Egodeath Yahoo Group – Digest 123: 2012-12-31

Stone rock marble is true banqueting bench / throne of the king. King is turned to stone by seeing snake medusa beauty note he sits on a throne always understand throne is already stone and understood already king by definition is understood to have been as sacred king, been turned to stone by priest of the god during initiation all civilized kings proper were psych/enth initiate.

Mh orig discovery/theory dev, Dec 31 2012

The panther is the ultimate, perfect, superior hunter, more so than other felines. Hunters knew this; they would carry a panther sculpture to help their own hunt. Panthers don’t usually hunt humans, but when they do, they are perfect hunters. They swim, run, climb trees, they do everything, they are perfect hunters. You couldn’t design a better hunter. Panthers are seen positively; respected, admired, and generally they spare humans.

Actaeon is a hunter. He hunted around in his mind and saw the goddess Artemis/Diana unclothed bathing in the fountain in the back of his mind at the source of his thoughts. She punished him by turning him into a branching-antlered deer and his own hunting dogs tore him to pieces.

Branching is possibility branching illusion in the Possibilism model of spacetime, as opposed to the Eternalism model of spacetime, which only has virtual, stubbed branching, with only spacetime worms being real; hydras are branching snakes thus are illusory.

The mental worldmodel dis-integrates in the loose cognitive state. Mental constructs dis-integrate and awareness lifts up and out of them, unbinding from mental constructs.

Panthers were admired in Rome and were in the arena. Everything in the arena, as in culture, was seen in terms of myth, as throughout the culture, which was all based deliberately around psychedelics-induced loose-cognitive dynamics; personal noncontrol, or mental model transformation about personal control power; and block-universe fatedness.

The panther in “medieval” myth (though see Edwin Johnson’s chronology), lives in a cave (the cosmic/underground/mind cave) and its mouth breathes an attractive scent which attracts a creature except the dragon (heimarmene fatedness snake, spacetime worldline perceived with elevated, un-bound awareness) into the cave, where the panther kills the creature. The mind is attracted to the control-vortex capability and potential, in which psychotic-like (Maenad initiates) loss-of-control is tangled interpenetrating with transcendent knowledge.

Transcendent knowledge, tangled with psychotomimetic threat of loss of control along with transcending all desire and fear, is the pearl of great price held in the claw of the dragon or fire-breathing panther. Fire is the attractive desire for and pursuit of transcendent knowledge about personal control, time, and personal agent identity.

Thus I have successfully deciphered and described and explained why per Benny Shanon on Ayahuasca in the Americas has the 3 most common cognitive phenomenology mytheme metaphors and analogy visions of ‘snake’, ‘panther’, and ‘palace’ as well as ‘snake’ and ‘king’ being the two most common world myths including Greek myth, and why ‘panther’ is a major attribute of Dionysus.

This morning I confirmed that not only is the panther seen as a hunter, as I previously posted about, but the ultimate ideal hunter, and found that the panther breathes not fire but an attractive scent pulling creatures into its cave, and the panther lives in a cave.


The careless, in-passing statement, never-justified assertion, that the Scientific Method is about predictions and confirming them, and that’s what makes something Scientific, proves that my Theory is scientifically proven and verified. I predicted that myth always and only makes sense by using my interpretive key that myth means Cybernetics/Heimarmene/Dissociation. Time and again the moment I learn of a myth, it instantly fits into my core theory and periphery mapping theory of deciphering religious mythic mystic metaphor analogies. No serious book on Philosophy of Science ever asserts and explains that Prediction and Verification is what makes for Science. All sloppy, in-passing mentions, in poorly written books, always assert that Prediction and Verification through Observation is what makes for Science.

A noxiously widespread myth of the 20th Century, found in all inferior sloppy uncritical books, is that Philosophers of Science assert that Prediction and Verification is what makes for Science. But no actual Philosopher of Science asserts that Prediction and Verification through Observation is what makes for Science. Based on the junk notion that Prediction and Verification is what makes for Science, it is proven that the Egodeath theory is Science and is scientifically verified as scientific fact. As Einstein said about observation and data: If the data doesn’t agree with the theory, then too bad for the data. The theory is correct.

Feyerabend says that in reality, as a matter of historical fact, the real Scientific Method is “anything goes”. Kuhn’s mystical mysterious “paradigm shift” like then-mysterious religious conversion, left itself open to that irrationalist attack Feyerabend used. Paul Thagard’s Conceptual Revolutions offers a rational, discernable basis for understanding the sophisticated logic of the conversion of a scientist from an old theory to the new. I point out that often there is no “old theory”, just a heap of wild speculation. Another book argues that the new theory is not proved, yet, when a scientist converts, as being better or having greater explanatory power.

As I posted the other day, a scientist converts to the new theory when the scientist reckons, per Thagard, that the new theory is a better investment, like having greater stock appreciation potential. A leading scientist doesn’t wait until the new stock value exceeds the old. He beats the crowd: he invests in the new theory *before* its value is commonly recognized. Clearly since 1988 (core theory) and 2001 (myth deciphering), the Egodeath theory has all potential to offer greater explanatory power than the “old theory” given that there is no old theory, just a heap of shot-in-the-dark scattered fragments.

This is all original theory-development work based on my research and idea-development since 1985. I figured out how all these ideas fit together and are the most important idea-combination, forming the Egodeath theory including my Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence which came together in 1988, in my draft article as displayed in my undergrad graduation portrait photographs in Fall 1988 including some initial forays into deciphering myth in terms of self-control cybernetics, pre-existing single future block-universe determinism (Eternalism), and psychedelics-induced loose cognitive binding of mental constructs.

Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com, January 1, 2013
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

The Egodeath Yahoo group is a Weblog sent out by Michael Hoffman,
covering the cybernetic theory of ego death and ego transcendence,
including:

o Block-universe determinism/Fatedness, the closed
and preexisting future, tenseless time, free will as illusory, the
holographic universe, and predestination and Reformed theology.

o Cognitive science, mental construct processing, mental models,
ontological idealism, contemporary metaphysics of the continuant
self, cybernetic self-control, personal control agency, moral agency,
and self-government.

o Zen satori, short-path enlightenment, and Alan Watts;
transpersonal psychology, Ken Wilber, and integral theory.

o Entheogens and psychedelic drugs, mystery religions, mythic
metaphor and allegorical encoding, the mystic altered state, mystic
and religious experiencing, visionary states, religious rapture, and
Acid Rock mysticism.

o Loss of control, self-control seizure, cognitive instability, and
psychosis and schizophrenia.


— Michael Hoffman
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath
http://www.egodeath.com

All fields lead to the Egodeath theory, unavoidably; the broad consensus picture of what we think we know is destined for collapse soon.

No-free-will is surprisingly extremely popular, now and in the history of Philosophy and Theology. Even though gleefully anti-rational freewillist QM is also popular. Not even Neurotheology has a clear view of the only theory that matters, the minimal, laser-focused Egodeath theory; the Cybernetic theory of ego transcendence.

The Egodeath theory includes but *combines*, and *only* combines, the popular niche topic of psychedelics and the recent new topic of entheogen history, the popular niche topic of anti-atheist religious experiencing capability, the popular niche topic of Eternalism and spacetime worms, and the topic of personal control, and the popular topic of myth, and the very new suddenly popular-breakthrough topic of ahistoricity of Jesus — now everyone is making an aside “I believe Jesus existed, but …” which they never would’ve said as recently as a couple years ago. Mad Rights is also trending upwards (insanity is barely discernable as being distinct from god consciousness).

As surely as the psychotomimetic mind’s thinking is being bent by the Black Blade of the Cult of Blue Oysters inward toward forcing one to think “I cannot resist the inevitable realization of being forced to go out of control”, we are headed toward transcendent disaster in collective scholarship: every thought we write certainly brings us in the labyrinth forced further into the black hole of loss of control of our writing: we find ourselves forced to write nothing but the words God puts into our pen and those words are the writing on the wall The King’s Kingdom Is Unavoidably Destined for Collapse; the historical Jesus is certainly doomed and cannot be saved; throw all the QM trash writing at the wall you desire, still, no-free-will trumps all version of QM in every one of your manyworlds.

There is no escape from your destiny, writers: myth all inscribes on our minds self-control seizure, the spacetime worm-filled marble block universe we are frozen fused to in our Salvia haze of clarity, the worm ate the branching bush that shaded me from the deathly light of the sun. The Philosophy of Time spells doom for the Modern egoic sovereign agent.

Ken Wilber’s empty framework cell for religious experiencing is empty and waiting for something more than vague Advaita Oneness: ready to plug in Ramesh Balsekar’s shock-the-newage no-free-will point in Advaita, or better, the full expansion of Balsekar which is Hoffman’s Egodeath theory — you can plug me in right where Wilber Scotch-taped as an afterthought “Also: drugs” onto his key diagram, several books after Ken Wilber’s first book, which opens by censoring Nitrous Oxide from William James statement “On Nitrous Oxide, it occurred to me that…” All roads lead to Rome. In loosecog, all thoughts lead to “I am inevitably destined unavoidably to realize transcendent loss of control.”

In scholarship now, all writings lead clearer and clearer to the Egodeath theory it cannot be avoided, there’s no way now to slow down our thoughts, to put on the brakes, there is no handle to slow this train down, no way to jump off the tracks on this path along the vine yard with no place to turn to the left or to the right as we halt at the angel of death gatekeeper whirling the sword of fire through which we are forced to pass to gain thinking that will no longer collapse in a heap of rubble in five minutes from now. I can see the future and the king of this world of dim muddy scholarship is about to see the writing on the wall and be turned to stone his power dead unless he turns and repents and re-thinks what do myth and entheogens and the Philosophy of Time and ahistoricity of Jesus all have in common?

How can we avoid like John Pilch’s heroic effort of avoidance, writing about the compelling conjoining forming an unavoidable topic we must explicitly discuss, of where today’s Shamanism revolution in religious books comes together with the Entheogen theory of religion and myth (C. Ruck & M. Hoffman January 2013) and our new clear model of spacetime worms in the Eternalist Philosophy of Time? The Prohibition Press dictates that it is forbidden to write about such combinations. Let us write instead the usual old story before Bart Ehrman wrecked everything by shining the spotlight on the question Did Jesus Exist? We want to go back to safety of egoic stable delusion, not look ahead at the beautiful compelling elegant combination that is the Egodeath theory and subcombinations of its topics.

Who can save us from this inevitable collapse of everything we thought we knew about Jesus, our own history, Wikipedia fallen, all we thought we knew, our reality is all founded on dust, mud, our very calendar year numbers all a question mark. What really happened in the formation of New Testament Christianity, and when? It is all a big now big question mark and nothing at Wikipedia can be trusted, as it is all founded on the printing press controlled by the Catholic forgers leading to the book of category errors, the Encyclopedia Britannica. Woe is us scholars. Even Robert Anton Wilson cannot save our sorry mountain of massive category errors from collapsing into rubble. Who can be the savior of Christianity? of Christian reality, the Christian reality tunnel that is our Modern world?

