and innocent mode, to experience the
future as open and contingent on their own initiated acts as sovereign moral
agents.

It was truly the age of sin and delusion, with the masses assuming the future
to be open, as they were oppressed (or oppressed themselves) into being all
uninitiated, all naively innocent children, lacking experience of initiation,
lacking the perception of the fixity of the future and the experience of our
impotence as metaphysical agents who initiate our own actions and author our
own future.

The ancient tradition of the mystic altered state and the habit of
intellectual investigation of our nature as change-agents continued, but only
with the kind of suppressed vigor of an underground tradition.


The early to middle modern era created the clockwork universe with
reductionist determinism (with the future “closed” in the sense of being
pre-set but *not* pre-existing).

The 20th century world invented the Copenhagenist interpretation of quantum
mechanics to attempt to evade the great problem of metaphysical unfreedom, but
they managed only a fleeting victory, through suppressing the problematic
alternative, hidden variables, endorsed by no less than Einstein and Bohm.
Even Schrodinger’s cat was an unreliable and ultimately traitorious ally for
the Copenhagenists, because the cat was only created by Schrodinger to portray
the absurd and dubious aspect of Copenhagenism, to show what dubious beliefs
you must also adopt if you embrace Copenhagenist quantum indeterminacy.

References for QM controversies:
James T. Cushing – all his QM books, including his recent textbook,
Philosophical Concepts in Physics. He’s the authority on how Copenhagenism
cheated to win dominance and shut out the hidden variables interpretation of
QM.
Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism – Christopher Norris. I haven’t
read it yet; appears relevant.
Einstein, Bohr and the Quantum Dilemma – Whitaker. I haven’t read it yet;
appears relevant.

Finally, with the rediscovery of entheogens, the Nag Hammadi library, and the
Dead Sea Scrolls, we re-discover the initiation experience of the fixity of
the future and the perception of our impotence as metaphysical change-agents.

So we have three eras, which Jonathan Ott contrasts in terms of entheogen
availability and I characterize also in terms of grasping the concept of the
non-open future.

o In the Age of Entheogens, people experienced the future as pre-existing and
closed; freedom was problematic.
o In the Pharmacratic Inquisition, people experienced the future as open;
freedom was taken for granted.
o In the Entheogenic Reformation, people learn again the concept of the
pre-existing and closed future; freedom is problematic or taken with a
metaphysical caveat, but has become a stable convention.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — theory of ego death and rebirth in mystery
religions

Key themes of mystery allusions to mystic dissociative phenomena


I could explain Attis in terms of the mystic altered state and its associated
concepts, adding that to my new pile of cracked mythic codes, such as
Promethus, several modes or variants of the Christ myth, and Dionysus.
However, by this time, I need to do the same as I did when sweeping the
classic-rock lyrics to seek out the allusions to the common distinctive
phenomena of the mystic altered state: list the categories of themes, forming
a catalog of themes that can be freely arranged so that you can construct your
own genuine mythic tradition, following the strict rules of the ancient poets.

o ithyphallus = goat = the inability of our personal power of will to control
ourselves

o pierced side = slaying of the illusion of our personal will = arrow of time

o donkey = goat = bull = unenslavable, disobedient, self-willed, sovereign
(self-ruling)

o horse = sheep = ox = enslavable, obdient, other-controlled, subject (ruled
over)

o goats vs. sheep = seemingly self-willed (deluded) vs. metaphysically
ever-obedient (enlightened)

o insane = dionysian = entheogenic loose cognition

o torn to pieces = entheogenic loose cognition; cognitive dis-integration

o castrated = unrebellious/obedient = ultimate securing of control over one’s
rebellious will = mind has transcended illusion of authoring its will =
Amanita under pine tree

o drunken = unmixed wine = psychoactive mixture in a preservative wine base

o gorgon face = bloated face of rancid, unburied death = metaphor for ego
death upon seeing illusory aspect of time & fixity/preexistence of future

o child = uninitiated = naive delusion of metaphysical freedom

o abduction of young daughter or son = sudden destroying of one’s naively
confident illusion of metaphysical freedom by seeing the frozen-future concept

o winnow = separate the poisonous/psychoactive ergot from the ordinary grain

o death penalty = penalty of death = what the uninitiated is subject to, and
suffers upon enlightenment

o doll = puppet = experience of metaphysical helplessness in light of
frozen/illusory time

o sin = morality = error of moral thinking = pseudo-guilt of conceiving
people as morally culpable

o rebel = uprising = contender for king = would-be-king = rebel king = false
sovereign = illusion of metaphysically free ego who controls oneself and
authors the open, not-yet-settled future

o transgression = sin = trespasses = trespassing = conceiving of ourselves as
wielding sovereign power over the space-time block that produces our every
thought and action

o tomb = womb = cave = matrix = cosmos = rock = astrological determinism =
frozen space-time block that prevents metaphysical freedom

o slavery = captivity = realizing the plausible concept that we are frozen
into space-time and authored ultimately by it rather than our own power as
free agents.

o delivered = ransomed = released = freed = exodus = exit = reborn =
resurrected = redeemed = the hope that we can in some sense transcend the
frozen-future concept or realization that would destroy our power of
originating our own actions and future states.

o judgement = trial = court = justice = condemnation = in the mystic altered
state, examining our concept of oneself as initiator and change-agent, and
finding it untenable in light of our altered-state peception of time and
personal control

o forgiven = sanctified = cleansed = washed = sin-cancellation = letting go
of the naive assumption of our moral culpability, necessarily together with
letting go of the assumption of our metaphysical freedom and the open future

o sacrifice = substitute sacrifice = willing sacrifice = abandoning our naive
assumption of metaphysical freedom and corresponding mental-model of oneself
and the world, in order to gain a new view of ourselves as being produced as
part of the frozen space-time block.


These are allegorical metaphors for the mystic altered state and the concepts
and experiences brought forth in it. These metaphors explain the mystic
meaning of the Jesus myth, the Attis myth, the Dionysus and Prometheus myths,
and all other paradigmatic Hellenistic myths. The central theme is the
problematic nature of our metaphysical freedom, including encountering and
seeking to transcend the problem.

Now I am entering a period where cracking the code, deciphering the language,
has become reduced to routine. Today, or this week, marks the effective
culmination and peak of such mystery-concept code-cracking, just as there was
a specific week during which I wrote lists of lyrical allusions to the
phenomena of the mystic altered state in popular acid rock or classic rock
songs.

http://www.egodeath.com/mcpnotes.htm#xtocid15387 — Key themes of lyrical
allusions to mystic dissociative phenomena

http://www.egodeath.com/rushacid.htm#xtocid12715 – lyric lines for one artist

Since I have characterized acid rock as the genuine mystery religion of our
era, it is fitting that my greatest summary of acid-rock thematic categories
should so closely match my catalog of themes from the mystery religions and
myths. If we dissolve or analyze the mystery stories into their key motifs,
we have the building blocks for such classic-rock lyrical allusions.

Where in classic rock/acid rock lyrics do we find anything that can be called
a mythic story, as opposed to a mere technique of inserting isolated allusions
as a secondary encoded layer? These rock lyrics usually are put forth in the
guise of a song about a non-mystery subject, with individual phrases serving
as isolated pointers to prompt the altered mind to recognize a hidden layer of
meaning alluding to the shared experience of artist and hearer.

These classic-rock songs and ancient religious mythic stories both have the
form of a surface story that serves to allude to the phenomena, experiences,
and insights that come forth in the mystic altered state. The story embodies,
encodes, and conveys the materials that have come forth from the experience
and serve to reproduce and lead back into the experience.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — theory of ego death and rebirth in mystery
religions

CG:

>Granted you may have some good points,but there is some big difference
>between the heady 70s and the eighties onwards and anyone who has followed
>Rush for a long time (as I have since I was 12) knows that the guys are
>wonderful,caring,family minded guys with a great sense of fun.
>
>Many of their lyrics in recent times have been about issues like personal
>ambition and life in general and about internationalism.
>The lyrics of Rush have been inspirational to a great many people who have
>no truck with LSD or anything else of that ilk.
>The guys are consummate musicians who have always put the music first and
>never went for the whole Rock scene and all the associated baggage,this has
>been recorded many times in biographies and in Fanzines.
>
>You are way off mark and its very sad that you make such a superb band look
>like a group of drug addicts when they have NEVER been anything like that.

You have not explained how your points supposedly disprove Rush’s repeated use
of LSD. I will spell out your implied reasoning to see how compelling it is.

>Rush are wonderful, caring, family minded guys with a great sense of fun.

Therefore they must not have been LSD enthusiasts or acid mystics, because LSD
users are not wonderful, caring, family minded guys, and they do not have a
great sense of fun.

>Many of their lyrics in recent times have been about issues like personal

ambition and life in general and about internationalism. Therefore the lyrics
do not contain allusions to LSD phenomena or acid mysticism, because lyrics
can only contain a single level of meaning.

>The lyrics of Rush have been inspirational to a great many people who have no

truck with LSD or anything else of that ilk. Therefore the lyrics do not
contain deliberate allusions to LSD phenomena, because songs cannot be
inspirational to non-LSD users while still having elements that are intended
for listeners in the altered state.

>The guys are consummate musicians who have always put the music first.

Therefore they have not used LSD repeatedly, because people who put the music
first must avoid using LSD.

>As documented in biographies and in Fanzines, they never went for the whole

Rock scene and all the associated baggage. Therefore they have not used LSD,
because rejecting the common Rock lifestyle means avoiding taking LSD.

>You make a superb band look like a group of drug addicts when they have never

been anything like that.

Your arguments are weak indeed, as well as ignorant, narrow-minded,
prejudiced, and jam-packed full of preconceptions. It’s not really thinking,
but rather, superficial, unexamined, assumed associations. So I see what kind
of critical thinking is needed to reject the hypothesis I put forward. You
don’t know anything at all about LSD, evidently, except pop-culture and
propaganda. I’d be surprised if you knew anything about the Greek
mystery-religions and the Hellenistic myths.

What can I say to the ignorant children, except, I’m glad that I can introduce
them to the world of higher thought for the first time.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — theory of ego death and rebirth in mystery
religions

Erik Davis, author of TechGnosis,
http://www.levity.com/techgnosis/tgtoc.html
asked the following.


From: Erik Davis
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2001 7:42 AM
To: mhoffman…
Subject: Re: Block-universe ego-death

Michael,

1. How does your block universe model jibe with quantum uncertainty
and the seemingly open-ended or emergent drift of time? In other
words, what kind of physics does it rest upon?

2.
Michael wrote:

>First it strikes the mind that this model of time, will, self, and world are
>stunningly coherent, then that system slams you to the ground in
>powerlessness, then you seek a way of standing up again on your own
>cybernetic, egoic feet as a seemingly self-authoring, self-originating agent
>again. You seek a way to become like a free sovereign agent again.
>
>This 2- or 3-phase view of the revelation experience explains various
>paradoxes. The mysteries reveal metaphysical unfreedom, revealing us as
>prisoners in the cage of spacetime, which creates our thoughts for and forces
>them upon us via one’s now alienated will. Yet the mysteries also claim to
>provide transcendent freedom by uniting with and becoming a higher god that

is

>even higher than the Fates and astrological cosmic determinism.

2. How do you characterize this last phase in contemporary cybernetic
non mystery-religion terms? Philiosophically speaking, what
constitutes this higher I/God outside the system? What is the nature
of its freedom?

— erik davis
http://www.levity.com/figment

It is amusing to watch Protestant theologians try to make sense out of the
blood of Christ by which we are saved, while avoiding Catholic
supernaturalism. They miss “the third alternative” — the blood is
Amanita-water. However, it’s too simplistic to stop at that equation.


http://www.christinyou.net/bloodchrst.html – The Blood of Christ – A study of
the meaning of the “blood of Christ,” pointing out the many mystical meanings
that have been used to explain such. James Fowler, 1999.

“The blood of Christ has always been an important concept to Christian people
… as with any object of belief, there are those who take the object and
ascribe to it meaning that it was never intended to possess. Some Christians
have done that with the blood of Christ, giving it magical and mystical
significance that the Scriptures do not ascribe to it. … The efficacy of the
blood of Jesus is to be understood by the fact that Jesus gave up His physical
and material life-blood in obedience unto death (Philippians 2:8). By His
death on the cross (physical and spiritual) the death-penalty is paid. We are
thereby redeemed and reconciled to God in order to partake of Christ’s
spiritual life. This is not a partaking of His material, liquid blood running
through our veins, but His Spirit within our spirit … There is no Scriptural
reason to believe that there is a bowl of the liquid blood of Jesus in heaven.
Nor is there reason to believe that there is a fountain filled with Jesus’
blood wherein all Christians are baptized in the flood of a blood-bath.”


The coherent and sensible interpretation of the blood of Christ is that it
represents:

o A comparison with being washed in the blood/life of the slain Mithraic bull
(who is astrological determinism) in order to gain his vitality and rise above
him, like eating a captured warrior.
o A contrast with the psychological economy of the Jews who had to purchase
clearance of sins through paying their produce (the coin of the day). They
had to buy clearance of transgressions through blood sacrifice. (This economy
of moral transgression cleansing was profitable for the priestly monopoly.
The underclass couldn’t afford to pay for these costly guilt-clearing
sacrifices, so they became “the lost”.)
o The pressed juice from dried amanita.
o The transcended and killed will — in a comparison with the eagle-torn
liver (will) of prometheus.

Amanita is a large part of the sensible explanation, but to make sense of the
meaning of the mythic frameworks, we need more philosophical decoding than
only saying that “blood really means Amanita.” Closer would be the formula
that such Soma is the “blood of Jesus” which “forgives” — that is, clears,
cancels, and renders inapplicable — our delusional conception of moral
agency, metaphysical freedom, and the culpability of sin”.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — theory of ego death and rebirth in mystery
religions

These ideas can be connected: entheogens, orthodox Christian terminology, the
will, time, and self-control. Some theorists connect entheogens and
Christianity, but we really need to bring a simple philosophical systematic
metaphysics into the picture as well.


The Catholic Encyclopedia mentions the Mithraic virtue-giving (I would say
sin-cancelling) property of Haoma (Vedic “Soma”), which Wasson and Heinrich
propose is Amanita-water.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10402a.htm – “The [Mithraic] fathers conducted
the worship. The chief of the fathers, a sort of pope, who always lived at
Rome, was called “Pater Patrum” or Pater Patratus.” The members below the
degree of pater called one another “brother,” and social distinctions were
forgotten in Mithraic unity. The ceremonies of initiation for each degree must
have been elaborate, but they are only vaguely known — lustrations and
bathings, branding with red-hot metal, anointing with honey, and others.

A sacred meal was celebrated of bread and haoma juice for which in the West
wine was substituted. This meal was supposed to give the participants
super-natural virtue. The Mithraists worshipped in caves, of which a large
number have been found.

There were five at Ostia alone, but they were small and could perhaps hold at
most 200 persons. In the apse of the cave stood the stone representation of
Mithra slaying the bull, a piece of sculpture usually of mediocre artistic
merit and always made after the same Pergamean model. The light usually fell
through openings in the top as the caves were near the surface of the ground.
A hideous monstrosity representing Kronos was also shown.”


Mithraism provided a sanctifying cleansing through washing in the bull’s
blood, right next to the use of Haoma, which according to the entheogen
scholars is murky bloody-looking water. This idea, combined with the Jewish
idea of buying clearance of transgressions through sacrificial animals.
Prometheus also spilled his blood willingly for the benefit of humanity, when
the eagle sent by Zeus bit at his side, killing his liver/will.

These common ideas of the era led into the idea of being cleared of sin
through the blood of Christ, while preserving the inner-circle Amanita
meaning, in which the entheogen reveals the idea of moral culpability being an
untenable and incoherent assumption, thus cancelling culpability for sin.


Notice the mention of Kronos, god of time, as a monster. We are mystically
killed by the power of time. There is no time for metaphysical freedom. In
the mystic altered state, time, change, and metaphysical freedom are called
into doubt together, as a system.