You would think that the huge popularity of gleefully bizarre anti-rational interpretations of QM is violently opposed to determinism aka no-free-will. I have often pointed out that a main reason for rejecting Newtonian spacetime and even Special Relativity, demonizing those and running into the bosom of QM, is to hide in the Last Preserve of free will. But strangely, to my surprise, the more that I defended my unpopular underdog view, of no-free-will, the more I find that almost everyone asserts no-free-will. Sure, I’m glad to get some confirmation of my Theory, but it is shocking how extremely popular no-free-will is, at the same time as everybody’s at the bosom of QM to try to evade rationality and defend their stupid freewill position.

How can no-free-will be so popular, at the same time as freewillist QM is so popular? Are these two, opposed camps of writers?

I loathe Robert Anton Wilson’s gleeful sensationalist hyping of deliberately anti-rational, gleefully anti-rational interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, the very worst sort of anti-rationalist gleefulness, like how Leonard Peikoff describes the mindset of the surrealism culture of Weimar Germany in his book The Ominous Parallels [between 20th Century U.S. and 1930s Weimar culture in Germany]. Niels Bohr’s Copenhagenism interpretation of QM reeks of gleeful sensationalist anti-rationalism: a bad theory adopted for bad, psychological reasons. James T. Cushing criticized the popularity of the Copenhagen interpretation against David Bohm’s neglected hidden variables determinism interpretation. Two distinct analysis: what’s the case scientifically (ontology) vs. what are the motives psychologically.

Some Philosophy of Science pays attention to “sociology” of science but I think there lacks books on the *psychology* of science: why, psychologically, are people drawn to one scientific theory or interpretation, versus another? Ken Wilber edited and compiled a couple books about the importance of distinguishing between religious views and scientific views: religion is compatible with science, religion is not demonstrated or definitively supported by science.

My views are a little different. To grasp religious truth or transcendent mental coherence, requires scientific thinking: orderly, analytical, precise, careful, incorporating loosecog observation (per Wilber), non-metaphor dependent, direct, explicit. You have to think like an android, programmed by Paul Thagard (Conceptual Revolutions), to straighten out ideas in Transcendent Knowledge.

People are inconsistent. They rabidly for thrills gleefully assert no-free-will: have you heard about the new neuroscience experiment? It disproves free will!! And they rabidly for thrills assert gleefully anti-rational QM because they like it because it supports freewill. Here’s how the huge popularity of no-free-will fits coherently with the huge popularity of freewill QM: people are irrational and incoherent. News flash!

The egoic mental model is incoherent compared to the transcendent mental model. But lately I am more inclined to focus on innate state-specific mental structures (Wilber) and state-specific cognitive phenomenology, as clearly asserted in my main article. Suppose a new experiment proves that Relativity is false or that the Copenhagenist interpretation is false or the QM is false. Suddenly (Wilber points out), all the pop trash junk that’s been written showing how QM supports free will, religion, and the American way, we must burn in a bonfire as false, wrong, misleading irrational mental pollution. Let not my Egodeath theory be ever subject to such disproof:

A given fact: in tightcog, the egoic personal control system and mental worldmodel innately arises, thrives, and coheres.
A given fact: in loosecog, the transcendent personal control system and mental worldmodel innately arises, thrives, and coheres.
Fact: these given facts are regardless of any theories of neuroscience, QM, or scientific findings about spacetime. It is an unassailable given observational datum that tightcog gives the egoic mental model which uses the Possibilism model of time (“tree”, flowing water, autonomous sovereign king) *and* that loosecog gives the transcendent mental model which uses the Eternalism model of time (“snake”, marble block, puppet king dancing on God’s string).

It is only misleading to introduce the fields of Neuroscience and Relativity and QM in support of or against these given facts which live and exist and breathe vitally within the distinct realm of cognitive phenomenology. Down with neuroscience, down with spacetime science, up with Cognitive Phenomenology, which is *the* realm on which my breakthrough Theory of Egodeath and the Cybernetic theory of ego transcendence resides. Neither is the realm in which Egodeath theory resides, the realm of Trendy Information Science, Trendy Cybercult, Trendy post-Modern-ism, trendy Neuroscience or Neurotheology.

To Hell with Neurotheology; the only useful thing is Cognitive Phenomenology, as I formulated in the scope and intent of my Mental Construct Processing view in April 1987 after my Spring 1986 General Semantics course, and as Benny Shanon’s scope (but better scoped than his) in his 2002 book The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience.

The problem with the fields of QM, Neurotheology, Philosophy of Time, Transpersonal Psychology, Neurotheology, Atheism, Ahistoricity, Free Will and Determinism, and Entheogens and Psychedelics, and Myth, and Mysticism, and Psychology of Religion, and Theories of Religion, is that they are packed with irrelevant crap and have the pieces of import scattered fragmented buried hidden overgrown obscured. Relevant transcendent truth is more visible in Rock mysticism lyrics than in today’s bad, badly written, irrelevancy-filled fields.

If you know what to look for — IF! — you can find the Egodeath theory everywhere in every book in every field; per delusions of reference, the Egodeath theory is obvious everywhere you look; if you think about Ivory soap, clearly that implies the Egodeath theory: purifying thinking, therefore you perceive the psychotic threat of loss of control, wonderful peace and light advice “transcend desire and fear” to which all psychotics nod assent: wisdom indeed, let me prove it to you, to myself, as the voice of truth about control power in my mind is commanding me to do. Happy advice: transcend all desire and fear. Insanely great advice. Ivory soap is mentioned and advocated in the book of Revelation, advocated by the highest angel of God; God commands that you buy Ivory soap.

There is no escape: as you crawl desperate pleading “No, no, I must not think that Thought, that psychotic thought: Truth Is Loss of Control, but every thing every topic I think about forces my mind, there is no escape, junk tele-vision shows too are all about triggering my Realization that Truth Is Loss Of Control; escape the forced thought that kills, that throws me into unavoidable psychosis, by turning on the radio, but I am not imagining it I swear he distinctly sang “invisible railways” where the liner notes say “invisible airwaves” in Permanent Waves. It is as if the songs on the popular Rock station are broadcasting messages meant for me to be the One in the Modern world who makes a brand new discovery of timeless religious revelation.

“If you want to learn to fly you’d better learn how to kneel, on your knees boy.”

Read Kant: there it is right there, Kant says “Michael Hoffman’s Egodeath theory is coherent and profound and compelling.” Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Ken Wilber, there is no escape they are all talking about Michael Hoffman’s Egodeath theory all thoughts force bend thinking inwards towards the underworld fountain in the back of the cave of the mind lured drawn by tractor beam of the Death Star attracted to the smell you cannot reason your way away from smelling the attractive stimulating smell coming from behind your mask of personal control thinking.

Every book ever written is a veiled pointer, recommendation, blurb, a footnote to the Egodeath theory as surely as Freke and Gandy’s book The Jesus Mysteries sells Elaine Pagels’ book The Gnostic Gospels (1979), written after The Gnostic Paul (1975), written after The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis (1973). (I thought of Ivory soap randomly, above; it was not an artificial setup example.) In Antiquity, all aspects of culture were explicitly presented like we’d now call Delusions of Reference: all items were deliberately framed, vigorously as much as possible, to point to psychedelics ego death Cybernetics/Heimarmene/Dissociation metaphor, as much as Alex Grey says art should forcibly point to transcendent experiencing.

In the sorry, forgetful, single-state, tight-cog-only Modern era, still, all books point to Transcendent Knowledge per the Egodeath theory — but quite poorly and ineffectively, buried in noise and junk and confusion, fragmented, half-buried, in ruins in the Kali Yuga.

Out of that mud, dirty diamonds hardly visible, sprang fully formed 25 years ago January 11, 1988, a new dispensation of the Holy Spirit of Truth, in the computer center, on an Apple Mac, in Microsoft Word, as a siren sounded I thought “Is this siren coming for me because I am to go psychomimetic?” and the crystalline block universe idea relative to personal noncontrol fell together with all my best ideas from the potent restart of my thinking with room scrambling control beyond control in April 1987 when my father was dying and it was do or die for saving my semester but I was in April 1987 onto hourly breakthroughs how can I justify wasting my time on classwork?

My friend, an angel, walked by the glass window of the computer lab, and I asked him his major, Mechanical Engineering, minutes after I knew I had the massive breakthrough of the Block Universe theory of the nature of ego transcendence. Now that pretty holy computer lab is replaced by a big new computer building but I still want a plaque at that window where I received the block universe and talked to the angel who helped me on Shakedown Street.

My work isn’t about the far away area of the mind like Shanon; the Egodeath theory is about Western university Engineering deadheads in today’s Psychedelic 80s, in 1985-1989 going back to the beginning of the world in 1964 with the song Help! by John Lennon, as well as 1981 Diary of a Madman (by Bob Daisley’s band Blizzard of Ozz) and 1975 Caress of Steel on your neck by the guillotine and Ride the Lightning 1985 by Metallica — though actually I didn’t decipher Acid Rock mysticism lyrics until around 1988 (?) when I started to recognize the meaning of Bob Daisley’s lyrics, with the open door in my cottage and a lightning storm going on while the vinyl rotated.

I wasn’t able to make it fit together: the psychedelics revelation about the real nature of ego transcendence against Wilber and the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, versus religious history, of which I knew very little in the late 1980s. Neither was I at all literate or informed about writings about psychedelics. My mind wasn’t away far away in the South world of the Americas, nor far away in the history of Psychedelics; my thinking and theorizing was based right here in the 1980s in Western University Engineering student life, not antipodes of the mind, but the Shakedown Street of the current culture.

The ultimate product of the Psychedelic 80s, my Egodeath theory, was squarely a product untainted and uninformed, illiterate, except for the detail of having read (besides skimming Minsky’s AI book The Society of Mind) Wilber’s early books, Watts’ Way of Zen, and skimming Trungpa. And I grew up in the Bible-only Church of Christ (grandparents), and in Jewish temple (mother), and newage and human potential (father). As much as possible, the Egodeath theory arose from General Semantics, Self Help human potential, and the College of Engineering, and Rock culture, here and now, in this place and this era, not travelling away to the geographical antipodes nor time-travelling somewhere in time away from here.

The Egodeath theory is a product of here, now, the 20th Century, *our own* culture, not inherited, not borrowed. We stand on our own, we truly Modern religionists of the Egodeath theory which is *our* own original product, informed by Wilber’s early books and Watts’ presentation of Zen and by early 20th Century General Semantics. I am the source of the Egodeath theory and my life is as pure as can be purely a product of today’s Now culture, our own native culture, indigenous Engineering college life.

— Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com, January 1, 2013
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

The following conditions provide the greatest safety and the least need to fear the loss of control in the Holy psychedelic entheogenic psychotomimetic cognitive state of the Maenads of Dionysiac possession. Maidens, or rather, mature perfected epoptes:

o Society has studied the Egodeath theory and discussed all aspects of transcending personal control power for 50 years.

o Using 4-HO-DiPT or even shorter-lasting psychedelics.

o Have Thorazine CPZ Chlorpromazine available (see “I Wanna Be Sedated” in the scriptures of the muses)

o Everyone knows how to be a trip guide.

o Psychedelic mixed wine is culturally integrated like in Athens and the Roman Empire, such as recreational religious burial banqueting clubs.

When these conditions are met, Cognitive Scientists have the least need to fear the near-future onset of unavoidable destined psychotomimetic loss of control over their intention; the least fear that the mind is fated to be about to be coerced into intending violating safety, sanity, control, and a viable future. Thus I guarantee that there is no risk of intending to violate your sanity/safety/future/control, unless you think slightly incorrectly about unchained thinking, and existential transcendence of fear and desire, in which case I guarantee you are fated to violate your sanity/safety/control/future. If the angel sings praise to God on the throne slightly ahead of Time or late, or slightly out of pitch, the angel is instantly cast into the river of fire.

So you see it is perfectly safe here in the psychotomimetic Dionysian Maenad world of this research laboratory, if all safety measures are perfectly in place and you never make any mistakes. Thus there is no longer any reason to fear, as long as you bow and practice trusting your unchained mind that’s controlled by hidden, mysterious Controller X and machine-like fatedness. Cognitive Scientists of 2050, you almost have to be as reverent and careful and prayerful as when riding a bicycle downtown in traffic, which I cannot recommend to friends and family. People are run over and die all the time that way; witness the white bicycles and flowers around town. Religion without danger is like computers that are perfectly secure: if a computer exists, it’s insecure.

Where there is religion, there is danger and threat of loss of control, even from merely the fact of having loose cognition and transcending the mind-constraining safety egoic control system, dull-witted boring stability, that separates one from God or transcendent vivid consciousness, preventing dancing with the control vortex surfing in and out of the event horizon where hooking into the loss of control vortex can be felt and played with like a climax toying.

On the other hand, when your thinking is fully God-shaped, God-impressed, or God-formed, through 50 years of studying the Egodeath theory and control, the danger is routinized-away, like the banqueters are expected to hold their shallow “cup” (plate) without spilling it. You are expected by that advanced level and culture, to keep your balance, yet Dionysus is accompanied by the old man so inebriated he has to be helped onto his donkey. The danger is safe.

Religious freedom is danger freedom — deal with it and be an American adult man. Or else admit that real religion is illegal, you are false governors self-appointed to preside over a lie, and religious freedom is an empty sham, phony, pretense, counterfeit.

— Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com, January 1, 2013
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

Also some commentary on free will which follows the spirit of radio.

I saw Rush on the Permanent Waves tour. As we were about to leave, I had an extra ticket, and went across the street to the garage band drummer’s house (a classmate) and asked if he wanted to go *now*, so he came with us.

The Spirit of Radio
Neil Peart/Rush
excerpts with fresh new analysis January 1, 2013 by Michael Hoffman, for scholarly analysis
http://amazon.com/o/asin/B000001ESN

A companion unobtrusive [God]
Plays the song that’s so elusive [hidden message, magic double meanings]
And the magic music makes your morning mood.

Off on your way, hit the open road, [your future is open with possibility branching up to you to control and create your future]
There is magic at your fingers [tremors of loosecog energy]

Invisible airwaves/railways crackle with life
Bright antenna bristle with the energy [bristling loosecog energy tremors]
Emotional feedback on timeless wavelength [feedback of fear and sense of meaningfulness lies that way, feeling of frozen time Eternalism block universe]
Bearing a gift beyond price, almost free [transcendent knowledge that freewill power is only virtual power]

All this machinery making modern music [fatedness machinery of your hidden worldline rail spacetime worm tunnel of dubious trustworthiness uncaring yet you have to trust it with your life and control of your mental intention it is your umbilical cord feeding you your near-future intentions]
Can still be open-hearted. [despite seeing that you fatally depend on trusting a non-personal fatedness machine to feed you your intentions, you can assume heart, compassion, mercy, life]
Not so coldly charted, it’s really just a question [fatedness, the machine computer that produces your intentions, is not uncaring or harsh, but what matters is you be honest about your dependent situation]
Of your honesty, yeah, your honesty [sung “you honestly”]

One likes to believe in the freedom of music, [we value freewill power, we like to believe in such freedom]
But glittering prizes and endless compromises [the brilliant pearl of great price, transcendent vision, and seeing the flaws of the personal freedom premise]
Shatter the illusion of integrity. [shatters the illusion of egoic personal control power that steers through possibility branching]

For the words of the profits were written on the studio wall, [the words of the prophets are “the egoic king is doomed soon for his kingdom kingship power to collapse unless he changes his thinking”]
Concert hall
And echoes with the sounds of salesmen. [can be heard as “sailsmen”, alluding echoing 1975’s No One at the Bridge and piloting the space ship to the black hole. ego death is the disappearance of cybernetic steersmanship]


Crossover the interpretation mode between these songs on the albums Caress of Steel through Power Windows; keep all the analyses in mind across songs, just as all myth refers to Cybernetics/Heimarmene/Dissociation. It is most effective to present commentary on the entire album together.


The next song on the album is Freewill. It is about free will. The lyrics go:

Life is nothing left to chance
A host of holy horrors to direct our aimless dance

A planet of playthings
We dance on the strings
Of powers we cannot conceive/perceive

The gods are malign
Blame is better to give than receive [don’t say I’m a moral control agent; I’m merely a puppet of God, blame and praise him only]

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still haven’t/have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill/cure [own your choice you are forced to make between wrathfully intending violating the egoic control system, versus mercifully preserving your future/control/sanity/safety]

They were dealt a losing hand
The cards were stacked against them

All preordained
A prisoner in chains
A victim of venomous fate [heimarmene snake]

Kicked in the face
You can’t/can pray for a place
In heaven’s unearthly estate

Lyric commentary and analysis by Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com, January 1, 2013

Off on your way, hit the open road
vs.
Invisible railways crackle with life

= tree vs. snake
= Possibilism vs. Eternalism
= branching future vs. single preexisting future
= egoic control thinking vs. transcendent control thinking

Lyric commentary and analysis by Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com, January 1, 2013

A companion unobtrusive
Plays the song that’s so elusive

One’s normally hidden transpersonal self and worldline, in loosecog, unveils briefly an elusive glimpse, perceiving and revealing and showing to un-bound awareness the altered-state mental worldmodel of self, time, and control: the perspective that is elusive and is guarded by the threatening gatekeeper angel of death, dragon, of the threat of loss of control which is interwoven with valuable deeply meaningful and attractive transcendent knowledge about self, time, and control — transcendent thinking, Transcendent Knowledge, the Egodeath theory, the transcendent conceptual system, the transcendent worldmodel including the necessary-to-develop transcendent control system like learning to ride a bicycle balancing not crashing.

To play the song, to see the blinding vision of the source of control, without going insane or out of control, the mind must learn transcendent, transpersonal self-control cybernetics. My first draft article in 1988 describes and explains why the truth is elusive and you have to venture carefully, repeatedly, to enter this state disengaging your control system while reconfiguring your control-system on-the-fly.

Lyric commentary and analysis by Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com, January 1, 2013

Song: Black Blade
Album: Cultosaurus Erectus
Artist: Blue Oyster Cult
exegesis by Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com, January 1, 2013 (I’ve commented on these lyrics for many years)

I have this feeling that my luck is none too good [strong sense, that Philosophy can’t explain-away by definitions, of a real, truly problematic personal control situation rapidly approaching in the loose cognitive state induced by psychedelics]
This sword here at my side don’t act the way it should [sword is Acid and its effect on personal control, promising god-mode control of one’s mind but bringing loss of control with that]
Keeps calling me its master, but I feel like its slave
Hauling me faster and faster to an early, early grave [anticipation of ego death, cancellation of personal control power across time]
And it howls! It howls like hell! [feedback: thinking about and feeling the sensation of disengagement of egoic safety control constraints, causes intensification of that feeling, thinking, and perceiving of personal control disengagement and transformation]

I’m told it’s my duty to fight against the law [battle of the mind and of the personal control system, against one’s own mind and personal control system and mental constraints across time]
That wizardry’s my trade/trip and I was born to wade through gore [thought of going dangerously out of control enabled and forced by transpersonal fatedness]
I just want to be a lover, not a red-eyed screaming ghoul
I wish it’d picked another to be its killing tool [mere metaphorical ego death and the threat of intending general loss of control in the course of exercising the revelatory enlightening and mind-transforming dynamics of transcending personal control]

Black Blade, Black Blade
Forged a billion years ago
Black Blade, Black Blade
Killing so its power can grow… grow, grow! [runaway feedback of the thought of loss of control due to increasingly precise thinking about the limits of control; the control vortex]
[“grow” — here’s where printed lyrics fail and you have to bother and trouble yourself to actually listen to the artist and hold the vinyl to your eyes, immersively]

It’s death from the beginning to the end of time [loose cog block universe *experience* (not mere ordinary-state philosophy books) of timelessness, frozen unchanging time embeddedness]
And I’m the cosmic champion and I hold a (holy) mystic sign [forget Campbell — this is the *real* “hero’s journey” told in myth]
And the whole world’s dying and the burden’s mine [hypersolipsism: no one else is in this bubble of perception and mental virtual reality; all egoic control agents are seen as illusory, only frozen spacetime worldlines exist, as people; omni-ego-death of everyone at all times, as seen through the individual mind’s transcendent loosecog perspective]
And the black sword keeps on killing ’til the end of time

Black Blade, Black Blade
Bringing chaos to the world we know [the old control-chaos monster Typhon: my animal control/constraint system is disengaged, my mind is allowed to do anything it can, and my control transcends any guidance system, and to top it off, my thoughts are helplessly injected by the worldline given to me from outside my control domain]
Black Blade, Black Blade
And it’s using me to kill/cure my friends [curing everyone of egoic personal control delusion and mental dys-integrity]

Black Blade, Black Blade
Getting stronger so the world will end [in addition to the ancient mystical sense, the logical prospect in the Modern era of spreading the Egodeath theory/perspective to everyone; the entire deluded society undergoing the Egodeath enlightenment all at once]
Black Blade, Black Blade
Forcing my mind to bend and bend [the control vortex, attracting and coercing thinking to focus on ego death and the threat of loss of control along with giving the greatest value, salvation, purification, regeneration, religious revelation, cancellation of sin, eternal durability/athanatos/eternal life/immortality, and mystical enlightenment]

[vocorder; this is the ego-killing sword of loosecog control revelation talking; the threatening and ego-killing aspect of transpersonal realization:]

I am the Black Blade
Forged a million billion years ago [the worldline of everyone was created outside of time]
My cosmic soul it goes on for eternity [experience of frozen pre-existing future block universe Eternalism — do these dimwitted academics writing books about Time realize you can *experience* Eternalism and that that’s in fact what religious consciousness is all about??]
Carving out destiny [the Creator outside time created all our spacetime worm worldlines that are forced upon us always, whether secretly as in tightcog or revealed as in loosecog]
Bringing in the Lords of Chaos [control chaos]
Bringing up the Beasts of Hades [the old monster: the threat of loss of control, control chaos, fated self-violation forced by the fated snake of your worldline]
Sucking out the souls of heroes [ego death, mind must sacrifice and repudiate its claim to be a moral control agent]
Laying waste to knights and ladies [heroes and god-rap’d psyches]
My master is my slave [personal noncontrol of oneself across time]
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
You poor f*ck*ng humans [on fadeout] [humans in myth would be expressed as “you poor doomed and condemned mortals” shadows of illusion that collapse upon torch light revealing their nature]

Lyric commentary and analysis by Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com, January 1, 2013, based on original theory-development since 1985

To not die from battling against your fated thoughts, think of the fatedness snake on a nonbranching pole, affirm and accept that, to conform your thinking to be immune from conflicting with the loosecog block universe worldline perspective. How technically do we avoid all aspects of danger and fear of red alert rapidly approaching disaster alert, feeling approaching a psychotic control state? Ego death control turmoil panic from sensing the block universe worldline is only one of the set of loosecog experiences. Each loosecog phenomenon brings its own distinct dangers. Every danger has a kind of safety medicine, every toxin a tonic.