Time looks frozen, and metaphysical freedom looks absent, and change looks
illusory or frozen — that is, it is very common to perceive these factors in
this way. That is not to say the mind must always perceive these ideas, or
that the ideas are known to be true because they are perceived in a vivid and
disruptive way.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — theory of ego death and rebirth in mystery
religions

As part of The Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence, I started an Ego Death
discussion list. Covers these subjects insofar as they overlap:

Theory of time, tenseless time
The frozen, preexisting future
Block-universe determinism/fatalism

The entheogenic theory of the origin of religion
Tight versus loose binding of cognitive associations
Entheogens in the mystery religions

The Christ-myth theory
Cracking the code of the mystery-religion allegories
Christian orthodox terminology and theology in terms of the ego-death
phenomenon

Cognitive instability during the mystic altered state
Self-control cybernetics
The problem of controlling the will

Reformed theology
The Copenhagenism versus hidden variables debate
Contemporary metaphysics
Philosophy of mind (such as Hofstadter’s collection The Mind’s I)

I take it for granted that participants are already familiar with these
subjects; I focus purely on connecting these areas into a concise theory or
world-model.

I have invited a number of theorists from the areas discussed in the group.
The Yahoo discussion group format works well. You can participate via email
and/or Web. (For email, I recommend the plain text/”do not convert” option.)

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — theory of the ego-death and rebirth experience

Distribution:
James Arthur – entheogenic historian
Clark Heinrich – entheogenic historian
Dan Russell – entheogenic historian
Mark Hoffman – entheogenic historian
Dan Merkur – psychologist
Paul Hollander – philosopher
Hermann Detering – historian of religion
Erik Davis – techno-mystic
David Ulansey – mystery-religion theorist
Acharya S – Christ-myth theorist
Timothy Freke – Christ-myth theorist
Peter Gandy – Christ-myth theorist
Earl Doherty – Christ-myth theorist
George Harvey – Christ-myth theorist
Nathan Oaklander – Time theorist

[my latest reply is at bottom]


CG wrote:

>I have just been reading your interpretation of Rush lyrics and with respect

most are way off mark.

>I simply disagree that any lyrics are alluding to LSD etc….”Witchhunt”

which you say is about the “drugs war” is about the evils of racism,xenophobia
etc and has absolutely nothing to do with LSD,it’s blatantly clear from the
lyrics.

>Rush are probably one of the cleanest living bands in rock and always have

been,drugs have never been on there agenda.


Michael wrote:

>What is your position regarding the song Passage to Bangkok, which is

blatantly about cannabis? You didn’t address that, but should have. Without
addressing it, your message lacks credibility.

>http://www.egodeath.com/rushlyrics.htm#xtocid22938

>Do you have any evidence that Peart and Rush in the 70s were clean, rather

than heavy drug users? I have a lot of lyrical evidence that Peart was
intimately familiar with the phenomena that occur in the mystic altered state.
With no evidence, your assertion is a preconception, an empty opinion,
carrying no weight and possessing no ability to persuade.

>If you are not familiar with the phenomena of the mystic altered state and

are not familiar with the mystery religions and Hellenistic thinking, you are
in a poor position to evaluate whether the themes and wording in Rush lyrics
include allusions to the phenomena that are common in the mystic altered
state.


CG:

>Granted you may have some good points,but there is some big difference

between the heady 70s and the eighties onwards and anyone who has followed
Rush for a long time (as I have since I was 12) knows that the guys are
wonderful,caring,family minded guys with a great sense of fun.

>Many of their lyrics in recent times have been about issues like personal

ambition and life in general and about internationalism. The lyrics of Rush
have been inspirational to a great many people who have no truck with LSD or
anything else of that ilk. The guys are consummate musicians who have always
put the music first and never went for the whole Rock scene and all the
associated baggage,this has been recorded many times in biographies and in
Fanzines.

>You are way off mark and its very sad that you make such a superb band look

like a group of drug addicts when they have NEVER been anything like that.


Michael:

>You have not explained how your points supposedly disprove Rush’s repeated

use of LSD. I will spell out your implied reasoning to see how compelling it
is.

CG implied/expanded:

>Rush are wonderful, caring, family minded guys with a great sense of fun.

Therefore they must not have been LSD enthusiasts or acid mystics, because LSD
users are not wonderful, caring, family minded guys, and they do not have a
great sense of fun.

>Many of their lyrics in recent times have been about issues like personal

ambition and life in general and about internationalism. Therefore the lyrics
do not contain allusions to LSD phenomena or acid mysticism, because lyrics
can only contain a single level of meaning.

>The lyrics of Rush have been inspirational to a great many people who have no

truck with LSD or anything else of that ilk. Therefore the lyrics do not
contain deliberate allusions to LSD phenomena, because songs cannot be
inspirational to non-LSD users while still having elements that are intended
for listeners in the altered state.

>The guys are consummate musicians who have always put the music first.

Therefore they have not used LSD repeatedly, because people who put the music
first must avoid using LSD.

>As documented in biographies and in Fanzines, they never went for the whole

Rock scene and all the associated baggage. Therefore they have not used LSD,
because rejecting the common Rock lifestyle means avoiding taking LSD.

>You make a superb band look like a group of drug addicts when they have never

been anything like that.


Michael:

>Your arguments are weak indeed, as well as ignorant, narrow-minded,

prejudiced, and jam-packed full of preconceptions. It’s not really thinking,
but rather, superficial, unexamined, assumed associations. So I see what kind
of critical thinking is needed to reject the hypothesis I put forward. You
don’t know anything at all about LSD, evidently, except pop-culture and
propaganda. I’d be surprised if you knew anything about the Greek
mystery-religions and the Hellenistic myths.

>What can I say to the ignorant children, except, I’m glad that I can

introduce them to the world of higher thought for the first time.


CG:

>I take your point!

>No disrespect ok.

Michael:
I’m sorry for acting disrespectful to you. I receive dismissals like yours
about every 3 weeks, and a concurring email about every 8 weeks. Neither the
‘for’ nor ‘against’ emails have any real intellectual content, and they
contain no evidence that either party has ever read any books on philosophy,
mystic/religious experiencing, or entheogens.

I should upload the arguments and organize them, then request further replies
that take the arguments into account. This way, the responsibility falls on
me as organizer of information.

I should also write a list of recommended books and links for people who are
unfamiliar with the research in such areas. These do not prove my position,
but provide more adequate grounds on which to debate my thesis.

o Mystery-religion studies, Greek mythology webpages
o Books about theory of mystic experiencing
o Books about altered-state phenomena
o Books about the entheogenic theory of the origin of religion.
o Books about Rush, acid rock, and progressive rock (I’ve already uploaded
the start of one prog rock book that says loud and clear on page 1,
psychedelic rock begat prog rock).

If you read these kinds of materials and *then* still disagreed with me, we’d
be prepared for a meaningful, informed debate. The Peart interviews I’ve seen
have not supported my thesis, and I would like to collect Rush articles and
interviews to search them for evidence to support my thesis. If I heard from
someone who was well-read and also experienced with altered states, I would
consider that to be a significant challenge to my thesis, rather than a
dismissal by someone who is unqualified to compare altered-state experiences
to these lyrics and judge the thesis.

I have never received a ‘for’ or ‘against’ email from anyone who was well-read
*and* experienced with the altered state. However, I have spoken with someone
in the entheogen community who was a spiritual adult in close contact with
youth culture during the 1970s, who assured me that Rush are indeed
acid-mysticism artists, as is rather obvious when examining the Caress of
Steel vinyl-album cover including the lyrics and photos.

It strains credibility to hold up this vinyl-album cover and deny that the
album is acid mysticism. The full-size, fold-out album cover all but screams
out “acid ego-death” in large, undulating letters, if you know anything about
entheogens, psychedelics, and religious experiencing. Side 2, an integrated
“concept” album-side, is the greatest example of philosophy meeting entheogens
in Rock lyrics. It covers ego-death and rebirth, the astonishing experience
of loss of control in mystic experiencing, and existential issues following
the ego-death experience. A true work of art.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — theory of the ego-death and rebirth experience

The Psychedelic Sacrament: Manna, Meditation, and Mystical Experience
by Daniel Merkur, Dan Merkur
Paperback – 144 pages (August 15, 2001)
Inner Traditions Intl Ltd
http://www.parkstpress.com/titles/psysac.htm

>Reveals the secret teachings from the Judeo-Christian traditions that promote

the use of psychedelic substances to enhance religious transcendence.

>Explains how special meditations were designed to be performed while

partaking of the “psychedelic sacrament”.

>By the author of The Mystery of Manna, Powers Which We Do Not Know, Gnosis,

and The Ecstatic Imagination.

>In The Mystery of Manna, religious historian Dan Merkur provided compelling

evidence that the miraculous bread that God fed the Israelites in the
wilderness was psychedelic, made from bread containing ergot–the psychoactive
fungus containing the same chemicals from which LSD is made. Many religious
authorities over the centuries have secretly known the identity and experience
of manna and have left a rich record of their involvement with this sacred
substance.

>In The Psychedelic Sacrament, a companion work to The Mystery of Manna, Dan

Merkur elucidates a body of Jewish and Christian writings especially devoted
to this tradition of visionary mysticism. He discusses the specific teachings
of Philo of Alexandria, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux
that refer to special meditations designed to be performed while partaking of
the “psychedelic sacrament.” These meditations combine the revelatory power of
psychedelics with the rational exercise of the mind, enabling the seeker to
achieve a qualitatively enhanced state of religious transcendence. The
Psychedelic Sacrament sheds new light on the use of psychedelics in the
Western mystery tradition and deepens our understanding of the human desire
for divine union.

>About the Author — Dan Merkur, Ph.D., has taught at Syracuse University and

Auburn Theological Seminary. His research focuses on the varieties of
religious experience in historical, cross-cultural, and psychoanalytical
perspectives. He is the author of many books, including The Mystery of Manna,
Powers Which We Do Not Know, Gnosis, and The Ecstatic Imagination. He lives in
Toronto, Ontario.


Dan Merkur also wrote the following books:

Unconscious Wisdom : A Superego Function in Dreams, Conscience, and
Inspiration
by Daniel Merkur, Dan Merkur
Paperback – 192 pages (May 2001)
State Univ of New York Pr

The Mystery of Manna: The Psychedelic Sacrament of the Bible
by Daniel Merkur, Dan Merkur
Paperback – 186 pages (January 2000)
Inner Traditions Intl Ltd

Mystical Moments and Unitive Thinking
by Daniel Merkur, Dan Merkur
Paperback – 188 pages (March 1999)
State Univ of New York Pr

The Ecstatic Imagination : Psychedelic Experiences and the Psychoanalysis of
Self-Actualization
by Dan Merkur, Daniel Merkur
Paperback – 218 pages (February 1998)
State Univ of New York Pr

Gnosis : An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions (Suny Series in
Western Esoteric Traditions)
by Dan Merkur
Hardcover (December 1993)
State Univ of New York Pr

Becoming Half Hidden : Shamanism and Initiation Among the Inuit (Garland
Reference Library of the Humanities, 1559)
by Dan Merkur
Hardcover (September 1992)
Garland Pub

Powers Which We Do Not Know: The Gods and Spirits of the Inuit
Daniel Merkur
University of Idaho Press, 1991


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — theory of the ego-death and rebirth experience

>The book list for sites such as ours could concentrate on:

1. Entheogens in the origin of religions.
2. Judeo-Christianity as mystery religion.

>We should work on this together, drawing from and adding to the

psychedelics-and-religion bibliography.

There are plenty of general psychedelics-and-religion bibliographies already;
it’s nearly common knowledge by now. There are already about ten books about
entheogens in Western religions. I will merely provide links to such
comprehensive sites.

It is great that people are making a strong connection now between entheogens
and the origin of essentially all religions, but this new common knowledge
lacks a philosophy and theory of metaphysics and time.

I am going to be very selective and strive for books that especially support
the convergence of the following areas.

o Entheogens in the origin of religions, particularly the mystery religions.
o Religious experiencing rationally and clearly explained.
o Judeo-Christianity as mystery religion.
o Metaphysics of time, theory of frozen time, including hidden-variables
determinism and tenseless time
o Personal control agency

I will not provide much coverage of these areas: shamanism, most Eastern
religion, 20th-century psychedelics history.

http://www.egodeath.com/entheogenbooks2.htm — new page in progress

http://www.egodeath.com/entheogenbooks.htm — needs organizing


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

I found your into essay on the cybernetic theory of ego transcendence
quite interesting. I have some questions for you:

1) You see the block universe as “deterministic” in some sense, at least
when time is considered as a frozen dimension as opposed to flowing.
Where/how does quantum uncertainty fit into this scheme?

2) Correspondingly, you see egoic free will as illusory, as the
experience of time as “flowing” is itself illusory. I’ve been kicking
around the same idea for some time now. When I was 14, I ingested a
quite substantial dose of LSD and subsequently experienced ego death
quite unexpectedly. The sense of timelessness and “eternity” was
extremely powerful, I had a remarkable feeling of omiscience. And yet,
there is a sense in which the illusory remnants of my ego still
maintained themselves throughout the experience, and certainly they
reasserted themselves “afterwards”. In this respect then, I cannot
myself predict my own future actions, although I should be able to in
some sense, since I still carry the memory of that experience within
myself. How do you resolve this apparent contradiction? Did I simply
not experience ego death thoroughly, or is my present ego cognition
simply “forgetting” what it already discovered? That is, according to
your theory, shouldn’t conscious precognition become available through
ego death? Suppose one could in fact gain precognition through ego
death. For example, let’s say that during ego death I come to the
realization that I will raise my right hand in five seconds. How would
this square with the very powerful “illusion” that I have the ability,
on some level, to then choose NOT to raise my right hand, thus
contradicting myself? Is that choice simply not available to me somehow?
It seems to be such a “real” choice, it is simply hard for me to accept
that I would not be able to make that choice. Would my hand simply raise
itself against my own “will” somehow?

3) My experience was a very disturbing one, particularly since my ego
did not really understand what was happening. At the time it seemed as
if I was dying, and the painful, eternal nature of the experience caused
me to believe that I was in fact trapped in “hell” somehow. (I was
raised as a Catholic, wouldn’t you know). I am eager to re-enact the
experience based on the knowledge that I now have. Do you have any
advice to make it less painful/shocking? I am terribly afraid that I
will find myself in the same uncomfortable state of mind despite my
intellect!

Thanks,
Mike Anderson

Michael Hoffman wrote:
To keep the postings short and modular, and keep the threads focused
with useful Subject lines, I will respond to your questions in
separate threads.

Michael Anderson wrote:

> 1) You see the block universe as “deterministic” in some sense, at

least when time is considered as a frozen dimension as opposed to
flowing. Where/how does quantum uncertainty fit into this scheme?

MH:
See message
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath/message/14
in which Erik Davis (book _TechGnosis_) poses the same question, in
Subject “Quantum indeterminacy, transcending det’m”.

Erik Davis, author of TechGnosis,
http://www.levity.com/techgnosis/tgtoc.html
asked the following. Michael Anderson asked the same question.

1. How does your block universe model jibe with quantum uncertainty
and the seemingly open-ended or emergent drift of time? In other
words, what kind of physics does it rest upon?


I essentially agree with Einstein, Bohm, Huw Price (book Time’s
Arrow), Schrodinger, and James T. Cushing (several books including
Copenhagen Hegemony). I assume you have read these books, so that I
can focus on connecting them with my theory, which for short let us
dub “the egodeath theory”.

Key ideas of these theorists include the block universe, hidden
variable determinism, opposition to the Copenhagen view. I am,
however, skeptical about the need for the concept of “advanced
action” and will have to read the latest books on the subject.

I could provide some quotes later from these books that say exactly
the same things I did when enrolled in an atomic physics course.


(I will refer to The Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence as “the
egodeath theory” for short. I do want want to frame it as “my
theory”; it is my expression of “the” theory which we can discover.
It is good for me to “own” the theory as its representative exponent,
yet I want to hold it at arm’s length.)

As far as the Einstein camp (the anti-Copenhagenists such as myself)
are concerned, quantum indeterminacy merely expresses our state of
knowledge, not the state of the measured physical world. The
particle *has* a specific velocity, location, and spin; the
only “cloud of uncertainty” is the uncertainty of our *knowledge*
about the particle.

The only “collapse” of the wave is a (positive) collapse of our
knowledge. There is no collapse in the physical system being
measured; the particle has a particular position etc. at all times,
independently of our act of measuring and being aware of the
particle’s parameters.

This is all trivially obvious to the anti-Copenhagenists but as Huw
Price points out, as I have always seen, the physicists adopted
Copenhagenism by rejecting philosophical precision in their speech.
They all made the cheating jump from “measurement impacts the
particle” to “our awareness changes the particle”.