I mapped all aspects of all dangers of all cog phenomena with their solutions or rebuttals. Transcending all control thinking has its magic transcendent need for life-affirming bias, undecidable rationally but viable transcendence must choose life. To conform to noncontrol or block universe fatedness, be no one already, die ego death and be invisible to the gatekeeper. Pre-conform to loosecog perspective before entering loosecog. Myth says pray to personal creator of your worldline.

Axiom: there’s a technical nonmyth equivalent, eg transcendent trust and affirmation of conformity, like Job regardless of life content and outcome. Else you dont conform to the altstate world and are seen by gatekeeper archons and thrown out of harmony into the purifying flames of selfstrife and reconfiguration until you submit and trust and conform your thinking to eliminate mismatch between your thinking and the altered state dynamics. This is the deciphering of tradition and rock mysticism, and we are left with lots of discussion and debate: how must and can the Red Alert danger approaching disaster alert occur or be prevented for the Cog Sciist?

Advanced mystics and current modern Rock explorers continue to experience — as one of many cog phen — red alert danger flag: rapidly approaching psychotic control state. The mind continues to have that potential, but many phen’a have many danger aspects and solutions to discuss debate and question: can we map all the danger aspects more fully and tame this dangerous extremely valuable loosecog state? Certainly denying or underrepresenting dangers is bad, not the way. McKenna should have led discussion about his dangers he encountered on mushrooms. I found how to ask many critical questions, after figuring out the entire language of myth and theology that describes loosecog insights, phen, & dangers and solutions historically used and in Rock.

How are loosecog dynamics tho, really? Technically? Analytic Philosophy, Control Systems engineering, Expert System modelling: better-analyze all that myth knows and Egodeath theory which is complete in all the basics. Certainly we should adopt and fully understand the block universe model which is strongly affirmed in myth. is there more in an improvement over that?

Ego death 101 will always be:
number one self-control cybernetics
number two block universe determinism
number three dissociation
number four analogies about those

Those can be detailed and the various dangers of the various cognitive phenomenology of the loose cognitive state be all mapped and mitigated to harness fully and safely the loose cog state for general use and for cognitive science research.

Michael Hoffman Egodeath.com jan 2 2012

Written 2013 not 2012

> To not die from battling against your fated thoughts, think of the fatedness snake on a nonbranching pole,

Or equivalently with different emphases think of and affirm the meaning of the sacrificed king fastened to the tree/pole/cross/stake, by conforming your control- and time-thinking to that, is to stabilize those danger aspects of loosecog.

>affirm and accept that, to conform your thinking to be immune from conflicting with the loosecog block universe worldline perspective. How technically do we avoid all aspects of danger
>
> I mapped all aspects of all dangers of all cog phenomena with their solutions or rebuttals.

My notes files and voice recordings have more, no time but what I post reflects all of my ideas well enough. Ultimately cognitive scientists and androids will mentally picture myth and rock lyrics and technical non-metaphorical theory of Transcendent Knowledge in the Cybernetic Theory of ego transcendence, to account for and relatively neutralize the fully identified dangers of each experiential phenomenon in the loose cognitive state.

— michael hoffman

Here is my Amazon book review. Please indicate as soon as possible whether this review was helpful, if it is visible at Amazon.

Flights of the Soul: Visions, Heavenly Journeys, and Peak Experiences in the Biblical World
John Pilch
http://amazon.com/o/asin/B007M7CUTI
April 2011

5.0 out of 5 stars
Partly covers altered state in Bible & Antiquity, a halting step forward
January 3, 2013
By Michael Hoffman (Egodeath.com)

Pilch barely mentions psychoactive drugs — this is a glaring, elephant-in-the-room omission. He’s free to tiptoe around the subject, self-censoring and evading the topic, but many people want and expect him to write something about the topic of entheogens, given his book title and his coverage of religious alternate states of consciousness, Shamanism, and his citing many books that do have the expected coverage of entheogenic, visionary, psychedelic, psychoactive drug plants and chemicals.

Pilch doesn’t deny that drugs are relevant, he refrains from making any points about them at all; he doesn’t even list the possible hypotheses to answer the Grand Unevadeable Question I pose: To what extent were entheogens used throughout Christian history? Pilch implicitly acts as if any non-drug method is as plausible as drugs for inducing the mystic altered state. He is eager to propose and discuss any technique other than drugs.

I object that yes, there are many ways of accessing altered states, but what matters in the Bible is the intense mystic altered state, and there is only one guaranteed way of inducing the intense mystic altered state on-demand: visionary drug plants and chemicals. For example, per Pilch, blocking your nostril gives you an altered state — but, I argue it does so less reliably and generally less intensely than entheogens.

Just because a technique such as bodily postures can lead to some degree of some kind of altered state, doesn’t mean that that method is a strong candidate as an explanatory theory of the visionary altered state in the Bible, compared to the Maximal Entheogen Theory, which asserts that all of Antiquity was centered around entheogenic mixed wine, and religious literature of Antiquity is mystic fiction written in that cultural context.

Pilch argues rightly that the visionary state was routinely expected in Antiquity. But his theory of why they had access to this so readily, and we don’t, is laughably vague: the Enlightenment brought different “bio-psycho-social” conditions. I object that if people had the same brains as we do, as Pilch rightly asserts, a vastly better, and fully specific explanation is that their culture was based around entheogenic mixed wine, and modern culture isn’t, and that is a sound, plausible explanation, that has a kind of strong evidence. Pilch waffles, on the one hand portraying modern consciousness as lacking an intense visionary state of seeing Jesus, and on the other, asserting that altered states are common.

I point out more discerningly, that weak altered states are common in the modern era thorugh non-drug means, and that the intense visionary mystic altered state has often been accessed in the modern era, on-demand, through psychoactive psychedelic entheogenic drug plants and chemicals, which map to the Bible and Antiquity themes of eating and drinking followed by the intense visionary altered state.

The superior efficacy and reliability of drugs are evaded and avoided, timidly tiptoed around by Pilch; he leaves it to the reader to do his expected work for him, his directly, centrally crucial work, of covering specifically the drug technique. He censors-out the subject of entheogens every time, within his lists of hardly effective or reliable methods of inducing the intense mystic altered state, such as bodily postures, nostril-blocking, controlled breathing, “and many other methods”, as if all the methods are as strong of candiates as entheogens. Based on the book’s title, most of the audience for this book wants and expects him to deliver the goods and cover entheogens. Alas he doesn’t deliver on this, leaving it to the reader to investigate putting these pieces together.

Pilch is halfway between really hopelessly clueless Bible scholars, who lack the concept of altered states, and the Maximal Entheogen Theory of religious myth which I’ve defined, which is that everyone in Antiquity routinely used entheogenic mixed wine, and wrote fiction alluding to mixed-wine experiences, for an audience who routinely used entheogenic mixed wine and psychoactive sacred meals. Pilch uncritically assumes that Jesus and Paul and crew are historical; he doesn’t consider whether the Bible and its characters is 100% fictional.

Pilch’s views go toward that direction of reading the Bible as metaphorical description of the intense mystic altered state, incorporating social-political themes as well, but less consistently than the entheogen-fiction reading of the Bible, and therefore his position such as on ‘etic’ and ’emic’ and ‘derived’ theories, along with his charts of altered-state options, is a little confused and garbled. His views are certainly superior and an advance compared to scholars who lack the concept of altered state visionary description in the Bible, and read “vision of Jesus” as if it’s in the ordinary state of consciousness.

Pilch provides useful building blocks toward a consistent theory of altered states in religious myth, but his work already looks dated, tepid, and too-timid, from the point of view of maximal ahistoricity and nonliteralism combined with the maximal entheogen theory of religion, according to which the main, normal way of accessing the intense mystic altered state in the Bible and historical religion is entheogens, with other methods being merely supplementary.

The problem is, if Pilch is right, then he fails to go far enough to actually cover this subject of altered states in the Bible and its context of Antiquity. He has us go this direction, toward Shamanistic altered states — but only a tiny bit, then come to a jarring halt at the invisible thought-boundary, hitting our heads on the invisible but blatantly, totally obvious, glaring “Do Not Cross!” barrier when it comes to visionary plants. People alienated from the altered state won’t agree with his book, because Pilch’s proposal exits the ordinary state of consciousness, and people interested in the altered state won’t agree with his book, because he withholds too much.

As an ahistoricity and entheogen scholar and theorist, it took me a long time to warm up to this book. It’s hard to overlook and forgive Pilch for censoring-out the obvious highly relevant topic of entheogens from his book that claims to cover the mystic altered state in the Bible and in its context of Antiquity. In the end, Pilch is a good guy, making progress toward the direction of a more intelligent, informed, genre-appropriate mode of thinking. But censoring-out entheogens is a distractingly glaring and unhelpful author’s choice, given the huge un-served demand for such coverage within Pilch’s subject of altered states in religion.

His uncritical assumption that the characters in the New Testament are historical individuals further hinders reading the genre of mystic altered state metaphor in the intended mode; we still are left with a far too literalist perspective as if the food and drink in myth is ordinary food and drink. The result can only be a massive category error, which is exactly the outsider’s perspective, falling headlong into the prepared misleading trap. Pilch’s work is far from the last word; in the end, he provides merely a helpful building block toward an eventual successful explanation of how the ancients routinely accessed on-demand the intense mystic altered state in connection with sacred meals including mixed wine.

Pilch’s books about altered states in the Bible amount to an important, much needed step forward toward sensible explanation and reading the Bible in a mode that’s appropriate for its intended genre. But frustratingly, this book is only a baby step and is disappointingly constrained, for those of his readers who already agree with him that obviously the Bible is written by writers who are thoroughly routinely familiar with accessing the mystic altered state and who write for such audience, with everyone understanding per the social and cultural context Pilch keeps pointing out, that this is not literalist writing, in the Bible, but mystic altered-state metaphors in support of social and political purposes in conjunction with purely mystical enlightenment purposes.

Pilch is too strenuously arguing against the most unimaginative, slow, conservative writers, who only think, genre-inappropriately, in terms of the ordinary state of consciousness and to whom “the Holy Spirit” is an empty phrase; he should put half his attention on pleasing the ahistoricist readers and the entheogen readers, which are large audiences interested in taking Pilch’s direction to a coherent completion.

Pilch ideally should cover entheogens in the Bible and in religious experiencing, because many readers and writers are very interested in entheogens. For the intense mystic altered state in the Bible and its sociocultural context of Antiquity, see The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience; Gnostic Visions: Uncovering the Greatest Secret of the Ancient World; Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy; Entheogens, Myth, and Human Consciousness, and entheogen history books linked to those. I also recommend From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World.

— Michael Hoffman

Before John Pilch, no Christian scholarly books discussed altered states as such — or only a few. I have a perfectly low opinion of the output of the guild of Christian scholars: they don’t know anything that’s important. Pilch points in the right direction, which almost no one else does within the guild of Christian scholars. He is one of few pointing in the right direction. His direction is correct, he needs to go all the way and not only half way. If you are going to cover altered states, then cover altered states — that argument assigns the book 2.5 stars of 5, since the author goes half way towards his implied promise of what the book is going to cover. By that measure, his book is 50% false advertising.

Without Pilch, the glass was all-empty, held by the guild of scholars of early Christianity. With Pilch, the glass is now half-empty. That’s less horrible of a misunderstanding than before; that’s a relative halfway to sanity position Pilch brings, from the land of the outsiders who cannot understand This Parable of Mark 4:12 which stands for all parable, that is, analogies describing the entheogen-induced mystic altered state, of loose mental-construct binding.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+4&version=NIV —

Jesus taught them many things by parables. “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.” The Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. Jesus answered: “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that “They may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and their sins should be forgiven them,” as it says in the Old Testament at Isaiah 6:9,10.” Then Jesus said to them, “Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable? The farmer sows the word. Some people are like seed sown along the path, or on rocky places, or among thorns. Other people are like seed sown on good soil, who hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop a hundred times what was sown.”


A different philosophy of granting praise or recommendations of books in a field is: how does the book compare to other books in that field? Given that most books by the guild of Christian writers are completely literalist mixed with supernaturalism and grounded only in familiarity with the ordinary state of consciousness, when one author wakes up we rightly recognize there is correct activity springing up from among the dead field of completely off-base scholarship.

The review I wrote is not entirely negative; I point out the lack of and need for covering the altered state. That’s what Pilch nominally does and nominally calls for, and he helps by citing books that cover drugs as an altered state method. He is very correct so far as he goes, and is ahead of the field (which isn’t saying much). That I consider mere Pilch to be greatly superior to the field of scholarship about Christian origins is a sign of how very low an opinion I have of the field; of how poor the quality level in the field is. In a community of blind men, the one-eyed man is the visionary king.


Deconstructing: analyzing the logic within a document to disprove the document, to show that the document contains self-contradiction. Poor arguments and assumptions are often filled with self-contradictions. I favor extreme positions as being more likely to be self-consistent. Compromising, middle-of-the-road positions, are usually the most self-contradictory. Wasson’s book SOMA became self-contradictory to the extreme, the more I extracted its logic into the light of day and revealed it as kettle logic. If you hold that the Bible is entirely literally true, that’s a kind of coherence. I hold the Bible is 100% purely fiction, which is a position with low chance of being self-contradictory or vacillating, or prevaricating. Pilch and a reviewer at Amazon both are self-contradictory:

Assertion 1: Altered states are common; there are some 25 kinds. People everywhere have altered states all the time during the modern era.
Assertion 2: The modern era misreads mythic altered state metaphor, because moderns don’t understand and recognize allusions to the altered state, because moderns don’t have the altered state, unlike the alien different culture and bio-psycho-social (Pilch asserts that term) mentality.

Pilch asserts 1 and 2 as a system. So does another reviewer. It’s clearly a system with a contradiction he needs to explain. The truth of the matter is that moderns access 29 generally weak altered states (via drumming, dancing, standing on your head, sneezing, dreaming, alcoholic inebriation (I forgot to ridicule Pilch’s equating of that with ‘altered state’), plus 1 intense altered state: entheogens.

The false, modern, literalist, ordinary-state misreading of the Bible is based on and depends on a fundamental premise: the altered state is out of reach. But surely they know that the U.S. tripped in the 60s on cannabis and lysergic saure di-ethyl-amide, which saved American Christianity from its predicted collapse in the 1960s. This is an impossible contradiction. How can people say that moderns have no religious altered state access, and at the same time, talk about religious experiencing through LSD? People don’t put the fragments together into a coherent system. Say you hate my ahistoricity, or hate my entheogen theory, but you cannot say that my thinking or position is waffling and self-contradictory, vacillating, prevaricating, that I am in denial of my own actual position.

I so deconstructed Schultes’ initial, 1976 edition of a top popular book, Hallucinogenic Plants, of which Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers is the 3rd Edition.
Self-contrad’y entheogen bks Prohib’ist propaganda/taboo
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath/message/5886
I showed that Schultes’ moderate, self-effacing position is a bunch of self-contradictory nonsense and gibberish, like the argumentation I extracted out from the posturing and evasive, prevaricating dancing-about that Wasson does in SOMA. The entheogen-minimizing stance or posture, or the minimal/moderate stance, is incoherent and self-contradictory. The same type of argumentation is woven throughout all such books, and fundamentally does not hold water.

The hardest thing for the Maximal Entheogen Theory is to explain why there are only hundreds of mushrooms in Christian art and not printed books from 1500, “How to use magical plants to experience Christian metaphors.” Why do we only find mushrooms on church doors, but not discussions of eating scrolls in the scriptures (Ezekiel, Revelation) spelled out explicitly as mushrooms? Why do we only find 50 books on drugs in the newage theosophy bookstore, and 50 chapters, per Thomas Roberts, and a Consciousness Studies section of the bookstore, but not usually a Psychoactive Drugs section? Why do pagan books — that we have — from Antiquity only have some discussions of mushrooms and visionary plants, but per Andy Letcher, we don’t have many explicit trip reports labelled as such?

The paradigm provides the answer, as always: the answer must be various types of censoring often occurring: often self-censoring, often external censoring after the writing, self-censoring by tradition. There is a long history of entheogen use and of some explicit writing and depictions, and some conceal-then-reveal, secret-then-not, coverage. Mystics perpetually rediscover the plants, and the allusions to them, and the explicit depictions of the plants, which together forms the ongoing universal tradition of entheogen mystics rediscovering and communicating and selectively propagating the memes to this extent, together with outsiders and with Catholic-type profiteers who understand the Eucharist and give it and the placebo to insiders and outsiders. There is this balance.

It doesn’t go, as Carl “Secret” Ruck would have it, or worse, as McKenna misportrays it, all the way to the extreme: “The big, bad, all-powerful and omnipotent Catholic Church completely eliminated visionary plants for two *thousand*, long years! Everyone was helplessly prevented from any knowledge. That is: I, McKenna, assert that our religion and culture have had never had entheogens.” What a terrible, false, self-defeating, disastrous strategic position! McKenna and that minimal-entheogen assumption has royally screwed and denied the modern potential connection with the great tradition of using visionary plants. Neither has the use of visionary plants become fully out in the open and explicit in our historical mainstream cultures.

With Eliade, we even denied that real Shamans historically used visionary plants — Wasson reveals the baselessness of Eliade there, and then Wasson turns right around and does exactly the same thing, the same fallacy, that he just exposed Eliade doing: Wasson denies — in a vague, evasive, indirect, manipulative way so as to avoid directly raising the question — that our Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian cultural history includes any use of visionary plants. Schultes, same — because these modern Western white guy scholars are all spouting the same false paradigm.

Once you deconstruct one of them, exposing him — as Wasson does easily to Eliade — you are able to similarly expose the whole lot of them as parroting a baseless heap of a non-system, a kettle-logic paradigm that is inherently self-contradictory, waffling, evasive, manipulative, dishonest, indirect, vague, and ready to throw up our arms better to say “We just can’t understand their alien minds, we are too superior” rather than accept the asking of the questions such as:

To what extent were visionary plants used in Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian cultural history?
Surely visionary plants make more sense than “ancients were very impressed by dramatized eating and drinking”.
Surely visionary plants were not used by one or two but many religionists ongoing throughout our own history just like every Other culture we deign to investigate.
Surely it is better to legalize than demonize and prohibit.

If Ruck is addicted to the ‘secret’ premise even though it harms drug legalization, I counter that the correct premise is ‘secret-then-revealed’. Ruck is contradictory: *everyone* used entheogens, all over history, and, entheogen use was secret. You can’t combine those two premises; the system self-deconstructs — unless you have a chapter explaining how those two mutually contradictory premises fit together, which Ruck doesn’t. Modern and minimal entheogen scholars are consistently self-contradictory. Letcher’s book doesn’t even have a defined point or position; it’s a bunch of dismissive posturing without the guts to commit to any defined, specific position.

It’s impossible to refute Letcher’s position, or Schultes’ 1976 argument, or Wasson, because these poseurs, these dancing posturers, evade defining and committing to a specifiable, summarizable position, and when you pin them down and extract by force deducing their implied, implicate position, and drag it into the light of explicit argumentation, it is always plainly self-contradictory. This hidden self-contradictory deconstructive potential is standard practice for the entheogen-minimizing position, unlike for the maximal position.

This malformed thinking is found in various forms in Eliade, Wasson, McKenna, Ruck, Schultes, 1960s writers about the “new discovery” of psychedelics, as a “shortcut” to the “traditional” methods — which were silently left undefined as if those supposed known methods were defined and specified. How the meme and tradition of entheogen use throughout history was sustained and propagated, is slightly complex, not an all-or-nothing story. Entheogens weren’t entirely explicit and public, usually, nor super secret known only to a restricted few groups (as Ruck proves): monks, priests, magicians, midwives, poets, musicians, working girls, tavernkeepers, servant slaves, the aristocracy, fairytale tellers, puppeteers, playwrights, literature writers, and folk peasants, and the secret guild of street sweepers.

The maximal theory doesn’t assert that everyone explicitly discussed and wrote about initiation and the particular plants in mixed wine all the time. There is more than enough evidence, even if there aren’t many explicit passages in our available ancient writings we’ve found yet since we had the brilliant idea of looking for it 10 minutes ago (which is about the length of time Letcher spent doing his homework for his book Shroom).

— Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com, January 4, 2013

Mr. Historical Saint Paul said:

I have had visions and revelations of the Lord, from the Lord.

Lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me *a thorn in the flesh*, *the messenger of Satan* to buffet me. To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.

Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me.

The Lord said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20cor%2012:1-9
____________________

The half-enlightened scholar of Christian origins, John Pilch, writes:

“Paul identified Satan as the one who was responsible for some unknown personal physical problem (2 Cor 12:7).”

Pilch leaps into literalistic, self-sure, uncritical reading mode. By damn, if the scriptures have the word ‘flesh’, then it’s a given fact that Paul was talking about a literally physical bodily problem with his flesh. Never mind that these are entirely fictional writings that are driven my analogy describing the mystic altered state — forget that. This text, about a vision of Christ, says ‘flesh’ therefore we have no reason to doubt that Paul is talking about his literal flesh.

See the characteristic self-contradiction of the chronic outsider’s reading? Pilch asserts that vision talk in the New Testament is after-the-fact description of an altered state experience. But in the same book, Pilch asserts explicitly that the ‘flesh’ passage is about some “personal physical problem”. But using Pilch’s own argument against his assertion, using his text to deconstruct itself, we must consider whether every verse spoken by Paul is every bit as much a description of altered state experiencing, including the word ‘flesh’.

I doubt that “flesh” means literal flesh. People read religious mythic writing far, far too literally. Per a Gnostic reading, “flesh” coherently refers to the part of me and my mind, my thinking, that is within the Heimarmene-ruled block universe, the Fated cosmos. Then the thorn in the flesh is a message about fatedness and personal noncontrol with respect to fatedness.