In addition to Price’s description of the philosophical crudeness of
such philosophizing by physicists, I investigate the psychological
reasons *why* they all made this cheating jump. They propped up
Copenhagenism because they wanted the mind to have power, including
metaphysical freedom. Such power of consciousness is removed if you
adopt hidden-variables determinism as we anti-Copenhagenists do.

Copenhagenism is an invention of those with a covert agenda that lies
outside physics: their real motivation for interpreting QM is to
provide a safe haven for egoic metaphysical freedom and power, of a
type that are not supported within a deterministic system.

The egodeath theory is emphatically *not* “founded on” any system of
physics. The future is frozen not because of billiard balls playing
out over time into a not-yet-settled future. Rather, the future is
frozen due to the fixity of the time axis, the inability of time to
flow, and the lack of room for metaphysical freedom.

These abstract concepts are forcefully experienced during the mystic
altered state; one perceives time as frozen, and perceives personal
power as an epiphenomal illusion injected into the mind from beyond
the egoic sense of control. The sense of time’s flow is suspended
together with the sense of personal metaphysical freedom and power.

Determinism is always defined as providing prediction-in-principle,
and conceives of the future as not yet existing, and is always
defined reductionistically. Ancient mystic Fatalism, as I proffer,
is coming from an entirely different chain of reasoning.

If there is a bit of true randomness in the universe, determinism (as
defined) utterly collapses into ruin. Fatalism, however, remains
standing tall. Prediction is a red herring. I reject defining
science as “prediction” though prediction is the *main* component of
standard definitions of what constitutes science.

Determinism is susceptible to be overthrown by problems of subatomics
or prediction — (correctly conceived) Fatalism is utterly immune to
these threats.

Time in only open-ended as far as our *knowledge* about the future.
The future is single (I hold this because it’s the simplest
worldmodel) and closed and already exists. Forking only describes
our lack of knowledge. Only 1 future is possible: that which has
always existed. Past, present, future all popped into existence,
crystallizing forward and backward, at the timeless moment of
creation.

My goal is to find the simplest coherent worldmodel that explains the
relation between time, will, personal control, and the experience of
ego-death. Forking futures and multiple branching universes is
unnecessarily complicated.

My approach is “first-things-first”, and the first worldmodel we
should define is the simplest one. Only after we acknowledge that
most basic worldmodel should we go on to discuss more complex
models.

Reductionistic determinism is more complicated than ancient Fatalism –
– it piles on extra assertions (such as prediction in principle) that
are overly bold and venturesome and are not needed for a most basic
and simple model, which is frozen time and the preexisting future.


In a separate posting I will address question 2:
MH:

>>Yet the mysteries also claim to provide transcendent freedom by

uniting with and becoming a higher god that is even higher than the
Fates and astrological cosmic determinism.

Erik Davis:

> 2. How do you characterize this last phase in contemporary

cybernetic non mystery-religion terms? Philiosophically speaking, what

> constitutes this higher I/God outside the system? What is the nature
> of its freedom?
> — erik davis

On Tue, 19 Jun 2001, Michael Hoffman wrote:

>
> Time in only open-ended as far as our *knowledge* about the future.
> The future is single (I hold this because it’s the simplest
> worldmodel) and closed and already exists. Forking only describes
> our lack of knowledge. Only 1 future is possible: that which has
> always existed. Past, present, future all popped into existence,
> crystallizing forward and backward, at the timeless moment of
> creation.

This begs the question, if the future is crystallized, why do we not have
knowledge of it? (My answer would be that we CAN have knowledge of it,
but I’m not sure why we don’t ALWAYS have knowledge of it, why are we
ever “wrong”?)

> My goal is to find the simplest coherent worldmodel that explains the
> relation between time, will, personal control, and the experience of
> ego-death. Forking futures and multiple branching universes is
> unnecessarily complicated.
>
> My approach is “first-things-first”, and the first worldmodel we
> should define is the simplest one. Only after we acknowledge that
> most basic worldmodel should we go on to discuss more complex
> models.

Be careful here, when you say “Only after we acknowledge that most basic
worldmodel should we go on to discuss more complex models” you sound like
a reductionist rather than an “Ancient Fatalist”.

I see no reason why fatalism need be simple.

J

Hi all, I’m very pleased to be here. I would like to pass on some
valuable information. I spoke to Richard Nelson who is the organizer
of Consciousness Technologies and he said that I could tell any of my
friends that if they said ‘James Arthur said so’ (of course that’s me)
he would give them a $50 discount on the Conference cost. So feel free
to pass this on as he said I could tell my friends to tell their
friends also. He said that they would need to put up the deposit
before June 23rd but I have a feeling that this is flexible (can’t
promise it but give it a try if you recieve this message too late).

So hopefully this will help anyone teetering on the edge of may or may
not go. I would sure like to meet those of you on this list at the
conference. There is a pictorial tour of the site up on the Blue Honey
webpage that was put together by Andy (Mr. Blue Honey) and it shows
what an AWESOME place this event is held at. Here are some pertinant
links to the event.

As this message amounts to a $50 coupon feel free to forward it to
anyone you feel could use it and any groups you happen to be a member
of (You never know who might need it). Hope to see you there!

Best Regards, James Arthur http://www.jamesarthur.net

For Consciousness Technologies Information:
http://www.charm.net/~profpan/ct/ct2001.html

For The Blue Honey tour of Consciosness Technologies 2000:
http://www.bluehoney.org/CTGallery.htm

Michael Hoffman wrote:

>> Time is only open-ended as far as our *knowledge* about the future. The

future is single (I hold this because it’s the simplest world-model) and
closed and already exists. Forking only describes our lack of knowledge.
Only 1 future is possible: that which has always existed. Past, present,
future all popped into existence, crystallizing forward and backward, at the
timeless moment of creation.


Jason Wehmhoener wrote:

>This begs the question, if the future is crystallized, why do we not have

knowledge of it? (My answer would be that we CAN have knowledge of it, but
I’m not sure why we don’t ALWAYS have knowledge of it, why are we ever
“wrong”?)


Michael Anderson wrote:

>You see egoic free will as illusory, as the experience of time as “flowing”

is itself illusory. … The sense of timelessness and “eternity” was extremely
powerful, I had a remarkable feeling of omniscience.


MichaelH:
Experiencing a *sense* of omniscience is not the same as having omniscience.
You can feel like you are in a position to know everything, to jump out of the
usual lack of knowledge, without actually knowing everything or jumping out of
lack of knowledge. Part of this sense of knowing is that the mind during
loose cognition is so brilliant and creative, and so prone to feedback-loop
build-up, it *does* discover certain transcendent revelations and lofty
principles.

Such a state of mind presents the unrestrained feeling of knowing everything,
together with actual strong potential to have insight into the highest
principles of time, self control, will, and moral agency. However, the mind
does not actually break any laws of restricted knowledge. It breaks out of
the accustomed restrictions and ruts of thought, but it does not actually gain
the ability to remote view or to see the specific content of the future.


MichaelA:

>And yet, there is a sense in which the illusory remnants of my ego still

maintained themselves throughout the experience, and certainly they reasserted
themselves “afterwards”. In this respect then, I cannot myself predict my own
future actions, although I should be able to in some sense, since I still
carry the memory of that experience within myself.


MichaelH:
You seem to associate having a clearly engaged ego with predicting your future
actions. On the other hand, you seem to associate loss of ego with the
ability to see the content of your future. Predicting one’s future actions is
a topic in itself.

Normally, we feel that we have partial ability to reach into our own future
and predict our actions. In the loose-cog state, this sense is diminished,
and we can radically lose confidence in our ability to predict or control our
near-future actions. This can lead into a control-vortex, loss-of-control
experience.


MichaelA:

>How do you resolve this apparent contradiction? Did I simply not experience

ego death thoroughly, or is my present ego cognition simply “forgetting” what
it already discovered?


MichaelH:
I’m not following your expected reasoning completely. You seem to assume that
experiencing ego death thoroughly would enable you to predict and thus see the
content of the future. I don’t see how experiencing ego death would somehow
suggest seeing the particular content of your future.


MichaelA:

>Shouldn’t conscious precognition become available through ego death? Suppose

one could in fact gain precognition through ego death.


MichaelH:
A fundamental axiom I adhere to is that we cannot have precognition. That is,
the simplest model of ego-death does not drag in the highly and unnecessarily
speculative hypothesis of precognition. Intuitively perceiving the fixity and
eternal preexistence of the future is completely separate from having
precognition.


MichaelA:

>For example, let’s say that during ego death I come to the realization that I

will raise my right hand in five seconds.


MichaelH:
That’s an extremely arbitrary and dubious premise, which is not needed for the
simplest theory of ego-death.


MichaelA:

>How would this square with the very powerful “illusion” that I have the

ability, on some level, to then choose NOT to raise my right hand, thus
contradicting myself? Is that choice simply not available to me somehow? It
seems to be such a “real” choice, it is simply hard for me to accept that I
would not be able to make that choice. Would my hand simply raise itself
against my own “will” somehow?


MichaelH:
Actions happen through the will. If the universe forces you to decide to move
your hand, it will do so by secretly injecting into you the will to do so. In
the normal, tight-cognition state, we claim authorship for this will, but in
the loose-cog state, we perceive this will being forced upon us, into us.

From the point of view of our initial state of knowledge, the choice might
produce outcome A or B. But that only describes our incomplete knowledge.
The choice has already, timelessly, eternally been cast in stone, together
with all past and future thoughts, states, and acts of will.

We can intuit, grasp the coherent plausibility, or perhaps even perceive
*that* the future is fixed. We can understand the nature of the future, or
this grasp this aspect of the future. However, this is *entirely* different
than knowing the particular *content* of the future. Understanding principles
of time and the future is entirely different than knowing what particular
states lie in the future. “Seeing” the *fixity*, frozenness, or preexistence
of the future is not the same thing as seeing the *content* of the future. We
still remain ignorant.

So much of determinism is drawn by the passionate wish to see the future —
people always define it foremost, like they define science, as a method of
predicting. I can’t relate to this overzealous insistence of the importance
of seeing the future.

Like pop spiritualists come to spirituality with a strongly preconceived
expectation that the purpose of spirituality is to make you feel nice, so do
scientists and determinists come to the philosophy of science with a strongly
preconceived expectation that the whole raison d’etre of science is “to
predict”, to know the future.

Whence comes this modern obsession with divining the future? I take it as
axiomatic that we *cannot* see into the future, except in the weak sense of
posing scenarios that seem to be possible from the point of view of the
current limited state of knowledge. I am not trying to view the content of
the future — I am only intent on focusing on the idea that the future already
exists. We assume that other places now exist, but we would never assume that
that somehow entitles us to *see* those other places through remote viewing.

Remote viewing and precognition both are unrelated to the basic theory of
ego-death. You can have the full insight and experience as I define it, with
never having any psychic experience of remote viewing or precognition.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

MichaelH wrote:

>>My goal is to find the simplest coherent world-model that explains the

relation between time, will, personal control, and the experience of
ego-death. Forking futures and multiple branching universes is unnecessarily
complicated.

>>My approach is “first-things-first”, and the first world-model we should

define is the simplest one. Only after we acknowledge that most basic
world-model should we go on to discuss more complex models.

Jason wrote:

>Be careful here, when you say “Only after we acknowledge that most basic

world-model should we go on to discuss more complex models” you sound like a
reductionist rather than an “Ancient Fatalist”.

MH:
I am so accustomed to Wilber’s all-level, all-quadrant thinking; I
intellectually grew up with it and I take it for granted that other people are
not reductionists. I never thought in a reductionist way; my natural
assumption is that all levels coexist and are consistently synchronized — it
is not important how. Each level has its own kind of reality for all
practical purposes.

The physical world might be purely an illusion but this doesn’t alter the
experience of ego death. I reject Copenhagenism because it is too mental and
denies the actual position, in itself, of the particle — in that sense, I am
an advocate of the existence of the physical plane without the need for mind
to be aware of it. But on the other hand, I am agnostic about the existence
of the physical plane.

We live in a mental world, and experience ego-death in a mental world — this
suggests how far I am from reductionism. Conventional thinking has ruined all
words. If I say “basic”, the reductionists misinterpret me as one of them.
If I say “deterministic”, they assume I’m on board their “reductionistic
predictionism” programme. “Fatalism” is also largely ruined by misguided
popular connotations.

So the problem of misleading connotations is worse than you warn of — it’s a
veritable minefield of preconceived notions, and *all* of them must be
meaning-shifted together to arrive at the model I’m systematizing.

Jason:

>I see no reason why fatalism need be simple.

MH:
Strategically, a theory has much to be gained through radical simplicity. To
build clear thinking, one should start with the simplest system first and
build on that. I have found that correctly conceived Fatalism provides are
far simpler world-model than the conjectures of determinism (prediction,
reductionism) or the vaguely free will (metaphysical freedom).

Postulating a closed and already-existing future provides a far simpler system
than assuming a future that is not yet settled. If one *can* start off with a
far simpler system, one *should*, for clarity of thinking. This is just a
principle of good thinking: don’t start off with complex, excessive, overly
numerous axioms and assumptions. If the opportunity presents itself to begin
with simplicity, do so — begin with a “first-order approximation”. This is
essential for the character of my theorizing.

I do not define the best goal as a perfect and true model. The best goal to
begin with is to formulate a simpler first-order world-model of time, self,
control, and will, much simpler than anyone has formulated before.

Compared to determinism and free will, as they are defined by seemingly every
philosopher and physicist, correctly conceived Fatalism is dirt simple and has
the fewest and clearest postulations. A metaphysics with an open future is
complicated and unclear. A block universe with a single preexistent future is
far easier to visualize and is usefully bounded in scope, as a model and
concept. Much activity in constructing the theory of the ego-death experience
is the activity of removing unneeded principles and assumptions, such as
forking universes.

Selecting a streamlined goal that is sufficiently simple to survive in
competition is essential. Overly elaborate systems cannot propagate
themselves. The mind is bound to discover the ego-death theory very early on
in the loose-cognition state exactly because the theory or world-model is so
incredibly *simple*.

If the future already exists, as the altered state forcefully suggests, the
current time-slice of ego is impotent to change the future — as the altered
state actively suggests, since it removes the very *sense* of the ability to
exert force upon one’s future. There is a good reason why the mystery
religions have themes of eternity, fatedness, and metaphysical death and
disempowerment of the self: entheogens naturally lead the mind to stumble
across these perspectives and ideas.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

I expect to evaluate this book soon. According to David Ulansey’s Mithraism
book, Stoicism was the strongly dominant philosophy of Tarsus, and the
Hellenistic Mithraic mysteries started in Tarsus less than a century before
Christianity, when the precession of the equinoxes was discovered (setting us
free from astrological determinism, so the people of the era seem to have
thought).

To understand the mystery religions, we must understand that the ancients were
“cosmic fatalists”. I think it would be an anachronism to use the
contemporary term “determinists”, just like it would be inconguous to say the
ancients used “psychedelics” as sacraments, instead of saying “entheogens” or
“psychoactive mixtures”. We insist on defining “determinism” as
reductionistic predictionism, but the mystery experience does not present
determinism to your mental eye; rather, it presents Fatalism.

Reductionistic determinism is merely a later attempt to formulate a
proto-scientific hypothetical model of physical reality that accords with the
mystery-religion perspective. In this way, determinism is merely a vulgarized
and degraded form of Fatalism. Determinism in the age of the Stoics was a
completely abstract hypothesis, whereas Fatalism was an experience and an
object of perception (or apparent perception).


Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy
by Susanne Bobzien
$85.00 (Amazon: full price, not in stock. B&Noble, in stock for $80.75)
Hardcover (1998, March 1999)
456 pp.; 0-19-823794-4
Clarendon Pr; ISBN: 0198237944

Paperback:
List $26.00
Barnes & Noble Price: $20.80 (you save $5.20 (20%))
Readers’ Advantage Price: $19.76
This book will be available in September, place your advance order now.
Format: Paperback, 456pp.
ISBN: 0199247676
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Pub. Date: September 2001

“The definitive study of one of the most interesting intellectual legacies of
the ancient Greeks: the Stoic theory of causal determinism. She explains what
it was, how the Stoics justified it, and how it relates to their views on
possibility, action, freedom, moral responsibility, and many other topics. She
demonstrates the considerable philosophical richness and power that these
ideas retain today.”

“The first comprehensive study of one of the most important intellectual
legacies of the ancient Greek world: the Stoic theory of causal determinism.
The book identifies the main problems that the Stoics addressed and
reconstructs the theory, and explores how they squared their determinism with
their conceptions of possibility, action, freedom, and moral responsibility,
and how they defended it against objections and criticism by other
philosophers.”

“This is an awe-inspiring work….It is extraordinarily ambitious. It aims to
recover and understand, so far as the sources allow, the entire early Stoic
theory of fate, causal determinism, and responsibility. It achieves this
ambition while at the same time showing how immensely more difficult the task
is than anyone had appreciated before….It will most certainly be the first
work that everybody interested has to get to grips with. They will have to
start here both because the book is a model of scholarly method and because it
is an outstanding example of lucid philosophical thinking in an area where
clear thought is extremely difficult.” — Miles Burnyeat, All Souls College,
Oxford

Contents

Introduction
1. Determinism and Fate
2. Two Chrysippean Arguments for Causal Determinism
3. Modality, Determinism, and Freedom
4. Divination, Modality,and Universal Regularity
5. Fate, Action, and Motivation: The Idle Argument
6. Determinism and Moral Responsibility: Chrysippus’s Compatibilism
7. Freedom and that which Depends on us: Epictetus and Early Stoics
8. A Later Stoic Theory of Compatibilism
Bibliography; Indexes


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

Mike Anderson wrote:

>You [consider] egoic free will as illusory, [because] the experience of time

as “flowing” is itself illusory. … I experienced ego death quite
unexpectedly. The sense of timelessness and “eternity” was extremely powerful,

MichaelH:
This is an essential point. Today’s uninspired philosophers merely *think*
about timelessness and talk about it; in contrast, the loose-cognition state
presents timelessness as a forceful, shattering experience, like being
crucified in eternity, for eternity, like Prometheus chained to the rock while
Zeus’ powerful eagle descends from the heavens and consumes Prometheus’ will
again and again.

The inspired philosopher does not merely *think* or “philosophize” about
timelessness, eternity, and ego-death; he *experiences* it, forcefully, even
against his will, so that it is experienced as a life-or-death problem and a
dire situation demanding a solution with the urgency of an emergency.

MikeA:

>I had a remarkable feeling of omniscience. And yet, … I cannot myself

predict my own future actions, although I should be able to in some sense …
let’s say that during ego death I come to the realization that I will raise my
right hand in five seconds. How would this square with the very powerful
“illusion” that I have the ability, on some level, to then choose NOT to raise
my right hand, thus contradicting myself? Is that choice simply not available
to me somehow? It seems to be such a “real” choice, it is simply hard for me
to accept that I would not be able to make that choice. Would my hand simply
raise itself against my own “will” somehow?

MichaelH:
Louis Sass’ masterpiece of a book on schizophrenia, Madness and Modernism,
discusses the paradox of simultaneously feeling omnipotent and impotently
controlled from outside the self.

MikeA:

>My experience was a very disturbing one, particularly since my ego did not

really understand what was happening. At the time it seemed as if I was dying,
and the painful, eternal nature of the experience caused me to believe that I
was in fact trapped in “hell” somehow. (I was raised as a Catholic, wouldn’t
you know). I am eager to re-enact the
experience based on the knowledge that I now have. Do you have any advice to
make it less painful/shocking? I am terribly afraid that I will find myself
in the same uncomfortable state of mind despite my intellect!

MichaelH:
You experienced:
o Egoic free will as illusory
o Time as “flowing” only in an illusory way
o Unexpected ego death, felt as eternal and painful [compare Prometheus]
o The problematic nature of predicting one’s choices, perhaps especially
during the loose-cognition or ego-death state

MikeA:

>My experience was a very disturbing one, particularly since my ego did not

really understand what was happening. At the time it seemed as if I was dying,
and the painful, eternal nature of the experience caused me to believe that I
was in fact trapped in “hell” somehow. … I am eager to re-enact the
experience based on the knowledge that I now have. Do you have any advice to
make it less painful/shocking? I am terribly afraid that I will find myself
in the same uncomfortable state of mind despite my intellect!

As an emergency measure, when destructive chaos is a deadly serious threat,
transcendently postulate and pray to a compassionate mystery savior outside
the system of time, will, and personal control.

The more intellect you bring to the situation, the more forceful is the
realization of the insolubility of the problem of control. There is no
solution, yet faith in the recovery of stability can happen; producing the
rebirth of the illusion of the stable controller-agent — this is the concept
of “resurrection” or “rebirth with and as the mystery-god”. You should expect
that the loose-cognitive state, combined with reflection on the problems of
ego death, will continue to be painful and problematic, even past the tenth
significant session. It is a mystery that we can experience such
control-instability and die as a controller, and yet re-stabilize and continue
to live.

One quarter of the ego system dies permanently after a series of ego-death
experiences. The ego system is half illusion, and half of that illusion is
delusion when the mind mistakes the illusion for a simple reality. That
delusion permanently is revealed and discarded like a child’s clothing after
one grows into maturity. Thus one quarter of the ego (the gullible delusion
part) is destroyed during ego-death.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

The theses of Cahill’s book correspond with the concepts Elaine
Pagels’ book The Gnostic Paul associates with the lower Christians,
the psychics, which in Valentinian thought were refered to as “Jews”
as opposed to the Greek “Gentiles”. Pagels’ book portrays the
encoded category “Jews” as believing in free will, literalism,
supernaturalism, and the ideas associated with later Christian
orthodoxy. The Valentinian category “Gentiles” described the Fate-
oriented worldview of the initiated, dwelling on the illusory aspect
of personal moral responsible agency. I posted a clear two-column
list of “psychic” vs. “pneumatic”, or “Jew” vs. “Gentile” concepts in
the JesusMysteries discussion group a month or two ago, which I
extracted from the book The Gnostic Paul. Cahill’s book, described
below, supports Pagels’ characterization of what the Valentinians
meant by “Jews” or the Jewish metaphysical world-model, which in
Greek culture might be called the naive view of the uninitiated. The
Jews seem to have lacked a prominent sacramental mystery-religion —
entheogen use was only by the prophets, not by the general Jewish
populace except the Hellenistic Jews of the diaspora.


The Gifts of the Jews : How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way
Everyone Thinks and Feels
Thomas Cahill
List Price: $14.00
Paperback – 291 pages (September 1999)
Anchor Books; ISBN: 0385482493 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.71 x 7.99
x 5.25

From the editorial reviews:
He begins with Avraham (Abraham), who heard a voice and was willing
to follow it, and explores how that voice made Avraham’s descendants
think and believe in ways that were so radically different as to
change even the concept of time.

The evolution of human sensibility shows how the ancient Israelites
transformed the idea of religion by gradually introducing monotheism,
and equally transformed our sense of time and history. Beginning with
Abraham’s departure from his Sumerian homeland, the ancient Hebrews
broke with the repetitive cyclical image of history assumed by most
ancient religions to forge what Cahill terms the “processive”
worldview. In this perspective, the present and future become more
important than the past, for they are open to change, progress, and
hope. Cahill also credits the Hebrew Bible with bequeathing to
Western civilization such seminal ideas as the interior self (e.g. in
David’s Psalms),

The Jews introduced to the world a radically new conception of
reality. Supplanting the ancient view that man’s life on earth is
cyclical and predetermined (except for the occasional intervention of
capricious gods), the Bible teaches that the future is determined by
our present actions. This being the case, human behavior is morally
significant, man is free, and progress is possible.

His contention that the Bible introduces the “modern” sense of time,
history, and the nature of human relationships… seems persuasive

…reveals the critical change that made western civilization
possible. Within the matrix of ancient religions and philosophies,
life was seen as part of an endless cycle of birth and death; time
was like a wheel, spinning ceaselessly. Yet somehow, the ancient Jews
began to see time differently. For them, time had a beginning and an
end; it was a narrative, whose triumphant conclusion would come in
the future. From this insight came a new conception of men and women
as individuals with unique destinies–a conception that would inform
the Declaration of Independence–and our hopeful belief in progress
and the sense that tomorrow can be better than today.

Excepts from reader comments:
… because of the Jews the mindset of the Western world shifted from
one in which the fate of all people is fixed in the stars, and life
is predictable and inescapable, to the belief that life is always
progressing forward. … I find it hard to swallow that this
evolution occurred exclusively within their religion.

Explains how a small band of people departed from their neighbours by
revising their view of the universe and themselves. Viewing time as
linear instead of cyclical.

What is the impact of this novel way of thinking about ourselves? For
one thing, the linear view of time is the basis for all Western
scientific thought. Without such a concept we could never recognize
how evolution controls the flow of life.

Adopting the new view of time imparted the concept of free will,
which allowed us the freedom to pursue such inquiries.

The concepts of both monotheism, and individual identity, were
created by the ancient Jews.

The Jews moved us from a cyclical to a processive worldview. They
gave us the concept that time has a start and an end, and replaced
the world seen as a wheel by a world as a journey. Life came to have
value and people developed a conscience.

To claim that our very concept of time evolved from one of cyclical
and unbreakable repetition with no end and no beginning to our
current “processive” notions of past and future because of the Jews
begs more questions than Cahill tackles. Among them are how the
Egyptians managed to spend decades building monuments that were
intended to last forever if they were convinced it would all be for
naught when the next cycle began anew.

The Prophets not only did not condone irresponsible behavior, but
they preached against it and thereby contributed immeasurably to
civilization.

From the 1,000 plus years that Cahill outlines in his book we can
trace this evolution from Abraham and the germination of the idea of
monotheism to the thoughts of the prophets concerning social justice
and personal responsibility. What a long, long way from the binding
of Isaac we came in this book!
——–
end of reader review excepts

In comparing Jesus (as a allegorical mystery-religion figure) to
Mithras, Dionysus, Prometheus, and Attis, the problem arises of
*which* generation of Jesus story to examine:

1a. The Jesus story of Paul’s early epistles (a non-historical dying-
and-rising mythic Christ, concepts that have barely gelled into the
form of a sequential mythic story)
1b. The Jesus story of the gospel of John (a quasi-historical mythic
Christ – a distinct sequential story forms, even with some historical
placement, but still is essentially mythic-form)

2a. The Jesus story of the synoptic gospels (a historical quasi-
supernatural Jesus — the story starts to become more of a Homeric
epic story rather than mystery-myth short-myth form)
2b. The Jesus story of later Orthodox Christianity (a historical
supernatural Jesus — story becomes fully detailed and reified as
history rather than a mythic story or epic story)

(I list John before the synoptics, per the book The Unfinished
Gospel.)

The Jesus story develops through these four phases. Which phase
shall we compare to the other mystery-religion dying-and-rising gods?

It is one thing to allegorically decode the original Jesus story,
which was put forth as non-historical, mythic allegory; it is
something else to allegorically decode the later Jesus story, which
was put forth as non-mythic, historical report.

This is the greatest, pause-inducing problem I’ve run into lately
when trying to grasp “the” meaning of “the” Jesus story — there are
actually some four different phases of “the” Jesus story, moving from
the purely mythic, which is the same as the other mystery-religion
figures, to eventually a purely historical, truly supernatural Jesus
perhaps by 500 CE.

For the same reason it is interesting to compare Jesus to the other
mystery-gods, we can by that same token compare Paul’s earliest
conception of the Jesus or Christ figure to the orthodox final
conception of Jesus Christ, and examine the different psychological
and allegorical aspects of these two extreme end-points in the
developing Jesus-story.

It is easiest to compare the Phase 1a Jesus story or the Phase 2b
Jesus story to the mystery religions. The Phase 1 Jesus story simply
functions the same as the other mystery-gods. So for phase 1, we can
just discuss “the mystery gods including Jesus” and make valid
generalization, such as that these gods are allegorical portrayals of
the first-hand experience offered by the sacramental ritual.

During the mystery-state of cognition, after taking the sacrament of
apolytrosis (higher redemption), it is common to experience a general
pattern of the key points of Jesus’ passion:

o Riding a (willful) donkey
o Betrayal (by will and time)
o Undergoing judgement as a false sovereign
o Suffering humiliation
o Undergoing crucifixion
o Being speared to death in the will (a swooning mythic type of
death)
o A rescuing, entombment, resuscitation, and resurrection.

But you won’t experience yourself doing the historical particulars of
the later Jesus.

The above is the cogent exegesis of the Phase 1 version of the Jesus
story. Phase 2 of the Jesus story requires different explanatory
elements, although in all phases we explain in terms of the
same “language” of explanation — the mythic-experiencing encoding
approach.

In Phase 2 of the Jesus story, different mythic terms are used: death-
penalty for rebellion against God, Christ dying in our place, our
willingness to die to pay the price of reconciliation with God’s
realm, cleansing and cancelling of our sins. This scheme remains in
mythic-experiencing territory, but now it spun a certain way by the
orthodox church, with a different set of emphases.

Nevertheless, we can successfully use the same encoder/decoder
scheme: it’s a simple matter of mapping the key components of this
Phase 2 story to the standard components of the ego-death theory.

It becomes a routine concept/ allegory/ experience mapping problem, a
matter of mapping a set of concepts and allegories to the concepts
and experiences which are more clearly systematized and enumerated in
the ego-death theory.

It is impossible to solve any one problem, to explain any one
allegorical system, without entering the mythic state of cognition.
But with the vivid experience of the mythic state of cognition, not
just one but all these allegorical systems are suddenly solved
together, by mapping each of them into the ego-death theoretical
framework.

I need to check whether any elements such as humiliation, judgement,
or spear appear in Paul’s early epistles — that is, in the Phase 1,
mythic/mystery Christ story.


A. The Phase 1, mythic/mystery Christ story [crucifixion, dying, and
rising to new life…]

B. The Phase 2, historical/supernatural Jesus story [all are subject
to death penalty, all have trespassed, casting out a daemon,
substitute death in your place, cancellation of sin, purchase of
freedom…]

C. The Dionysus story [surprised while playing with pine cone &
puppet toys, torn or dis-integrated into pieces, uncontrolled
mania…]
Attis story [absolute act of will to bring organ of rebellious
uprising under full control, death of young companion, resulting
insanity, embedded in tree…]

D. The Mithras story [born from a rock, exiting the cave, precession
of equinoxes, conquering astrological determinism, washed in the
blood of the substitute-sacrificed bull…]
= = = = = = = = = =
EDT. The ego-death theory [idea and perception of fixed future, idea
and perception of metaphysical unfreedom, idea and perception of
illusory steersman, death of the egoic world-model, cancellation of
moral culpability along with metaphysical freedom…]

With EDT providing a systematic framework, it now becomes routine to
map the key elements of mythic-/mystery-allegories A, B, C, and D
into a common point of reference and recognize what aspects they
significantly have in common.

Of these various mythic-/mystery-allegories, B is distinctively
historical. Our sense of metaphysical freedom is largely propped up
by our sense of historical positioning. We might be able to thank
the Jews for our strong sense of moving through time as continuant
agents, per Cahill’s book The Gifts of the Jews : How a Tribe of
Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels.

If the Jews really are associated with linear, historical thinking,
and if the Greeks are associated with cyclical-time or block-universe
thinking, then we can call the Phase 1 Jesus story the “Greek”
version of the story, and call Phase 2 the “Jewish” version of the
story.

To rediscover Paul’s early conception of Jesus means changing from
thinking in terms of the “Jewish” version of the Jesus story to the
earlier, “Greek” version of the Jesus story.

According to Elaine Pagels in the book The Gnostic Paul, the
Valentinians crafted a two-layer Jesus story comprising the
lower, “Jewish” version of the story and the higher, “Gentile”
or “Greek” version of the story.

This is what is so distinctive about the Jesus story, or story-pair,
or two-layer story, compared with the other mystery-god figures. The
other mystery-gods had *only* the “higher”, mythic level of the
story. They don’t fully descend into linear time and history.

The Jesus story originally began with that mythic-level version, but
added something innovative: a lower level as well, in which
Jesus “landed” in linear time at a particular point and promised to
land in the future too.

The Jews read their scriptures, such as the story of Abraham, as
history — while the Greeks read their own mythic stories as timeless
mythic stories, not as historical events located in linear time.