Satan is the demiurge, the creator god, who created your pre-existing worldline that controls your thinking. Your fixed worldline rail forces you to have thoughts, and is unchangeable by your power of control. As a local personal control agent, control occurs in your mind, but you are absolutely powerless to change or create your near-future worldline. To the extent that you believe the block universe idea, sensation, and perception, in the loose cognitive state, you must believe that you have zero control-power of the type that can fight against your near-future worldline, because that very worldline is by definition and by perception, the very root and source of your control power.

The only rational possible coherent stance toward your near-future worldline which the demiurgic creator of the spacetime block forces upon you, is the stance of submission to the point of you disappearing, vanishing, as that type of control-agent which fancies and imagines, in delusion, that it could possibly win in a battle against its own worldline, as if a shadow might conquer the sun. You have control of a type, but not that type. You control your mind, but you don’t control the worldline rail that forces your mind to think what it is destined to think: you will control your mind strictly the way that the rail forces you to control your mind.

‘Satan’ is a variable pointer. In a two level system, the deluded egoic animal mind is Satan, and awakening to fatedness is angelic. When going beyond and outside fatedness, ‘Satan’ is equated with fatedness and the goal of the game then for the Gnostic Paul is to escape the control of Fatedness (Satan) and be pulled up by the Good God who resides and rules (controls) outside the fate-ruled cosmos that the creator, Satan, created.

I also take issue with Pilch’s phrase, that Paul “identified Satan as the one who was responsible for” the thorn in the flesh. What does Paul say, as a matter of exact historical fact? He doesn’t say “Satan is responsible for the thorn in my flesh.” Paul rather says: “a thorn in the/my flesh, the/a *messenger of Satan*”. Thus Paul actually says, against Pilch:

‘thorn in flesh’ = ‘messenger of Satan’

Mythemes mean Cybernetics, Heimarmene, Dissociation. Per Douglas Hofstadter, apply this Diamond Hammer of Interpretation:

How is ‘thorn in flesh’ analogous to Cybernetics, Heimarmene, Dissociation?

How is ‘messenger of Satan’ analogous to Cybernetics, Heimarmene, Dissociation?

In terms of Cybernetics, Heimarmene, Dissociation, how is ‘thorn is flesh’ analogous to ‘messenger of Satan’?

We know from Gnostic exegesis such as Elaine Pagels: flesh = Fatedness = Satan = creator = body below the head.

What is Satan’s message? What is Hermes’/Mercury’s message? What is the angel’s message? The message in myth is always Cybernetics, Heimarmene, Dissociation:

Paul *pleads* to take away the thorn. In loose cog, the advanced or beyond-advanced loose cog initiate, who is in a position to brag, the person who has the most experience in the world, who is an expert, the leader, still finds that he is subject to suffering the pain, that never is shaken off, never gotten rid of, the bothersome wounding thorn, an alien source of problem and dis-ease, a suffering, a blemish, which is something that prevents bragging, makes it impossible to brag. If only I could permanently get rid of this thing, then I would be able to brag, of what unlimited visions I have.

This thing endangers me, when I have it, I plead with God *again*, find myself in a state of wretched pleading again, desperation again; again Satan the ruler of Fatedness, the creator of my worldline, kills me with this humiliating defect, source of grief, this flaw, this imperfection. The thorn in the flesh that’s a message about fatedness, about subjection to fatedness, is a limiter and keeps the mind in this state of humiliating being forced to plead with the high God to remove this source of limitation, humiliation, this thing that defeats my desire to have unlimited visions.

The thorn in the flesh, message of fatedness, is the ability to take a stance against my own worldline and be thrown into a panic; we remain in a state of being threatened, a state of vulnerability, of fatedness taunting our aspirations to take full control without vulnerability and limitation. The mind remembers its horrific vulnerability to panic and pleading, vulnerable to the threat of a general something like a psychotic loss of control or a fear of being mentally forced to violate one’s intention, the mind is bent or reminded that it can be bent and forced against its own control power; the mind of the personal control agent — even with advanced Transcendent Knowledge — is reminded that it can be threatened with a kind of forced, overpowered loss of control.

If one’s fated worldline contains some fated thoughts the mind doesn’t want, still the mind will be forced to want to violate its wants. This control vortex capability also serves as part of the ladder to heaven, to the loosecog mental model. The mind can establish a good relationship with this message and reminder of the helpless vulnerability to fatedness, the thorn in the flesh that the mind pleads with God to remove.

Maybe we never need fear loss of control or suchlike in the loosecog state. But there is no evidence that the advanced mystic is immune to fear and trembling, threat, vulnerable to being proven again that one is in a state of helpless vulnerability and the mind might be forced by fatedness to think anything, chaos, control violation, and there is nothing by definition the mind could do *if* that is destined. We fear it is destined, some kind of loss of personal control, but we don’t know; we must acknowledge that it is possible in theory for the mind to construct some control-loss or control-violation scenario, that that might be in store, and yet we must trust nevertheless the worldline given us like Job must praise and acknowledge God’s power even while God wrecks his life.

Superior braggarts affirm they are no longer vulnerable to the threat of some control violation — and we rather expect them to experience then that reminder of who is not in charge, of who pushes who around inside the careenium. The tough confident guy is reminded that his power can be forced against him at the whim of the worldline; he too is stuck with the slave-like control device, the thorn in his flesh that can still always terrify and remind him of his situation. We cannot get rid of the vulnerability to being threatened to have our mind turned against itself by the overpowering force of the fatedness worldline and its creator: demiurge, Satan, the flesh, the block universe.

As long as you are a personal control system, you are subject to and vulnerable to being reminded that at the whim of the worldline, your mind could be made to, in a loosecog time-slice, violate its cross-time control intentions. Your mind can always be possessed and reminded of its slavelike vulnerability to be forced to violate intention, by having your intention overridden by the source of your thoughts: your fated worldline. This is not merely reasoned, but is experienced unavoidably, vividly, by threat and panic. The thorn in the flesh is a kind of vulnerability to panic attack in the loosecog state, leading to pleading to a transcendent God outside of fatedness, to remove that panic-attack vulnerability.

The collected data in religion, myth, Rock lyrics, and McKenna’s experience, and other trip reports by people of various cognitive styles, all indicates that we remain subject to loose cog panic attack. We have no evidence and basis on which to expect we will be free of this thorn in our flesh. It is pure wishful speculation that the Cognitive Scientists of the future will be immune to panic attack; they might still say after 50 years of studying my Egodeath theory, “I wanna be sedated”, with CPZ on hand, and using short-lasting psychedelics (loosecog agents; cognitive loosening agents) such as 4-HO-DiPT or other minor pleasant safe casual mild nice psychoactives such as Salvia and DMT or 5-MeO-DMT so that nothing can go worng and lead to panic attack ever again.

No more pleading to God to remove the thorn in our flesh, so, now we can brag about our unlimited visions! I have grabbed the helm and taken over control of my own near-future worldline, my personal control power is that clever and effective, powerful and strong you could say. Look out fatedness, I pluck out the thorn forever, and have done away with Satan the demiurgic Creator of the fate-ruled realm of flesh, now I have become invisible and powerless and escaped into the realm of psyche beyond the sphere of the fixed stars, I am born outside of the rock/marble block. I am a vein in the block of marble who has by miracle wiggled free and now runs around outside the marble block, as Jesus stands on the X-crossed gates of hell with X-positioned snake heads sticking out under the gates.

I have overpowered the creator of fatedness and taken control of my worldline, creating my own future from among the cybernetic possibility branches. That’s what we aspire to, in pleading to be free from the thorn in the flesh. Surely modern cognitive science will remove this vulnerability to panic attack, without the crutch of CPZ, Thorazine: we need instant stupidity on tap.

Thus there will be a purpose still for 20th Century scholarly books about Christian origins: when you become too smart and realize you are subject to control-psychosis or being overpowered by Mithras and terrorized, simply read a book of clueless scholarship about Christian origins, and your mind will become so dulled and confused, the inspirational panic attack will immediately subside like Jesus’ faith instantly calming the waves of the sudden sea-storm.

— Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com, January 4, 2013
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

these are entirely fictional writings that are driven [by] analogy describing the mystic altered state

Limping, wounded hip, limping king, wound in the side: Jacob, ‘the liar’, wrestled with the angel/god/man all night, and would not let the angel go until the angel blessed him. The angel blessed Jacob — Jacob became God-conformant, divine-approved, and the angel gave him the new name, Israel, which we receive, and the angel wounded Jacob’s hip; our hip is wounded when our mind becomes divine-conformant and God-approved.

Hip is leg is that which we depend on to uphold our power. My personal control power is supported by my legs at the hip. A wounding of my hip is a constraint that’s part of enlightenment, a constraint and limitation about my personal control power. To know God or the divine is to understand the limitation of personal control power. I have power to control my thinking in a limited constrained way, a limping and wounded control. Before enlightenment, I was not aware clearly or coherently of this limiting constraint and vulnerability in my personal control power.

When I gained the understanding of my inherent kind of constraint on my personal control power, and my weakness and infirmity and vulnerability, my Achilles’ Heel which supports my power, my mental model of personal control power gains a wound, it takes now into account my vulnerability and weakness and potential control-instability. I received a change of my name from Jacob the Liar, to Israel, and became aware of my Achilles’ Hip, the weak control subject to instability, on which my control power is supported. My control instability is my wound that is my passageway to heaven.

Wounded Jesus is the ladder on which we are carried transported up to heaven.

My Achilles’ Leg vulnerability is my passageway through which I received my new name, Israel, and put away the childish lie, Jacob, the lie of simple autonomous control power where I have simple control power that depends on myself where I stand on my own two feet, but in rock relief carvings, the little self and the slave who serves the mushroom wine stands on his own two feet, while the enlightened banqueter and king sits supported by the marble stone rock banqueting bench or throne of rock or donkey or horse or rides carried on Dionysus’ panther.

Captured slaves are humiliated by being made to walk falsely on their own legs under their own power while in chains in the triumphal victory procession, while the god or god-given ruler is carried, truly, not under their own power, sitting still, unmoving, like a sacred statue.

— Michael Hoffman, January 5, 2013, original research findings based on theory-development since 1985.
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

The following sections (Principles) came into my October 19, 1988 draft, after a September draft. These show that I gained a solid, articulate grasp around that point in time, of the control instability vortex, and the difficulty of piecemeal incrementally strategically reconfiguring and destabilizing the personal control system while having to stay safe and stable. These are a few selected sentences from the sections. The content in this draft is shockingly advanced, conceptually complete with closure, and rock-solid; it was 50 years ahead of its time in 1988 and remains 50 years ahead of its time in 2013.

To preserve the historical accuracy of these condensed excerpts, [square brackets] indicate major insertions of 2013. Otherwise, my 2013 additions, which are not indicated, are single-word. I here remain faithful to the draft but I do condense and clarify the draft wording slightly, where necessary for flow and comprehensibility.

There are also analogies of ‘contamination’ and ‘plague’ and ark of the covenant, which I rediscovered later, having forgotten that I had those ideas in 1988. My university and classmates around that time were involved in the adventures of Indiana Jones. I’m constantly forgetting and rediscovering as though new, ideas within this domain. Forgetting mental connections remains a problem, in gaining transcendent knowledge or knowledge in any field, like you could learn a lot of electric guitar and then have to re-learn and re-practice it. This is one reason why no matter how advanced your knowledge of my Egodeath theory is, all indications are that you remain constitutionally susceptible to pride and humiliation, wrathful reminder of vulnerability to your own control-instability potential.