I want to add: Where there is linear time, there is the egoic notion
of metaphysical free will. The concept of linear time and egoic
metaphysical freedom seem to have arisen together, perhaps in Jewish
thinking. The Greeks may have become weary of metaphysical
unfreedom, and even grown weary of confronting the block universe via
entheogenic loose cognition.

People wanted a greater amount of practical freedom, and the
experience of metaphysical unfreedom, even when positively
interpreted as “redemption” and exiting the deterministic jail cell,
was still too humiliating and injurious to the project of re-forming
the mind into the shape of a free sovereign agent.

So they sacrificed entheogens (which present an experiential vision
of metaphysical unfreedom) and allowed them to be driven underground –
– to forget the experience of metaphysical unfreedom and strive for a
greater amount of practical freedom.

They achieved their goal, technically — people became sinners, guilt-
agents, responsible free agents — at least until Reformed theology
came along. Even after Reformed theology, entheogens remained
suppressed, as “witchcraft”, so the naive sense of moral free
sovereign agency persisted. Entheogens kill the naive sense of moral
free sovereign agency.

Can a god outside the fated space-time system be metaphysically or
transcendently free?

Michael wrote:

>>First it strikes the mind that this model of time, will, self, and world are

stunningly coherent, then that system slams you to the ground in
powerlessness.

>>Then you seek a way of standing up again on your own cybernetic, egoic feet

as a seemingly self-authoring, self-originating agent again. You seek a way
to become like a free sovereign agent again.

>>This 2- or 3-phase view of the revelation experience explains various

paradoxes. The mysteries reveal metaphysical unfreedom, revealing us as
prisoners in the cage of spacetime, which creates our thoughts and forces them
upon us via one’s now alienated will. Yet the mysteries also claim to provide
transcendent freedom by uniting with and becoming a higher god that is even
higher than the Fates and astrological cosmic determinism.

Erik Davis wrote:

>How do you characterize this last phase in contemporary cybernetic non

mystery-religion terms? Philosophically speaking, what constitutes this higher
I/God outside the system? What is the nature of its freedom?

>– erik davis
>http://www.levity.com/figment

In the depths of the ego-death experience, an uncaring block universe appears
to have complete control of the person. This is an unstable and untenable
state, when one is dancing on the strings of a blind and dispassionate and
non-personal mechanism, the block universe. The person in this state is not
only abandoned into full existential isolation, but is forcefully being moved
here and there by a machine, and the accustomed personal restrictions and ruts
of thinking are gone.

The mind becomes released into a completely unrestrained freedom, while all
conventional power of self-control, restraint, and stability is suspended.
It’s freedom in the radical sense of arbitrary chaos, lacking any guidance,
lacking any system of values or regulations to steer by — with
moment-to-moment cybernetic arbitrariness. This is the very definition of
mental and cybernetic instability, which is not the best state of mind for
stable, mundane, viable existence.

The feedback problem also arises — the mind is perfectly prone to building up
a sense of sureness with any arbitrary notion that enters the mind, and these
seed ideas are perceived as being put into the mind by a mysteriously and
ominously hidden force outside that mind — the alien, hidden controller who
hands you your thoughts and delivers your will to you, already established in
its content.

Metaphorical language is almost mandatory to give sensible shape to these
abstract thoughts, experiences, and insights. The will can be said to be
free, except that such a will is forced upon you. Instead of seeing the eagle
of Zeus as *devouring* or removing Prometheus’ will, imagine the eagle as
forcing Prometheus’ will into him. Imagine God sending the Roman soldier to
inject Jesus’ will into him like a spear entering into Jesus’ side.

So does the mystic state produce the sense of the Ground of Being forcefully
injecting the will into the mind, amounting to a betrayal of the sovereignty
of one’s personal government right from within the innermost circle. How can
I assume I am the sovereign agent of my actions, while I am perceiving some
way in which my innermost will is not authored by me, but is authored by the
Ground and inserted into all points along the time axis, without my permission
or my own personal initiative?

My initiative of will is not even my own, not something I made, but is
something the Ground made and forced into me. This experience and perception
forces a deep rewriting or re-indexing of all elements of the world-model
regarding time, personal control, self-authorship, will, and responsibility.

But as soon as the mind latches onto such a deep rewriting of its world-model,
and conceptually grasps the ramifications, this is deeply destabilizing and
brings about the problem of compassion or goodness of the force that forges
one’s will.

If the Ground is conceived of or experienced as a dumb, uncaring space-time
block that controls and authors my every action, the problem of the goodness
of such an empty machine-like puppeteer arises. That is why one might
postulate a compassionate controller of the block, or a Mithras-type rescuer
who defies the tyranny of Fate and Destiny and rescues this spiritually killed
person out from the block-universe prison.

The entire reason to postulate a god outside the frozen and fated block
universe, or space-time cosmos, is to hope and look for some compassionate
controlling force that can operate on the un-free cosmic block. I don’t think
anyone has a theory of how such a god or one’s higher self can coherently
possess metaphysical free will or what we might call “transcendently free
will”.

Yet the mind *can* conceive generally, or vaguely, of such an idea: while
maintaining that the universe in which we live is a block-universe that has no
room for metaphysical freedom, no room for the naive concept of the free will,
we can nevertheless conceive of the abstract notion of some superior type of
freedom that we can call “transcendent freedom”.

How can we justify and explain the postulation of a transcendent freedom while
acknowledging the good reasoning behind the idea of metaphysical unfreedom?
We can only wave our mental arms and say that we are justified in postulating
a mysterious “transcendent freedom above metaphysical unfreedom.” I think
some of the Gnostics make such a move — while acknowledging and conceding the
idea of the frozen future, they nevertheless claim some sort of ill-defined
transcendent type of freedom, with one’s identity shifting away from the
cosmos-bound or Ground-bound will, to some ill-defined “higher will” of a
“higher self” that is one’s “higher identity”.

Is such a postulation “coherent”? Or fair, reasonable, or justified? Here,
we escape into the realm of transcendent ideas, perhaps my equivalent to
Wilber’s “paradoxical” ultimate state of consciousness. How can we walk with
confidence and stability while in the Dionysian state of cognitive
instability? We can’t; it’s impossible, and yet it is as though we can.
That’s the closest I come to paradox, or perhaps, mystery.

How do I become identified with a god who transcends the spacetime block with
an ominously closed and pre-existent future? That’s a mystery that may escape
justification, and is justified more in terms of practical needs during the
mystic experiential state. Here I escape more and more frequently into the
dogma that the theory of ego death and ego transcendence is not primarily a
matter of proof, reason, or logic, so much as a simple, palpable, graspable
systematization of the mystic experiences and thoughts and insights.

A quest for perfect truth or persuasiveness, or perfect coherence is forever
an uncertain project. It used to be easy to claim perfect coherence, but
theories are now known to be only imperfectly provable. I do promise a more
intense, more satisfying model than has been created, a far clearer
systematization and about the clearest systematization possible of ego death
and the reasoning involved in it.

The depths of ego death can be an emergency situation calling for emergency
moves, which amount to transcendent postulations of “somehow” stepping outside
the system and escaping the trap that awaits us at the center of the
Minotaur’s maze. The child discovers the problem, and dies in the maze; we
solve the problem not through supernaturalist belief but through transcendent
rational postulation. What doctrines and dogmas result? I believe: ___.

I believe that there is, in practice, some way to transcend the problem of
retaining practical self-command during the ego death experience, and that the
sacrifice of the ego is sufficient sacrifice to gain full justification of
one’s moral world-model despite the morality-killing vision of the block
universe and metaphysical unfreedom. I believe that the reasoning mind is
justified in postulating a higher, transcendent identity that escapes and is
immune to the perfectly severe and ego-killing reasoning that is revealed
during the discovery of the ego death experience.

We could call these transcendent justification problems Phase 2 of
ego-death — that is, the problem of our justified resurrection or cybernetic
re-stabilization. When the mental machinery applies reason to the problem of
self-control and self-government, it short-circuits — the system kills itself
in a cybernetic governmental power-seizure; the self-control governmental
system experiences a coup d’etat from within.

How then, after that self-cancellation of the old, egoic power system, can the
mind possibly move on ahead into a new, viable life with a new operating
system that does not crash every five minutes upon remembering the thought
that kills? How can the rational computer that affirms metaphysical unfreedom
(due to the static relationship of the time axis and acts of personal will)
devise a valid new rational operating system that is immune to ego-death
crashing?

Here is where the android in the myth of The Body Electric
(http://www.egodeath.com/rushlyrics.htm#xtocid22998) prays to the Mother Of
All Machines — only a transcendent robot-god paradigm is sufficient. If we
hold ourselves to be deterministic robots, we fall to the ground when thinking
upon our own self-government mechanisms.

How then can we avoid sheer destruction and the total breakdown into
cybernetic chaos, the mad vortex of control-beyond-control, the transcendent
insanity of grasping the control singularity? We are forced to invent,
against *or above* all reason, the square root of -1; we are forced to jump
out of the system: it is the only path that reason permits: not an
“abandonment” of reason so much as transcending reason.

The enlightened robot is commanded by reason to transcend reason and postulate
stability and higher, transcendent self-identity that is “somehow” higher than
the deterministic Fated cosmos. This is the cybernetic meaning of faith,
which one can only claim to have authored if one is identified with the
transcendently postulated “higher, transcendent self”, the Mithraic
transcendent robot who is somehow held to be able to operate upon the Fated
cosmos, grab the cosmic axis, and shift the orbits of the stars, even — in
some sense — changing the future, though of course such is impossible.

If you have been given Faith by the postulated *higher* Ground of Being or the
postulated *higher* self, you can simultaneously maintain that the future is
eternally frozen and yet maintain that we have transcendent freedom. This may
mean transcendently postulating a transcendent cosmos higher than the Fated
cosmos. Such a move does not deny determinism/Fatedness or the fixed future;
it forcefully affirms the block-universe model and all its problematic
ramifications.

Yet this move knowingly, boldly dares to postulate that there is a rationally
as well as morally justified way in which we are forced by reason, so to
speak, to move beyond what reason can achieve. This may very well be the true
heart of Gnostic thinking. If the Ground of Being is experienced as leading
only to death, insanity, and the termination of viable control upon which
further existence depends, the kind of Reason that delivered that awesome
achievement dictates preserving yet transcending such a type of Reason.

Such logic leads to the death of itself as a viable logic, and leads to some
sort of higher-logic which we only need to define as “some perfect and
justified transcendent logic which, in particular, is immune to the
self-cancellation of ordinary logic.” That right there is the complete
explanation, justification, and religious principle of transcendent logic,
which is the door and key to heaven. It is transcendent, life-enabling
compassion.

Without that key, without that bit of transcendent logic, we would all be
condemned to destruction — jail, insanity, harm, madness. Abraham’s angel
saw his gesture of transcendence of his will, and transcendence of reason, and
transcendence of moral agency, and gave him a religion: the religion of the
sufficient and justified mental-only sacrifice.

Part of letting go of delusion, letting go of the deluded mental-model of
self, time, control, and freedom, is letting go of strict adherence to
remaining within a system of logic that is only able to cancel itself out, as
personal control of the will cancels itself out during the mystic state. The
loose-cognitive computer calculates a logical result that says “you must
exceed logic: you must either postulate a higher logic that permits viable
self-government, or this machine will hit a divide-by-zero error and enter the
anti-control, control-beyond-control, or ‘run amok’ mode.”


http://www.egodeath.com/rushlyrics.htm#xtocid22921
Call out for direction [my guidance systems are all suspended]
and there’s no one there to steer [there’s no one in me to give birth to will]
Shout out for salvation [kneel and pray to god-of-Fate to save me from
freedom]
but there’s no one there to hear [no god appears]

The higher god outside the system, who one might pray to in need of a rescuer
from control breakdown or the self-cancellation of personal control,
ultimately can’t be relevant if it’s some weakly wished-for, remote God who
controls the spacetime block. We need a much more down-to-earth transcendent
god that the mind can somehow take responsibility for postulating and
conceiving. Such is the transcendent higher mystery god that one identifies
with and becomes.

How can I become a transcendent god? By forming such an idea, including the
necessary principles of stability, order, passion, justification, and
transcendence. This includes a rejection of an automatic identification with
a self that is authored by the spacetime block. To be transcendent, the mind
must think two ways at once: the mind cannot originate an idea; all ideas are
forced into the mind by the Ground of Being. But we can call that the lower
mind.

The mysterious, postulated higher, transcendent mind, the higher self and
transcendent I, *can* take responsibility for creating its self-concept that
serves to rescue stability and self-government — but only if this higher self
is emphatically differentiated from the lower self that is by definition a
helpless puppet created by the Ground of Being. Any more details about the
higher self are impossible to formulate; all that direction has to offer is
speculation and conjecture.

The only thing that matters about this postulated higher, transcendent Self is
that it is justified by pure logic and reason and compassion, and it is
particularly *not* the lower self which is necessarily an illusion (and also
previously a delusion). Such a system of ego death and rebirth, or cybernetic
self-cancellation and transcendent reset with a deeply revised operating
system, is concerned with the negative — understanding the breakdown ideas,
and with the positive: creating a rational and viable way of transcending the
problems *without denying* the problems.

How can we definitely and strongly accept and affirm the solid reasoning that
brings about ego death and the concomitant destabilization of control, while
also transcending such a deeply problematic and unstable foundation, such a
crash-prone operating system? We have to move into the realm of the
transcendent, as Abraham’s story tells of transcending physical sacrifice and
adopting a life-enabling conceptual-only system of transcending one’s will and
one’s faulty egoic self-government system. The angel was satisfied with this
gesture, and so Abraham had a future, in addition to being justified in the
light of higher reasoning about moral self-control agency.

————————–
As an aside, I did find a couple references to a piercing shaft involved in
Prometheus’ binding:

Hesiod, Theogony, 521-25: “And devious Prometheus [Zeus] bound with
inescapable chains, and drove a shaft through his middle, and set on him a
long-winged eagle, which used to eat his immortal liver [ = organ of will &
intention]; but by night the liver grew as much again as the long-winged bird
devoured in the whole day.”


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

>I hope Rev. H. founds an entheogenic kabbalah temple. I also hope that Mr.

Hoffman establishes his entheogenic Protestant church.


MichaelH wrote:
I’ll probably remain strictly a theorist. I don’t have time or patience for
rituals. I should envision an entheogenic Gnostic initiation-oriented church,
but my first audience is the thinking individual explorer online. Lately, I
wonder “What does the church of the placebo sacrament mean to these people?
What do they get out of it?” Basically, social interaction and an orientation
in life.

Was not the original Christian church a mystery religion, using the same
active sacraments as the other mystery religions of the era? Lately I feel
alienated from the Protestant church, which moved only part of the way from
orthodoxy to a genuine sacramental mystery-religion. A more pertinant debate
is the question of forming a Gnostic Christian or Christian Gnostic church.

There are some entheogenic Christian churches today, though I expect they lack
a systematic theory of the Christ experience. That would be too much to ask
in today’s cultural climate, given the current terrrible conditions (even
persecutions) for entheogenic religions.

Protestantism maintains a conventional heaven and hell even though Reformed
theology denies that these have anything to do with moral punishment and
reward. I surmise that the most extreme Reformed theologians finally abandon
heaven and hell as pointless, though they might not admit it. Even so, their
theological system is not redeemed, because they lack the flesh and blood of
Christ – the entheogenic sacrament.


It would be trivial to offer people more than today’s churches do, and we can
assume that people would flock to a real church now, just as they did in the
original Christian church as everyone clamored for the higher initiation.

My goal was not to repair Christian practice, but to make sense of it because
it is the myth that reigns over the world of Western culture and it was the
myth that was implanted into me before my intellectual life was initiated.
From the first, the Jesus myth was a part of my experiences. I spent as much
time in the synagogue, but the synagogue seemed even more bereft of any
genuine resonance with the experiences of the mystic state of cognition.

Neither did my family’s new age involvement give me anything. I got
everything from Christianity (including the cancelled sacrifice of Abraham)
and Zen. Jesus is the reigning religious myth of the culture that produced
me, so any theory of entheogenic origin of religions that is relevant to that
culture must have a solid, detailed explanation of the Jesus myth. I did not
study the myth in order to repair Christianity, but to explain what the
essential transcendent meaning behind Christianity is — to locate the higher
meaning of Christianity.