By October 1988, my draft of the Theory article contained the core of the 2013 ideas, already essentially fully developed and already partly applied to religious myth at that time, during the 3 years since October 1985. By October 1988, the Egodeath theory was born fully formed seemingly at a point in time, like Athena’s birth, because the loosecog phenomena innately fit together into a coherent system, with consistent phenomena noted by sustained intensive thorough investigation.

From my October 19, 1988 draft titled:

Introduction to a New Conceptual System of Ego Transcendence

with a cover page added soon after, showing the article title instead as:

The Theory of Ego Transcendence

I decided: forget the transient stupid, passing, clueless misconception of ego transcendence that the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology happened to have in the passing dark ages of the 1980s. Mine is *the* theory, of all time, not merely “the new” theory of the day relative to 1988. Later, as an improving pendulum-swing, I added the qualifier:

The Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence

which means, as opposed to the 1988 Journal of Transpersonal Psychology’s theory of what ego transcendence is about and amounts to, which is a vague oneness unity consciousness model. My theory, in contrast, is centered around the dynamics and mental model of personal self-control cybernetics. It is better to be specific, ‘Cybernetic’, rather than dated and relevant to a point in time, ‘New’. I realized that my theory won’t be “new” for long; it would be like Einstein titling a 1905 article as “The New Model of Spacetime”, 83 years ago. The title “The Theory of Ego Transcendence” suffers from being vague, like “Transcendent Knowledge”. Now I could clarify further as “The Cybernetics/Eternalism/Loose-Cognition Theory of Ego Transcendence”.
_____________________

From my October 19, 1988 article draft, “Introduction to a New Conceptual System of Ego Transcendence”.

Principle 14: Intention

There are virtually potential futures, but only a single actually potential future. Thus where a mental system has an intention-set, this intention-set was part of the single-possibility actual ground of being, and arose as such, though the style of its arising may have been as an original product of a virtual ego conceived as a First Cause, or homunculus. If the issue is to keep some intended control, the difficulty of keeping control is none other than the difficulty of keeping the intention to keep control. And there is no way to secure the intention to keep control. Upon grasping this, it makes sense to pray to God that the ground of existence is such that the intention to control is to happen.

What I will (regarding my intention) will happen, but I can’t ultimately control what I will will. Control is always limited to its own level. There is always a level above the control level in question, which controls the control; or, which controls my intention.


Principle 15: The control vortex, the timed trap of revelation, and the wall of insanity

The advanced mind which develops transcendent knowledge must walk along the border of genius and insanity. He has the genius to dismantle his sanity, the keys to his own self-annihilation. Of course this situation is indeterminate and unstable, and any egoic functioning would dictate life and death wariness of this realm of forbidden knowledge. This knowledge is like the ark of the covenant. At this point in development of knowledge and intelligence, is it first conceived that too much truth can be detrimental, due to its destabilization attributes. It is very likely many minds have understood or at least grasp this momentarily, but to do so is true ego death, and panic might be inevitable along with the terrified resealing of Pandora’s box or the resealing of the seven seals.

The virtual ego system is both necessary for life and also incompatible with truth, so that momentary correct indexing (comprehension of connected ideas) in the terrible awe of the presence of God is the best that a mind can do, and the rest of the time, the mind must for its very life, use egoic indexing. If a mind continued to grasp transcendent indexing, it would risk going insane. The test of revelation: there are filters of insanity and tabooness and control discomfort which cause any mind flirting with correct revelation to contract again into egoic functioning. The revealing, heroic, Michaelian, Satan-slaying mind must fight the dragon or dragons of egoic indexing and win, somehow overcoming the wall of insanity which protects the group mind’s immersion in epistemological error.

This mind must be able to draw upon any field or approach to special knowledge in order to keep walking the line of insanity/genius until the puzzle is solved, instead of going insane and failing to crystallize and retain understanding and development of it. At first it will seem that correct indexing can only result in total disintegration of egoic functions, good and bad. But the mind must keep the assumption of sufficient integration as it harvests more and more correctly conceived principles.

One safety tool is controlled revelation, in which insights are seen grasped in limited number or depth from within the secure stability of egoic indexing. But this intention cannot be secured, especially in the loose mental functioning binding mode, and there is always the danger of compulsive realization of the disruptive potential, forming the negative recursion potential issue. All gaining of correct transcendent indexing implies (triggers, elicits, carries, or brings up) the problem of negative recursion potential.


Principle 16: Recursive assumption and negative recursion potential

Knowing “you can do whatever you imagine by positive thinking”, or positive recursive assumption, implies its complement. I’m only as stable as my preprogrammed assumption of stability that is fated on my near-future worldline. With advanced analysis in the loose mental functioning binding mode, this assumption is unhinged, and I realize that I could as validly assume I am to go insane. Here stabilization structure becomes vividly logically indeterminate, and a properly functioning egoic conceptual system will likely run for its egoic life, go sub-genius, seeking stupidity, to quit thinking with hyper-clarity, or back out by prayer — unless it realizes that, too, is a product of assumption.

If there’s auto-assumption, there will be auto-recontraction into the egoic conceptual system, producing stability of control due to egoic functioning. Will there be auto-assumption? That is logically indeterminate, if one starts with neutral assumption. So if a temporary genius considers the stability of his sanity with neutral assumptions, he concludes that the continuing presence of his sanity is logically recursively indeterminate. And in such manner is the negative recursion potential unavoidable, by correct neutral ultimate assumptions. A genius finds his actions depend on his original assumptions, which have no logical basis. Thus the sanity of the genius rests on nothing logically solid, only purely arbitrary assumptions which are logically indeterminate.

Truth presents a trans-rationality problem: the truth sets you too free, free to the point of disintegrative arbitrariness. The mind is then out of control, as it has accessed forbidden control. Its greatest hazard is its own potentials, as manifested in alcoholism. The mental functioning is stuck in a problem producing/transcending cybernetic locked loop, in which the egoic control system is perpetually challenging itself. If I should assume pure logical analysis, I could not stop myself from contamination by this mental plague, face to face with the fact of absolute destiny, even of the details of my choosing. [The various loosecog dangers are distinct: gaining full unguided unconstrained control brings a distinct danger; being subject to whatever is on one’s near-future worldline is a different distinct danger.]

There is no controller homunculus to constrain the control system; there is simply the control system itself. I cannot prevent myself from logical analysis, so if I should assume purely logical analysis, I could not stop myself from contamination by this mental dynamic. If I assume logical analysis to deal with this problem, I will find that there can be no logical solution, thus no solution in the logical sense. It is logically indeterminate whether I will be doomed to contact the detrimental knowledge or not, and I cannot in any way secure myself from the caustic concept. If fear occurs upon realizing this, it’s not correctly understood as fear of a specific event due to my loss of control, but the very state of loss of control. I’m afraid of the state of loss of control. The purpose of fear is to negatively control.

Egoic security requires faith in personal (egoic) will power. When will power is seen to be logically indeterminate and arbitrary, the control system becomes indeterminate, and fear of loss of control happens along with the (now endangered, in belief and actuality) state of presence of control In fact, there is always control, but theological indeterminacy and invalidity of control disrupts the integrity parameter of control. [There’s always personal control present, including during divine possession in loosecog, but the control parameters change.] There’s an ominous widening of the “virtual potentials” or “virtual future”. [The mind becomes more broadly capable during loosecog, able to envision great and psychotic-like capabilities and construct unconstrained harmful possibility scenarios.]

During tight mental functioning binding, the control area is sufficiently bounded and dynamically balanced that life is fairly stable. But loose mental functioning may allow this balance to fail, resulting in mis-control, a breakdown of the control system or at least a bypassing of secure control. Control is beyond control.


Principle 17: The analyzability of the middle realm of human experiencing apart from the low quantum and high ineffable realms

[Here I render loosecog cognitive phenomenology (the realm of religious mystic experiencing and insight) independent from all other fields: Relativity, QM, Wilber’s level 12 1/2 of transrational ineffability.]

If the arm of the virtual ego is illusory, it remains so regardless of whether consciousness is a determining factor of quantum level measurements, and regardless of the ultimate high ineffable level of the ground of being.

— Michael Hoffman, January 5, 2013, original research findings based on theory-development since 1985.
Copyright (C) 1988, 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

Typo correction; the 1988 draft correctly reads ‘parameters’ in the plural:

In fact, there is always control, but theological indeterminacy and invalidity of control disrupts the integrity parameters of control.

The actual correct lyric is definitive:
I was going insane
not merely the question, “was I going insane?”


Every cognitive phenomena type in the loose cognitive state brings distinctive dangers — but all of those distinctive dangers fit together, or at least are compatible. For example:

o The feeling of deja vu is dangerous.

o The seeing/feeling/thinking that one’s intentions that are sitting on the near-future worldline, along which the mind is being unstoppably, unavoidably moved forward, is dangerous.

o Personal control power, that escapes any attempt, on the part of the mind, to constrain it, is dangerous.

o Perceiving that the mind’s thoughts arise from outside of the domain of practical personal control power is dangerous.

o The loosened mind ranges over its entire domain of possible thoughts which the mind is capable of constructing, no longer held within narrow unimaginative ruts.

o The mind transcending its egoic control, logically must mean deliberately demonstrating violating one’s former cross-time restrictions and safely limited thinking, including deliberately overriding the usual, egoic, cross-time intention to retain sanity, safety, control, and a viable future. The transpersonal mind deliberately and formally (sacrificially) mortifies the egoic control system, to transcend it and be born out from it, to break out of that shell or prison of restraints and limitations.

o And other experiential cognitive phenomena of the loosecog state and the concomitant aspects of danger that each of those phenomena bring.


The combined idea and experience and perception, is dangerous, the divine danger factors all working and fitting together as a system:

o I strongly feel like I remember being here in this thought-sequence; and in conjunction with that,

o I see, feel, and perceive that my unknown intentions are sitting on the near-future worldline, along which my mind is being unstoppably, unavoidably moved forward; and in conjunction with that,

o I experience that my personal control power escapes any attempt, on my part, to constrain it; and in conjunction with that,

o I perceive that my mind’s thoughts arise from beyond and outside of the domain of my practical personal control power; and in conjunction with that,

o My loosened mind ranges over its entire domain of possible thoughts which my mind is capable of constructing, no longer held within narrow unimaginative ruts; and in conjunction with that,

o I feel like I’m at the Origin remembering that transcending my mind and transcending my control must mean deliberately demonstrating violating my former cross-time restrictions and safely limited thinking, including deliberately overriding my mind’s usual, egoic, cross-time intention to retain sanity, safety, control, and a viable future. My mind here deliberately and formally (sacrificially) mortifies its egoic control system, to transcend it and be born out from it, to break out of that shell or prison of restraints and limitations; and in conjunction with that,

o Other experiential cognitive phenomena of the loosecog state and the concomitant aspects of danger that each of those phenomena bring.