Now that I can understand and communicate this meaning, it would be possible
to repair Christianity, but that has not been my goal. Ultimately, my goal is
to understand and make sense out of our nature as controllers, and explain how
the dominant myth reflects this nature. Why do I want to explain the dominant
myth? To increase my understanding and our understanding of our nature as
controllers.


My preferred style of myth is distinctively contemporary, along the lines of
the power-cancelling android in The Body Electric, or a postmodernist
incongruous alien time-jumping vision that builds an allegorical savior
meta-story out of entire categories rather than a single limited storyline.

We can avoid all mystic and religious terms and speak purely in terms of
self-control cybernetics and principles that aliens also are sure to discover,
and thus escape the accustomed ruts of thinking and finally get to the real
heart of the matter, of what religious experiencing is really about. Yet
today’s dominant cultural myth is still the orthodox Jesus story, and a theory
of religious experiencing that does not conquer and transform the orthodox
Jesus story from within can’t achieve anything.


I am a chronically individualist thinker and can hardly picture a social
organization based on Gnostic entheogenic Christianity. The head needs the
body: the higher Gnostic Christians are into individual experience, unlike the
masses of uninitiated literalists, the lower Christians, who provide the
socially stable organization.

It is easy to see in retrospect that the body, in envy and fear, would cut of
the head, leaving us with the social body of “Jesus”, minus the religious
experience of “Christ” (a social/emotional substitute is only a frustrating
substitute).

There are too many dangers, we now know, in such a two-layer religion. The
head is always at risk of being rejected by the body. Because of its
so-tangible literalist layer, the two-layer Jesus story may have a clearer
impact on the mind than the mythic-only savior stories. But we don’t dare
tell the historical-style Jesus story in a misleadingly literalist way again.
This time, the head must kill the body — that is, we cannot humor the naive
belief in literalist historical reading of the Jesus story any longer, like
the Valentinian Gnostics did.

Either literalism or the mythic allegorical reading is bound to win. It’s a
winner-takes all situation. Paul aimed for a two-layer religion, but the
lower layer won completely, forcing the higher layer underground. This time,
we must have the higher, allegorical layer win, with no more inner-circle
secrecy. The greatest question remains: why were the Christian mysteries
secretive? What was the nature of their secrecy? Was the customary “death
penalty” threat applied to revealing the *Christian* mysteries as well as the
other mysteries? Is that why Paul “met with” the Areopagus council?

In Valentinian Gnostic Christianity, why didn’t the higher Christians, the
“Gentiles”, simply reveal everything openly to the lower Christians, the
“Jews”? Wouldn’t that have prevented the colossal disaster, where the lower,
literalist layer of Christianity took over the whole structure and shut out
the higher, mystic, entheogenic layer? That is the great question that is
glaringly raised yet left untreated in Pagels’ book The Gnostic Paul.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

S wrote:

>Concerning ego-death, illusions, and the concept of “shedding them like

clothes”: simply stated, in your opinion, what is the most efficient way to go
about doing this?

My goal is to design a 2-part system for perceiving the illusory aspect of the
self, a system with far greater convenience and ease-of-use than any that has
existed so far. Prometheus brought the general knowledge of how to make fire,
but what people actually need is a disposable lighter such as I am designing.
Who has time for ten years of reading books and another ten years of
meditating, with statistically dismal results that just prove the
ineffectiveness of such an approach?

On the other hand, we tried enlightenment in a pill but found that something
was missing (so I maintain). People have also tried studying religions and
religious myths, or participating in ritualism, again with little compelling
effects. The most efficient and convenient way to fully experience ego-death,
and perceive the exact and specific way in which ego is an illusion, and
abandon the delusion of taking this (indestructible) illusion as reality, is
to learn a simple, minimalist set of concepts, and mentally work through those
concepts while in the loose cognitive state, produced on demand through the
venerable traditional technology of entheogens.

The most efficient way to bring about an intense religious experience is
through:
o Studying the basic relationships between the concepts of personal will,
time, choice, and self-control. My Introduction article is designed to
provide all the concepts that are needed, in the space of just a few pages.
These ideas are individually found in books but are not gathered together
systematically into the form of an easy-to-use technology such as I am
designing.
o Considering the ideas while in the loose cognitive state, through skilled
use of entheogens or “cognitive loosening agents”.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

The idea has finally hammered itself into my head: snake = venom = toxin =
psychoactive = self-poisoning ability = self-cancelling ability. Poison is
like potion or a psychoactive/healing drug. The bee is related; it has a
venom. Persephone’s Quest, p. 199. Good discussion of psychoactive “wine”,
p. 197. See also the bee goddesses in Dan Russell’s Shamanism & Drug
Propaganda.

Persephone’s Quest demands slow and respectful reading to catch terms such as
“ceremony of dilution”. p. 195: after receiving Dionysus’ gift of
wine-mixture, they “saw double” and thought themselves poisoned, for which
they killed Dionysus and buried him beneath a pine tree (an Amanita host).
Erigone found Dionysus’ body and hanged herself from the tree in grief.
Cyclops and seeing double likely refer to third-eye metaperception.


The snake wrapped around the Mithras symbols has psychoactive-plant or potion
connotations. Through this poison/potion which magical plants, venomous
snakes, and stinging bees share in common, we are born forth from the Fated
deterministic cosmos as Mithras from the rock/egg/cave.

When you see a mythic snake, think of:
1. Venom as poison/potion
2. Drug-plants eaten by the snake
3. Ability to form a loop and inject itself with the poison/potion.


chthonian \Chtho”ni*an\, a. [Gr. in or under the earth] Designating, or
pertaining to, gods or spirits of the underworld; esp., relating to the
underworld gods of the Greeks, whose worship is widely considered as more
primitive in form than that of the Olympian gods. The characteristics of
chthonian worship are propitiatory and magical rites and generalized or
euphemistic names of the deities, which are supposed to have been primarily
ghosts.

A snake wrapped around an egg, and the underground Mithraic cave, suggest
magical plants/potions.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

The ego-death theory is a model of will, self-control, and time, and a model
of mental models including the notion of mental-construct association
matrixes.

This cybernetic theory of ego transcendence is immune to whether Jesus
existed, whether God exists, whether randomness exists, whether the world is
deterministic… and the theory is not something that could be true or false.
It’s just a device that is associated with a certain kind of experience, the
ego-death experience.

It doesn’t matter whether the mystery religions used entheogens, or whether
Christianity was originally an entheogen-using mystery-religion, or what was
in Greek “wine” mixture, or what the Hellenistic world really thought of the
myths and mysteries of the era. It doesn’t matter whether Copenhagen quantum
mechanics or, instead, hidden variables is true; advanced action has no impact
on the theory.

It doesn’t matter how consciousness itself works, or whether the physical
world exists outside the mind, or whether there is a heaven and a hell, or
whether we can have psychic remote viewing or precognition. All those things
are irrelevancies for the project of creating a model that causes ego-death
and describes the ego-death experience.

What remains? A technique, and a set of concepts and a point of view, that
prompt and describe a certain experience. Not truth, not certainty, not a
meaning for life, not a religion in any expected sense. It may be a
philosophy, but not an -ism or a programme, and I don’t know if I would call
it a master narrative.

Wilber’s Integral Theory is offered largely as a solution to practical
problems. I intend to provide no such mundane and practical solutions to save
the world. We chronically have expected too much from enlightenment and
transcendent knowledge. We are not justified in carelessly assuming that
transcendent knowledge will save the world. “If only people had transcendent
knowledge, everything would work out.” I have no reason to believe that.
That’s asking way too much from knowledge.

I’m more of an engineer than a theorist, unless you emphasize theory *as*
system-building.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/9123/portboy.html

Neil wrote:

>My next drumming appearance was at the Lakeport High School variety show.

With Don Brunt on piano and Don Tees on sax, we were the Eternal Triangle, and
we practiced nights at the school. (Don Brunt would drive us home in his Dad’s
’65 Pontiac, usually with a detour out to Middle Road, where he could get it
up to a hundred). For the variety show we played a couple of songs, including
one original which was titled LSD Forever (as if we had any idea — the only
drug we knew anything about was Export A!). My first public drum solo was a
success, and I will never forget how I glowed with the praise from the other
kids in the show (including, I’ve always remembered, Paul Kennedy, who has
done well for himself on CBC Radio).
____________________

>>Rush, in their early days, did perform a song called “Bad Boy” which stated:

“You flipped your dog on acid, and now he’s flippin’ on his bed.”

>… it was written by Larry Williams, not Neil.

____________________

http://www.r-u-s-h.com/nmsmirror.com/HTML/books/book_rush3.html

‘Hemispheres’ was released in October 1978, and by the time December rolled
round it had already gone gold in the States.

‘Hemispheres’ was probably Rush’s most ambitious album to date. It was
originally inspired by a book called ‘Powers Of Mind’ written by Adam Smith.
Neil Peart explained that Smith was a researcher who studied the occult and
various other kinds of philosophies, tried LSD, transcendental meditation and
so on.

Smith devotes one chapter in his book to the division of the brain into
hemispheres – Apollo being the right hand side of the brain and Dionysius the
left.

Side one of ‘Hemispheres’ is devoted to the further adventures of Cygnus, the
character who was last seen in ‘A Fare well To Kings’, plummeting through a
Black Hole in his spaceship Rocinante.

Says Peart who, of course, wrote the Iyrics for the album: “The world he
Ieaves is being ruled over by two gods who represent opposing forces – Apollo
and Dionysius. Apollo champions the force of reason and rationale and
Dionysius champions the force of instinct and intuition.

____________________

Neil wrote:

>Personal experience in China and Africa has proven that the most vivid and

bizarre dreams are created under these conditions, far beyond the wildest
hallucinations of any “mind-expanding” drug. My advice to those
substance-abusers who seek cheap thrills and momentary elevation by way of
addictive and messy chemical concoctions, “Stop wasting your time and money —
try dysentery instead.”

Neil betrays himself by speaking with such authority in comparing a certain
dreaming state to “any ‘mind-expanding’ drug”. He makes the comparison based
on “personal experience”. He takes the stance of one who is in a position to
offer advice to chemical users. His put-downs of the chemicals sound
insincere — he puts them down as a person who has experience with those
things he is presumably rejecting.

My main concern is not whether Peart frequently combined LSD and drumming. The
issue is whether he deliberately intended many lyrical turns of phrase to
allude to the phenomena of the mystic altered state.

I have never asserted that LSD is the only way to bring about the mystic
state. Your position is weak, if you have to resort to refuting assertions I
didn’t make, instead of trying to refute my actual position. My interpretation
of Rush lyrics remains fully viable.

First let us agree on reasonable things.

o Passage to Bangkok is undeniably a celebration of THD. So don’t waste our
time with any blind, knee-jerk assumptions about Rush being morally clean and
drug-free. If you take five seconds to investigate, if you have any
investigative ability at all, you have to admit this before even entering the
LSD debate. If you assert that Rush was drug-free, you are in frank denial and
there is no sense in trying to debate with you — you’ve disqualified yourself
as a man of reason.

o Rush likely has experience with LSD. The two master drugs of the 60s and 70s
were cannabis and LSD. Rush loved the first (cannabis), and Peart loved
philosophy, art, and spirituality, and was aware of LSD to the point of
playing a song named “LSD Forever”. If early Rush played “Bad Boy” written by
Larry Williams, about “flipping on acid”, we have at least pop-culture LSD
influences entering the band from multiple angles. Rush was a major heavy-rock
band of the 70s. It would be more difficult to believe that they did *not*
have some amount of LSD experience.

So, we know Rush loved cannabis and we are justified in assuming they were
familiar with LSD to some degree.

Two questions remain:

o Just how much did Peart do LSD? I suggest that he sometimes used it weekly,
in the mid-1970s, based on its half-week tolerance cycle, and the mention of
“I commit my weekly crime”, “on Sundays I elude the Eyes”.

o Even if we find that Peart used LSD weekly, how can we assert that he
intended the lyrics to refer to the phenomena of the LSD state of cognition?
The scientific and intuitive evidence is in the lyrics, for those who have
truly studied the perceptual and experiential phenomena of the mystic altered
state.

Allusions to LSD phenomena in this song include “vanished time”, and “I fire
up the willing engine”, “wind in my hair/head, shifting and drifting”,
“adrenaline surge”, “sunlight on chrome, blur of the landscape, every nerve
aware” (compare “every nerve is torn apart” in Cygnus X-1), “I spin around…
shrieking”, “Straining the limits of machine and man” (compare Body Electric’s
“guidance systems breakdown”).

Don’t believe what Peart says, whether he says he did or didn’t do lots of
LSD, or did or did not intend the lyrics to allude to LSD perceptions and
experiences. The proof is in your own comparison of your own knowledge of LSD
perceptions and experiences to your own careful reading of the phrases in the
lyrics.

Stereotyped pop-culture assumptions about psychedelics won’t do us any good
when investigating how Rush alludes to LSD phenomena. They are not an ordinary
band and they do not reference LSD phenomena in the ordinary way of other
bands.

When we list the distinctive LSD phenomena and search for matching phrases in
Rush lyrics, there are more matches per album than with any other band,
especially in Fly by Night through Grace Under Pressure, with Caress of Steel
being the most thoroughly acid-devoted album and a complete and sufficient
expression of acid-mystic philosophy.

The issue is not whether Rush is superficially psychedelic-style music. The
issue is, is there an intensely high frequency of the lyrical phrases matching
with the distinctive common altered-state phenomena, so that reason forces us
to conclude that it has been reasonably proven that the lyrics are intended to
allude to the phenomena of acid mysticism.

Very little is understood today about the mystic altered state. Acid rock is
the authentic mystery religion of our time.

____________________

>I remember seeing a mid 70’s concert video where Alex stuck out his tongue to

the camera and he had a hit of blotter on it.

Was this a bootleg video, or an official video?

Thanks
— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience
http://www.egodeath.com/acidlyrics.htm — Rush lyrics that allude to
phenomena of the mystic altered state

I posted the below material to various newsgroups last night (with the
exception of the Yahoo Groups footer at the bottom). This posting serves to
gather the evidence of my previous work on the egodeath theory, and takes
advantage of the newsgroup archival ability which was recently brought to life
again by the new Google Groups Web-based newsgroup participation and archiving
tool. Some well-designed URLs at my site, pointing to the newsgroups via the
Google Groups web site, should enable me to participate more conveniently in
the newsgroups, wherever I am — comparable to this wonderful Yahoo Groups
environment.

_________________

The Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence

This core theory [attached below, in the newsgroup version of this posting]
has been stable for several years, though it may be time to rewrite and update
this compact introduction to the core concepts. My recent work has focused on
mapping the mystery-religions and Hellenistic myths onto this core theory.

In October 1985, I started investigating self-control, transcendent knowledge,
ego death and ego transcendence, and the mystic state of cognition. In
December 1987 and January 1988, the core theory crystallized, especially
block-universe determinism. 1988-2001 I worked on expressing the core theory,
catching up in the relevant scholarly fields, and a general interpretation of
mystery-religion allegories in terms of self-control cybernetics.

I started the cybtrans.com (Cybernetic Transcendence) domain name in March
1995, which I retain as a legacy domain name. I am glad to see that
http://groups.google.com has made available the newsgroup archives since 1995.
You can find my previous newsgroup postings by searching on “cybtrans”,
“cybernetic theory of ego transcendence” (best), or “cybermonk”.

By continuing to make newsgroup postings available from 1995, the start of the
Web era, Google Groups has renewed my confidence in the WELL philosophy that
“posting is publishing”.

It is ironic that I have so infrequently posted about this theory in the
newsgroups, although I have been a regular post’er in alt.guitar.amps.
However, the few postings about this theory (in this public newsgroups) do
provide definite evidence that this core theory has been complete, and
available through searching, since the beginning of the Web era.

Two things happened almost simultaneously: Google.com took over the web-based
interface to the newsgroups (Google Groups) from Deja.com (formerly
Dejanews.com), and Yahoo took over the combined email/Web-based
discussion-list interface from egroups.com. Google Groups provides an
excellent newsgroup interface, and Yahoo Groups provides an excellent listserv
interface.

These two interfaces are still new and are just beginning to become
established. Yahoo Groups provides such a perfect interface, I almost
abandoned the newsgroups, though in principle I am a major advocate of the
potential of the newsgroups. Participating in, and searching in the newsgroups
was essential for constructing my popular Amptone.com site about guitar gear,
but my efforts to use the newsgroups for philosophy have been more halting
(due to my own choice of involvements, not due to the potential of the
newsgroups).

With Google Groups and Yahoo Groups now providing a better interface to the
newgroups and email discussion lists, I hope to coordinate use of the two,
with Yahoo Groups leading the way with the most ideal interface. (I should
consider alt.philosophy.egodeath.) I have mixed feelings about living solely
in cyberspace — on the Net. I take to it so much more naturally than to
writing printed articles and books.

I like the idea of not making a printed version of the theory available. Maybe
that is just silly techno-geekdom, the starry-eyed view of the Net. After the
tech stock crash, how can we still treat the Net as possessing some
TechGnostic mystic? I treasure books, but when it comes to writing, I love
posting to the Net. The Google Groups and Yahoo Groups interfaces are great
and practical because I can post from any Web terminal.

I posted parts of the theory on the WELL.com bulletin board, in the Mondo 2000
forum, around 1989-1994.

This core theory has resided at the Philosophy Introduction page of the
Principia Cybernetica website http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PHILOSI.html since
January 2, 1997, as http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Annotations/PHILOSI.0.html (and
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Annotations/PHILOSI.0.0.html ) by Mark Hofmann (pen
name).

— Michael Hoffman ( Cybermonk ) June 23, 2001
http://www.egodeath.com — designing the most convenient path to an intense
peak experience of control-cancellation and religious self-control seizure

http://www.cybtrans.com — legacy domain


Seaspray blurs my vision
The waves roll by so fast
Save my ship of freedom
I’m lashed, helpless, to the mast


============================================

Introduction to the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence

Copyright 1997, Michael Hoffman


[in the newsgroup version of this posting, placed here was a copy of the text
that is in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath/message/1 ]
…


— Michael Hoffman ( Cybermonk )
http://www.egodeath.com — designing the most convenient path to an intense
peak experience of control-cancellation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath — discussion group/listserv


http://www.cybtrans.com — legacy domain

============================================

Memory banks unloading
Bytes break into bits
Unit One’s in trouble and it’s scared out of its wits

Guidance systems break down
A struggle to exist — to resist
A pulse of dying power in a clenching plastic fist


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

>What are entheogens?

Entheogens are plants or chemicals that produce religious experience.


From Jonathan Ott’s _The Angels’ Dictionary_, in the volume _The Age of
Entheogens_:

Entheogen — Plant Sacraments or shamanic inebriants evoking religious Ecstasy
or vision; commonly used in the archaic world in Divination for shamanic
healing, and in Holy Communion, for example during the Initiation to the
Eleusinian Mysteries or the Vedic Soma sacrifice. Literally: becoming divine
within. (1979 Ruck, Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 11:145. In Greek the word
entheos means literally ‘god (theos) within’… In combination with the Greek
root -gen, which denotes the action of ‘becoming,’ this word results in the
term that we are proposing: entheogen. 1980 Wasson: The Wondrous Mushroom,
xiv … )


In my cognitive theory of the ego-death and mystic altered state experiences,
I characterize the primary action of entheogens as cognitive-association
loosening agents. Thus in the native language of my theory I speak of
‘cognitive-loosening agents’ rather than ‘entheogens’. Entheogenic
experiences are a subset of the experiences that happen due to cognitive
loosening. Cognitive loosening agents facilitate deep re-indexing of
mental-construct association matrixes.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

http://www.egodeath.com/determinismbooks.htm

The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control – John Martin Fischer, 1996
Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility – John Martin
Fischer, Mark Ravizza, 1998
Metaphilosophy and Free Will – Richard Double, 1996
God, Foreknowledge, and Freedom – John Martin Fischer (ed.), 1992
Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy – Susanne Bobzien, 1999
The Non-reality of Free Will – Richard Double, 1991
The Implications of Determinism – Roy Weatherford, 1991
Agency and Integrality: Philosophical Themes in the Ancient Discussions of
Determinism and Responsibility – Michael White, 1985
Free Will and Illusion – Saul Smilansky, 2000
Living Without Free Will – Derk Pereboom, 2001
Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will – Timothy O’Connor, 2000
_______________

Tenseless Time

Time’s Arrow & Archimedes’ Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time – Huw
Price, 1997
The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics – Julian Barbour, 2000
Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem –
David Ray Griffin, 199x
_______________


I am also working on a general format for book entries at my site. This
should be an excellent approach and an appropriate way to use Web-based
presentation for a more convenient approach to scholarly investigation. I
definitely need to add book-cover pictures.

A nicely presented overview of the available books can effectively reveal the
direction of trends, such as books covering the block universe, pre-existing
future, inevitability, ancient concepts of Fatedness, entheogen approaches,
and entheogenic origin of Western religions.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

This posting covers Calvinism, the block universe vs. the quantum multiverse,
and the thinking skills that are required for achieving rational transcendent
thinking.


sekhmet:

>> I do not need to have an opinion either way. It is Michael who has

expressed his own opinion, but the problem is he rambles and waffles
so much you have to work hard to pin down what he is really saying.


Michael:
I suspect that is a dishonest statement, you do not really think I ramble or
waffle but are just evading my arguments because you are unable to refute
them. You’re just bluffing and making up excuses to evade my points. There
is waffling and self-contradiction, but it’s not mine. My position is rich
with the requisite distinctions, which I consistently maintain — this is
different than the true waffling I’ve seen by those who claim to reject any
and all possible types of ego death. In trying to hold such an untenable
position, they end up waffling, when they are trapped when I try to pin them
down.


sekhmet:

>> As Coraxo also proved in a number of posts, Michael’s system is a secular

form of Calvinism. Calvinism is also not gnostic as it is opposed to
gnosticism.

George:

>I have never seen Coraxo prove anything. All he does is make a statement and

then claim he proved it.

>I did read and understand the block universe theory. It is not Calvinism.

Calvinism is a form of Christianity where God predetermines everything.

>The block universe is simply another name for the current scientific theory

of infinite universes


Michael:
No, the infinite universes idea is the “quantum multiverse”, which has
multiple futures. The “block universe” as established in Einstein’s
relativity has a single, closed, even preexisting future.


George:

> and there is nothing Christian about it. The theory is that whatever choice

you make a copies of you in another nearby universes have made different
choices. This continues until all possible choices have been made.


Michael:
The single-future block-universe idea *is* associated with the debate about
God’s foreknowledge and our lack of metaphysical freedom that follows from
God’s foreknowledge. The reason why God’s foreknowledge is considered to kill
our metaphysical freedom, the missing connecting link, is that God’s
foreknowledge implies that there is only a *single* future. The implied
reasoning is:

o Given: God knows whether we are saved or damned.
o Then: God knows what our future is.
o Therefore: We have only a single, definite future.
o Therefore: We cannot change our future.
o Therefore: We have no metaphysical freedom.


George:

>There is more, but what makes Coraxo’s wrong about it being Calvinism is that

in the block universe God doesn’t make choices either.


Michael:
If you define God like Mithras as residing outside the block universe, then
God does make choices that are not subject to the rules of the prison-like
block universe. The initiate exits the block universe with and as Mithras —
or Jesus/God. The gnostics talk of two gods, and it falls on you to keep
track of which is which. During initiation, we experience ourselves as being
in a frozen-future block universe, and this is a life-or-death problem for the
accustomed ego, and we pray to a god outside the block universe, and postulate
and hope there is such a rescuer god, and we (like Gnostics) postulate and
hope that we can change our identity to somehow step outside the block
universe.

But it is highly hypothetical, wishful, and (in a perfectly vague sense)
“transcendent” to assert that we can actually step outside the block universe.
Is it *really* possible for the initiate to step outside the block universe,
with and as the cosmos-transcending savior-god? That is an issue for debate.


George:

>Coraxo’s mistake is in thinking all theories of predestination are Calvinism.

That is simply not true. For example predestination is also a part of some
variations the big bang theory which do not involve a god at all.


Michael:
I do not ramble or waffle. My statements have always been clear, explicit,
simple as possible, and straightforward. We have to distinguish between the
apparent or practical way we “choose”, and the determined nature of choosing.
There are multiple “possible” futures as far as we know, but there is only a
single actual future.

Such accusers would say the Gnostics waffle too, because the Gnostics talk
about two Gods, one good and one bad. This is simply a matter of keeping
track of multiple definitions of a term, so don’t call it “waffling”. Others
in the conversation have truly waffled and do not retain distinctions between
different usages of terms. The orthodox criticized the Gnostics for saying
orthodox creeds but meaning something different by their words.

The block universe and multiple universes are two different ideas. The block
universe posits a single, closed, preset, even preexisting future. Multiple
universes considers the future open in the sense of forever branching.
Perhaps each branch preexists – the book The End of Time seems to take this
position. But the block universe, which I endorse, is much simpler and a much
smaller universe; in it, from the point of view of our knowledge, there are
many virtually possible futures, but only one actually possible future: the
one that already exists and has always eternally existed.

I endorse simplicity as a principle for choosing between metaphysical systems,
and I maintain that the single-future, non-branching block universe is simpler
than the branching-future multiverse. I endorse the block universe and reject
the multiverse. The latest development in quantum mechanics seems to be that
the Copenhagenists are endorsing the multiverse.

The multiverse is the kind of psychologically happy and ego-empowering
response the Copenhagenists would pick when the directionality of time is
challenged as it currently is. People now are saying that time is an
illusion. The Copenhagenists respond by saying that there are multiple
futures — this empowers ego, they feel, and protects and preserves our
metaphysical freedom. I expect the anti-Copenhagenists (such as myself) to
instead retain the early 20th-century idea of a single-future block universe.

In the block universe model (as used by Einstein, for example), posits a
single, closed future. This is always how I have defined the term. I only
*mentioned* the idea of multiple universes to reject it. I don’t think you
could find a statement of mine endorsing multiple universes. I would not have
said such a thing because I have never liked the idea — it is too
complicated. I seek the simplest system, which has a single, pre-existing
future.

Neither do I constantly shift my terminology in different discussion groups.
Sometimes I discuss various usages of terms, but I keep track of these usages
and differentiate them, and my own preferred usage is clear. Higher thinking
must be able to acknowledge and differentiate between multiple usages and keep
track of them.

Some people are not at that advanced level — they are unable to understand
the whole idea of multiple usages; they are unable to differentiate and keep
track of multiple connotations of terms and pick one while rejecting the
others. To them, I may appear to be waffling when I say that the future is
“open” in sense A but not in sense B, or when I say the ego “dies” in sense A
but not in sense B.

I have always clearly communicated which sense I endorse and which I reject.
Others are not good at keeping track of such senses of meaning, so they claim
I “waffle”. What can I do but give up on such an audience that is unable to
admit that there are multiple meanings of terms, and is unable — or
unwilling — to keep track of which meaning I endorse and which I reject?

Copenhagenists conflate the (positive) collapse of our knowledge about a
particle’s wave function with a change in the particle itself — however, I
don’t think this is only due to a lack of philosophical skill; they are
deliberately conflating the two senses of “wave function collapse” in order to
promote a non-scientific agenda: stealing power for the mind, saying that
consciousness collapses the wave function.

That is what the Copenhagenists say — it’s not what I say. I cannot trust
people in these groups to read what I write. They are more interested in
distorting it than understanding it. I mention the idea of multiple
universes, then people claim I endorsed it. If people can’t keep track of
that, there is no hope for communication.

I *hate* the idea of multiple universes and never would have endorsed it,
never would have done anything but mention the idea in order to reject it.

Read the Intro — hopefully it is definitive on my position (though it’s time
to update it).
http://www.egodeath.com/intro.htm

Apparently I will have to invent a better way to summarize my position, but
much of my postings *are* clear summarizations.

The predestination aspect of Calvinism is correct according to my ego-death
theory. But the retaining of heaven and hell by Calvinism doesn’t make
sense — Calvinism rejects metaphysical freedom, thus they must reject true
moral responsibility, thus they sometimes admit that their heaven and hell is
not about reward and punishment, but is only for “the glory of God”. That’s
the big mystery of Calvinism: what is the purpose of heaven and hell, if moral
responsible agency is an illusion?

Now I have mentioned Calvinism and agreed with part of it, and disagreed with
another part of it. The fumbling thinkers online will say that I waffled on
Calvinism, or that I am a Calvinist. Please try to keep track of my clear
points. Do I waffle in the paragraph above? Are my points so unclear as
people evidently find them? That paragraph is typical of the writing in my
postings. If you can’t keep track of my position on Calvinism in the
paragraph above, because I accept one part and reject another, then there is
no hope for communication in these discussion groups.

My thinking is simple as possible and I know exactly what I think, and which
aspects of conventional ideas I accept and which aspects I reject. Ask me a
question, and I can summarize my exact position. My core theory has been
complete for several years. My final assessment is that people in the
discussion groups are overwhelmed by the new combination of ideas and the new
distinctions of terminology I introduce.

I suppose it is not a complete waste of time to attempt to keep people clear
on what notions I assert and what notions I reject. Even though it is the
fault of the readers that they cannot keep track of the distinctions I clearly
make, I still should ideally take responsibility for being even clearer, but
there is not much room for improvement in my clarity or simplicity of ideas —
my writing already is very clear and simple, despite the chronic problems
inherent in semantics, where the same terms are involved in multiple competing
networks of connotation.

Another good example of my clear statements but the fuzzy reading by others is
when I said that the ego-death theory could be used for good or evil. What
more neutral, clear, simple, and practical statement could be made? But
despite quoting me correctly, some readers then said I endorsed its use for
evil, while other readers said my words didn’t mean that.

Those who saw it know what I mean and they cannot deny that I am being grossly
misread as though some readers are blind to even the clearest statements.
With such willful and/or fumble-fingered misinterpretation, there is no hope
for communication with such an audience. Those who saw it have to admit my
complaints and frustration are warranted.

Time and again I have put a clear and simple position statement forward, only
to see it read every which random way. I do my part of writing as clearly as
possible; people *have* to do a better job of reading clearly, and have to
take responsibility for their confusion as readers. I truly do not believe
that my writing lacks clarity — I think it is a shining example of clarity.

Fortunately, I do sense that people are interested in gaining a better
understanding of my position on relevant ideas such as Calvinism and the
quantum-mechanics multiverse. As long as people are interested in gaining a
clearer understanding, there is yet hope for communication. One thing I can
do, which is time-consuming but very effective, is to break up postings into
short postings with an accurate Subject line. Or, at least, add subheadings
within the postings.


I have lost interest in the question of whether Jesus existed. I read the
Christ myth books — it is established plenty well enough that we have no more
basis for believing in the historical Jesus than for believing in the gods of
Olympus. It is unprofitable to pursue the “question” of Jesus’ existence much
further.

Greater profit is to be had in examining the *meaning* of seeing and
identifying with the spiritual Christ — what does it mean to experience
Christ, and how does that compare with the other mystery-religions? This is
the question deserving our full attention, the question which will profit us.
Experiencing Christ and experiencing the single-future block universe are
closely related, as in the Mithraic experience of being born forth from the
rock cosmos.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

The Non-reality of Free Will – Richard Double, 1991, $60

This book, like most determinism books is fairly conventional and
unimaginative — it seems to lack awareness of the new theory of
tenseless time and the B series of time slices (Nathan Oaklander)
without a time-journeying continuant agent.

Such theorists just read each other incestuously and haven’t
encountered time face-to-face in the loosecog state.

They all unconsciously stay within the same conception of time, and
debate within that shared background assumption. But time is the
crux of the matter and to break out of the ruts of thinking about
unfreedom, we must develop a different model of time.

Richard Double talks of hierarchical compatiblism but it’s not what I
expected. I expected him to adopt my view of metaphysical
determinism or prexisting-/fixed-future Fatedness at the hidden
level, with virtual, apparent, as-if, effective, practical freedom at
the experiential level, and a great divide in between these two
levels.

But instead, he makes some other type of hierarchical distinction.
The Non-Reality of Free Will looks like an OK book, not one I’d pay
$60 for.

I do like the way he tries to frame free will as a just plain hazy,
incoherent, ill-defined, *vague* concept. This fits with my strategy
of seeking simplicity, seeking the intense ego-death experience,
seeking whatever metaphysical model causes the accustomed sense of
metaphysical freedom to cancel itself out.

Determinism is always defined to include predictionism and
reductionism, which I reject as irrelevancies and distractions that
can only lessen the credibility of determinism, in basically the same
way Double warns about in long-shot free-will theories that are
married to supposed quantum indeterminacy and thus cast into doubt.

Such conventional determinism, practically based on reductionism and
predictionism, is really every bit as doubtful and ridiculous as free
will theories that are based on quantum indeterminacy.


__________________

Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy – Susanne Bobzien, 1999

This book is more thoroughly innovative; that is, different than the
blind, circular determinism debates that keep recycling the same ruts
of thinking. It is a remarkable work of scholarship, which I think
of in a negative sense: why do we think scholarship is grand and
respectable, when it really should be seen as a symptom of
disgraceful scrap-recovery from among the burnt ruins of the ancient
libraries.

“Scholarship” is a euphemism for “post-destruction scrap recovery”.

The single most potent idea I got from this book so far is that the
main subject of philosophical debate from around 125 BCE to 250 CE
was Stoic universal causal determinism.

o What did the ancient leading thinkers consider to be the most
valuable experience? Mystery-religion initiation.

o What was the hottest topic of philosophical debate during that
same era? Stoic universal causal determinism.

o What year was ground zero, the real year zero at the center of the
mystery-religions? I’d say 70 CE (fall of the Jerusalem temple) or
125 CE. 70 is the safest, most definite year. Not 30 — that was
only assigned as ground zero a couple hundred years later. The true
peak of mystery-religion syncretism was more like 150 CE.

o What mystery religion came immediately before Christianity, in
Paul’s region of Tarsus? Mithraism.

o What was Mithraism about? Transcending astrological determinism.

o What was the main product of Tarsus? Scholarship and philosophy.

o What was the dominant philosophy in Tarsus? Stoic philosophy.

o What was the main, most prominent aspect of Stoic philosophy?
Universal causal determinism/inevitability/fate.


In summary, what two most-important features stand out, again and
again, in the thinking world during the peak of the ancient
Hellenistic religions?
o Mystery-religions.
o Universal causal determinism.

Could it be that these two are intimately related? Mystery-religion
experience is triggered by entheogens which reveal an encounter with
universal causal determinism as a kind of death of the self, yet the
person lives past the experience, having in some way conquered
death.

David Ulansey’s theory of Mithraism — immediate local precursor to
Christianity — points the way. In the mystery initiation, the
initiate encounters and battles with universal causal determinism,
dies in a way and is victorious in a way, and lives through and
somehow transcends universal causal determinism.

My ego-death theory is not simply derived from Ulansey’s, but as I
expected, the pieces are falling into place as required to confirm my
core theory that the intense ego-death experience is essentially
concerned with some kind of self-control seizure upon mentally
grasping and encountering a static-time, fixed-future world-model.

I’m tempted to call this a visionary encounter with “determinism”,
but that term has been ruined by people who insist on wedding it, for
no good reason, with the irrelevant long-shot assumptions of
prediction-ability and reductionism playing out over time, within
time.

— Michael Hoffman

Michael,

I still don’t understand how you reconcile determinism with
unpredictability. I suppose that quantum uncertainty could have
something to do with this, but still, if ego-death allows for access to
out-of-time-ness (for lack of a better word), why doesn’t it also allow
precognition? Is there some part of our ego which remains in tact and
keeps us blind to that part of time which appears to us as the future?
What is going on here?
Thanks,
Mike

PS – I noticed that we have something else in common – I too am a guitar
amp tone freq, cherish my Mesa/Boogie Mk IV with Mullard 12 AX7’s,
Sylvania 6L6’s. Must be some causal link here!

Michael Hoffman wrote:

>
>
> The Non-reality of Free Will – Richard Double, 1991, $60
>
> This book, like most determinism books is fairly conventional and
> unimaginative — it seems to lack awareness of the new theory of
> tenseless time and the B series of time slices (Nathan Oaklander)
> without a time-journeying continuant agent.
>
> Such theorists just read each other incestuously and haven’t
> encountered time face-to-face in the loosecog state.
>
> They all unconsciously stay within the same conception of time, and
> debate within that shared background assumption. But time is the
> crux of the matter and to break out of the ruts of thinking about
> unfreedom, we must develop a different model of time.
>

Physically, the first thing you should see when you see the mythic symbol of a
snake is something that is not even shown in the picture: a drop of venom.
The snake lives in a nest underground. Plants come up from underground. The
snake bites the psychoactive/medicinal/poisonous plants.

We must here consider these to be a single category, not three separate
categories. Magical plants are poisonous plants are psychoactive plants are
entheogenic plants are medicinal plants. The bee is also a representative of
plants.

Our main connotation of plants these days may be agriculture for food, but the
ancients likely held the psychoactive/medicinal properties to be most
characteristic of the concept of “plants”. Also they may have made much less
of a radical barrier between the idea of plants as food and plants as
medicine/psychoactives.

The snake bites the psychoactive/medicinal/poisonous plants, or magical
plants, injecting its venom into them; and the snake eats these plants,
absorbing their psychoactive and medicinal properties.

The snake is reborn, by shedding its skin. The snake can bite itself,
injecting itself with its venom and killing itself yet being reborn, as we are
reborn as mystery-religion initiates or Dionysian drinkers of the extremely
inebriating wine-mixtures.

The Amanita is like a bright red fruit growing up from a nest-like hole in the
ground, in the sacred grove, which is a demarcated space around the host
tree — especially Birch or Pine.

The snake is able to offer the soil-marked Amanita to Eve because the snake is
the guardian and owner of plants, certainly including mushrooms. The snake
emerges from its nest like the mushroom, and crawls along the ground.

You must not ingest these poisonous psychoactive plants, or you will die —
you will in fact die from the Amanita, in a mythic/mystic death, and you will
surely not die: you will be reborn again. You will suffer the death penalty
for eating this forbidden plant, and you will retain life, having broken
through the taboo.

We can expect the earliest forms of Western religion to be based on genuine,
actual religious experiencing through psychoactive and entheogenic plants.
Use of entheogens may possibly have tapered off during the late
mystery-religion era, shortly before the rise-to-power of State Christianity.
Or entheogens may have continually saturated the Hellenistic world until State
Christianity violently forced them underground — it’s too early to say;
research has barely begun on the use of entheogens in the Hellenistic world.

We can be certain that the term “wine” should be globally be replaced in all
the books by the phrase “wine-based psychoactive mixture”. The only real
question is, what psychoactive plants were commonly included in such mixtures?
It’s certain the common pharmacopoeia included opium and cannabis. Mushrooms
are likely, and probably water extract of an ergot.

The best book to start with on this subject is Dan Russell’s Shamanism and
Drug Propaganda. A Brief History of Drugs is also helpful. The greatest
masterpiece about the Amanita in Christianity is Clark Heinrich’s book Strange
Fruit. A compact and dense book that is also essential and establishes the
Christmas/Shaman/Amanita connection is James Arthur’s book Mushrooms and
Mankind.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

>I want to review the core concepts of your ego-death theory. What is the URL

for your article “Introduction to the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence”?

Best paragraph breaks:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath/message/1

Official URL at my site:
http://www.egodeath.com/intro.htm

Oldest copy with a continuously working URL, at Principia Cybernetica:
January 2, 1997, as http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Annotations/PHILOSI.0.html
(continued at
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Annotations/PHILOSI.0.0.html ) by Mark Hofmann (pen
name).

Oldest copy in the newsgroups (January 1, 1997):
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&safe=off&ic=1&th=3846ddcdd5ffec37,1&seek
m=5adau4%24pea%40nntp1.best.com#p

____________

Oldest detailed newsgroup thread of mine about the Cybernetic Theory of Ego
Death found in the Google Newsgroup archives (December 27, 1995):
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&safe=off&ic=1&th=546b8aef6a30e17f,19&see
km=4bqjve%2414c%40shellx.best.com#p
The email address shown there still works. I don’t know why the thread has no
URL pointing to my domain, which I’ve owned since March 27, 1995.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

>Which cognitive-loosening agents are the best for contemplating the core

ego-death concepts most conveniently, efficiently, quickly, fully, and
skillfully?

There are pro’s and con’s regarding the response curve (duration) of
super-short, short, medium, and long-duration triggers for loose cognition.
The short-duration materials can be redosed to more closely control the
intensity level, rapidity of increase, and rapidity of decline. However, it
is a distraction to have to stop philosophical reflection in order to redose.

o Smoked DMT or Salvia last only a few minutes, so have an almost
transient-spike curve.

o 4-Acetoxy DiPT aka 4-HO-DiPT lasts an hour. The usable visionary peak
window will only be a fraction of that duration, say 5 or 10 minutes.

o Psilocybin lasts around 4 hours. The usable visionary peak window will be
a fraction, such as half an hour.

o LSD or 2CT7 lasts around 12 hours, with a visionary peak window beginning
surprisingly quickly, such as 2 1/2 hours (unless literally swallowed after a
large meal) and lasting an hour.

It is possible to redose the 12-hour materials at perhaps 90 minute intervals
in order to maintain a flat extended visionary plateau, but with such a
long-lasting curve, it is impractical to do this except during a reserved
weekend.

To skirt close to a dangerously high peak, a short-lasting trigger would work
best — but would require so much attention to timing and redosing. A
short-lasting material also enables elevating to the ideal working level of
cognitive looseness at 6 pm, maintaining the level, then rapidly descending to
toward tight-cognition at 11 pm, returning to baseline (the default
tight-binding state) at midnight.

Extremely short-duration materials enable a series of spikish blasts that can
be fit into an arbitrarily short time, such as lunch hour — but it’s hard to
remain in a practical, flat working window, due to the constant distraction of
redosing. Despite the disadvantages of long curves (slow rise, very slow
descent/poor braking), the 12-hour materials do have a certain convenience
that enables focusing entirely on philosophical investigation with no
distracting redosing.

Duration charts including DMT, LSD, and mushrooms
http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/psychoactives_effects.shtml
Think in terms of chaining these curves to control the level. The LSD and
2C-B charts emphasize a series of peaks rather than a single peak-window
model.

The most efficient loose-cognition state for philosophy work is “moderately
strong”. Extreme looseness only backfires and results in a mostly wasted
session. Ego-death does not require extreme cognitive loosening — rather, it
needs moderate to fairly strong loosening, combined with skillful and focused
reflection on the relevant concepts of time, self-control seizure, cross-time
control, and the steering of the will. The concepts are listed reasonably
well in the Intro article. http://www.egodeath.com/intro.htm


Some Mithraic rituals involved burying the initiate up to the neck. This
would enable intense cognitive loosening with little chance of physical harm.
This may connect with the embedding of Attis in the trunk of a pine tree, in
addition to enacting the idea of experiencing oneself as fastened to the
cross, chained to the rock, being a Dionysian mask on a marble pillar, or
otherwise experiencing one’s embeddedness (as a quasi-controller-agent) in the
eternal block-universe. After being released, after tight cognitive binding
returns, one could say that they conquered their embeddedness in the block
universe and were lifted out of the predetermined cosmos in which
inevitability reigns.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

Greetings,

What an interesting form this should turn out to be! I’m excited that you’ve decided to create this discussion list Michael. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to find out about it…but I’m here now.

Just a brief intro: My name is andy and my hobby is studying spiritual plants in religious history…Christianity mostly. The whole Christian trip really fascinates me, not just the “Eucharist Conspiracy” but how the story of the sun is hidden in the story of the son, yet it’s right in your face all the time; or Moses and his entheogen – Manna. I’m a big fan of Acharya S, James Arthur, Clark Heinrich, Terence McKenna, Alan Watts, Rick Strassman, and of course Michael Hoffman.

What a cool group this is going to be, I’m glad that I got here early enough to watch it evolve…and maybe do a little evolving mySelf.

For more info on me click here:
http://www.bluehoney.org/Webmaster.htm

(-
andy

http://www.bluehoney.org


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Andy wrote:

>I’m excited that you’ve decided to create this discussion list … I

can’t believe it’s taken me this long to find out about it…

Michael:
This discussion group was founded June 10th, 2001. It’s now June
27th, 2001, 17 days later. The discussion group is now ossified,
fossilized, and petrified.


Andy:

> my hobby is studying spiritual plants in religious history…

Christianity mostly.

Michael:
I like characterizing leading-edge research in the ultimate
profundity as a mere “hobby”. My fundamentalist Protestant
grandparents are involved in church services three times a week — it
is their hobby.


Andy:

>The whole Christian trip really fascinates me, not just

the “Eucharist Conspiracy” but how the story of the sun is hidden in
the story of the son, yet it’s right in your face all the time; or
Moses and his entheogen – Manna.

Michael:
Dan Merkur’s new book is due out soon, on Judeo-Christian entheogen
use – a “companion book” for Mystery of Manna. I pre-ordered it
through bn.com, not Amazon, because Amazon has consistently been
unable to follow through on forthcoming or out of print books. b-n
has roots in brick-and-mortar stores, so may be better at working
with distributors and used-book networks.

Amazon warned me that Arthur Drews’ book Legend of Saint Peter
(Mithraic foundation of Vatican) will be delayed at least 4-6 weeks
in addition to the 2 weeks I’ve been waiting. b-n claims to be able
to get the book to me much faster.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — direct access to experiential knowledge of
The Heavy

Andy:

>I’m a big fan of Acharya S [The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest

Story Ever Sold], Alan Watts [The Way of Zen, Beyond Theology, This
Is It], [and entheogen historical researchers].


Michael:
I’m glad some people are seriously interested in the history of
mystery-religions and Watts’ approach to religion, in addition to
entheogens. I shouldn’t be surprised: you are not merely interested
in current use and 20th-century history of entheogens, but rather,
the complete history of entheogens, which goes much deeper than mere
20th century popcult history.

The 20th century history is essentially a-historical research. Such
lack of true historical awareness has caused harm. Prohibition,
which is persecution-for-profit, depends on keeping people ignorant
about the important role of entheogens throughout human history and
culture.

The 60s researchers made a pretty major mistake in emphasizing these
materials as a modern innovation, and also in promoting the false
assumption that Christianity is truly opposed to entheogen use.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — direct access to experiential knowledge of
The Heavy

Andy:

> What a cool group this is going to be, I’m glad that I got here

early enough to watch it evolve…and maybe do a little evolving
mySelf.


Michael:
Like the Reformed theologians, I steer by the unpopular, the
counterintuitive, and the unthinkable. There is the popular broad
path of spirituality, with all the too-familiar assumptions, dogmas,
and preconceptions about what religious experience should be about.

I hesitate to label my alternative approach “evolving”, but I do
think you’ll hear a novel, unpopular system of ideas. The others
provide instructions on mere conventional light and bliss. I set the
controls for the heart (or liver/will) of self-control seizure.

People may flee in horror, fear, and loathing, but at least they
can’t say this is just more of the same dull newage. I am past
trying to be sensationalist, and trendily rad — Extreme Religion! —
but there is something inherently radical and contrarian in building
a theory on instability, loss of control, and the short-circuiting of
personal control-power.

The excess-heaviness formula worked for Heavy Psych/ Heavy Rock. Pop
spirituality sweetness and light underestimates the draw of The
Heavy, which often speaks to us more deeply than the shallow,
superficially positive thinking of Spirituality Lite.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — direct access to experiential knowledge of
The Heavy

This is some source material for scholarly research of the authentic
mystery-religion verses of our time. Note the themes of fate,
entrapment, dread, elevation, unmet wish for descending, mix of
disaster and sublime elevation, exploration and searching within the
mind.


You elevate yourself girl
You’re burning your house down [? unintelligible]
When time has left you
You’re on your own
You try but you can’t come down
You keep real cool, yeah you know what’s good [? unintelligible]
You feel a new sensation
You cry inside, you get high inside
You’ve reached your elevation

This time it’s shown
Yeah, your mind is blown
You’re captured by your fear
You can’t escape, yeah you’ve sealed your fate
Reality can’t be near

You’ll get your kicks, and now you are fixed
Your whole world is sublime
Your explanation, your new sensation
You’ve reached your elevation

Yeah, you wanna know
What goes on
What goes on, in your mind
You wanna know
But you can’t find it
You can’t find
What you’re searching for
You can’t return, no
Yes, you wanna know
What goes on
What goes on, in your mind


Artist: The Society
Title: High & Mighty
August 1967, Waco, Texas


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — direct access to experiential knowledge of
The Heavy