The combined idea and experience and perception, is dangerous, the divine danger factors all working and fitting together as a system:

o You strongly feel like you remember being here in this thought-sequence; and in conjunction with that,

o You see, feel, and perceive that your unknown intentions are sitting on the near-future worldline, along which your mind is being unstoppably, unavoidably moved forward; and in conjunction with that,

o You experience that your personal control power escapes any attempt, on your part, to constrain it; and in conjunction with that,

o You perceive that your mind’s thoughts arise from beyond and outside of the domain of your practical personal control power; and in conjunction with that,

o Your loosened mind ranges over its entire domain of possible thoughts which your mind is capable of constructing, no longer held within narrow unimaginative ruts; and in conjunction with that,

o You feel like you’re at the Origin remembering that transcending your control must mean deliberately demonstrating violating my former cross-time restrictions and safely limited thinking, including deliberately overriding your mind’s usual, egoic, cross-time intention to retain sanity, safety, control, and a viable future. Your mind here deliberately and formally (sacrificially) mortifies its egoic control system, to transcend it and be born out from it, to break out of that shell or prison of restraints and limitations; and in conjunction with that,

o Other experiential cognitive phenomena of the loosecog state and the concomitant aspects of danger that each of those phenomena bring.


Thus I have explained how the danger is systemically compelling, and a matter not only of thinking, but also of perception and sensation, all fitting together and working together, even though you’d think that you can dismiss deja vu as vulgar superstition and you can dismiss or wave-aside block-universe fatedness of your worldline, containing possibly dangerous thoughts you cannot avoid, as mere metaphysical conjecture: “Eternalism and no-free-will are mere conjecture, carrying no compelling force of certainty.” Every danger has a solution, such as prayer and trust. Yet the mind habitually is shaped to take an egoic stance of fascination and recoil upon perceiving this combination of dangers, along with the strong sense of profound ultimate value and meaningfulness.

Therefore we can take a positive attitude toward this system of mutually supporting dangers, instead of only trying to dismiss and prevent them and hold up a shield to protect the mind from seeing — from thinking — them. These dangers are also at the same time, the stairway to heaven. The wounded-controller vision, the self-control seizure potential and capability of the mind, the thorn in the flesh we plead to be removed from our mind, is the sacrifice act, that is the vehicle and ladder and doorway, the means by which the mind is pulled into the transcendent mental model mode and state: the divine whirlwind chariot on which God carries us up descending to his throne at the source of the threatening and enlightening fountain of thoughts behind the torn veil behind the personal control thinking in the mind.

— Michael Hoffman, January 6, 2013, original research findings based on theory-development since 1985.
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

It’s not John Pilch’s fault that there is, in some ways, a full-on censorship against the entheogen explanation of the intense mystic altered state in Christian origins. Similarly, it’s not Andy Letcher’s fault that the Prohibition Press eagerly lapped up his incoherent, garbled and generally anti-drug-sounding book. If John Pilch wrote the truth, if Andy Letcher wrote the truth, his publisher (Prohibition Press) would’ve rejected the book. It’s not Pilch’s or Letcher’s fault singlehandedly. Individual gays were not to blame for staying closeted; yet, it was necessary for them in general, as a large group, to each come out of the closet.

Through my review, I have helped Pilch to write what he and everyone wants to write. All individual human beings want Pilch’s book to cover entheogens. But the Establishment including everyone who wants to be seen as conformant with the Establishment officially wants to censor-out entheogens from the story of our religion and cultural background. This desire and stance and expectation and paradigm needs to be shattered. I have helped Pilch complete his book, by saying what he cannot say. Who will be the one to break the silence? The simulated, robotic cockroach ventures into the light first, and only then, the real cockroaches are persuaded to come out into the light and write what they already secretly believe.

Everyone is stuck pretending to believe in various literalist readings of the New Testament, and pretending to be anti-entheogen and even pretending that they never heard of entheogens or ahistoricity. Prohibition Press and the Official tale of our Matrix reality-tunnel is effectively censoring, or *was* effectively censoring the reality-tunnel, until we broke and shattered the lie.

My ahistoricist, maximal entheogen theory is already more popular than Jesus, though that fact is not officially acknowledged. Every statement that is permitted to be published against the Egodeath theory corresponds to a hundred thousand people agreeing, silently, with the Egodeath theory including that the Bible is 100% fictional and that Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian religion were always completely entheogen-centered.

— Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com, January 6, 2013

Yet another phenomenon of the loose cognitive state, which brings distinct dangers with it, is the feeling of unreality. Everything is known to awareness via mental constructs. This becomes explicitly clear in metaperception during the loose cognitive binding state. Your present body, your past and future self, other people, other bodies, all can be seen as a joke, a cartoon, not to be taken seriously; comical, ridiculous, absurd. This is a potentially dangerously aloof attitude.

Inappropriate affect, a psychotic-like randomness of emotions and attitudes, is another phenomenon that brings dangers and fits with the dangers of the other phenomena. Thoughts of harm or violating conventional intention to retain safety, sanity, a viable future, and control, can easily be considered a source of sarcastic humor and mockery, in the loose cognitive binding state.


Identifying these distinct dangers, and remembering how they fit together to form greater systemic danger, is a major step toward mapping and accurately modelling (describing) the loose cognitive state. This makes explicit what specifically the dangers are, and prevents forgetting some of them. Remember, you not only think such thoughts, you perceive these perspectives, and sense and feel these experiences. And remember, the danger of the loose cognitive binding state is not only presented by one of these phenomenological sources at a time, but by the general set and system of such altered state phenomena, arriving in groups, interlinked, mutually supporting.

Thus we can read the 2112 album image of the nude guy recoiling in apprehension of the red star in a circle, as the mind in loosecog encountering a set of 5 points or phenomena with 5 concomitant kinds of dangers each phenomenon or point brings, as an integrated system: a system of enlightenment and ultimate valuable meaningfulness interlinked with a system of dangers and threats.

o Thinking
o Feeling
o Perceiving
are interlocked, in loosecog.

o There are some 10 phenomena, in loosecog.
o Each phenomenon brings one or two distinct dangers.
o The phenomena link together, mutually supporting.
o The dangers and threats link together, mutually endangering and threatening the person and mind.

There are solutions for each danger, and the solutions interlock.

Thus we have:
o Modes of experience (thinking, feeling/sensing, perceiving)
o Cognitive phenomena
o Dangers or threats
o Solutions for safety and viable stability.

A preliminary step to providing maximum safety for Cognitive Scientists in the loosecog lab, is to accurately describe the dangers, and remind how they fit together compellingly, as I have done. It is too easy to forget that these dangers are many and compelling and they arrive and fit together mutually supporting and are *not* merely a matter of armchair thinking like speculative abstract philosophizing, but rather, full-bandwidth completely immersive experiencing. This is why the most advanced and keen-minded explorers have always continued to report that there is always remaining, with no end in sight, danger and vulnerability, that always continues to demand reverential respect and complete concern about danger and safety requiring spiritual armor.

Naturally the mind dreams of entering loosecog with complete assurance and zero chance of fear and trembling, threat, danger, having the mind compelled and enticed into threatening itself. Even the exercise of practicing threatening to violate or transcend one’s survival needs still affirms that there is danger, which never simply goes away, so far as everyone reports. It’s not a matter of eliminating danger, though we can frame it as controlling danger, managing danger, transcending danger; we never, it seems, reach a point where there simply is no danger. Danger remains, according to reports of leading explorers.

The end of the Bible has harmony, not to imply that the danger is no more. Whenever the mind enters a certain stance that it is innately configured to enter, the mind re-encounters or re-accesses or re-assembles once more, the danger dynamics. So we should see the climax analogy: the mind has the capability of bodily climax and the capability of cybernetic self-control danger climax; after perfecting the mind’s transcendent mental model, that danger capability remains. When the mind forgets this, and returns to the autonomous egoic mindset, the danger quickly presents itself as a reminder again, pushing the mind once more into remembering the need for the transcendent, reverent, trusting, non-autonomy stance.

— Michael Hoffman, January 6, 2013, original research findings based on theory-development since 1985.
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

All entheogen authors & MAPS are complicit & false

Almost all of the famous entheogen authors & MAPS are complicit with Prohibition and with the entheogen-diminishing project, and are profoundly false, at the core, in their very starting assumptions that they play along with, especially their unstated assumptions. Beware of all entheogen scholars! Almost all of them are highly complicit and are pushing a false programme, serving to deny entheogens their central role in history and mystic experiencing. Their writings are hopelessly compromising and complicit with the phony official Matrix world of lies and dissembling and heavily biased misrepresentation of the truth about entheogens.

Even Grof is part of the entheogen-minimizing conspiracy, he is complicit and tainted in the official lie. We cannot trust Grof, McKenna, Walsh, Letcher, Wasson, Schultes. They are all complicit. Even Ruck has been significantly complicit in the official entheogen-diminishment conspiracy. We must throw in the trash this aspect and call them all on it, call b.s. on this broken thinking that the official story puts into the writings of these supposed entheogen advocates. Grof is as full of lies, distortion, incoherence, self-contradiction, censorship, and Prohibition-complicit prevarication, as anyone, and MAPS is complicit too: this article cites him:

“Grof [2001, LSD Psychotherapy, p. 270, pub. MAPS], the world’s most experienced psychedelic researcher, concluded that “at present after 30 years of discussion, the question of whether LSD and other psychedelics can induce generu9ine spiritual experiences is still open.” That’s false. The question is certainly not open. It is obvious and not difficult to be sure of, that plainly, it’s a given that psychedelics induce intense mystic and religious experiencing. Any child can tell you as much. There’s nothing unclear or hard to judge about this. The whole stance of this article, as if there’s any question on this matter, is phony and bunk. The very existence of this article is absurd, as if maybe psychedelics don’t induce mystic experiencing, as if it’s seriously possible to call that into question.

This entire genre of writing is absurd and complicit in Prohibition: it’s all nothing but a giant posturing, a presence, a big delegitimation project complicit with Prohibition Press, make-believe going along with the pretense that it’s uncertain whether psychedelics produce mystical experiencing. It’s like books doubting subjective conscious experiencing: you know immediately the book is hardly on the up-and-up.


The article “Entheogens: True or False?” by Roger Walsh, whose writings are used by John Pilch, is a central offender. It pretends and acts as if we know and understand how Christians accessed visionary experiencing, and that we know that they didn’t use drugs. This article *silently* takes it for granted, that Christian visionary experience was not drug-induced. As I have excelled at, I here apply my standard deconstruction technique to show the utter baselessness of the official, implicit tale of how religion works. I now assert that all mystic experiencing anyone has ever experienced or accessed was accessed via entheogens, and that’s what we must assume until proven otherwise.

This is no more unreasonable than the official story, which asserts with full uncritical confidence, taken as granted, that all mystic experiencing anyone has ever experienced or accessed was accessed via the fully understood usual methods other than entheogens, and that’s what we must assume until proven otherwise. I merely invert the official baseless assumption, and justify my move by the fact that non-drug attempts to access mystic experiencing normally fail and produce a weak travesty, make-believe mystic states, whereas it is an instantly verifiable fact that anyone can check, that if you use entheogens, you are guaranteed to get an intense mystic altered state, and, there exists much evidence once you bother to look for it, that visionary plants are completely common and normal and central in religious history.

I have a rock-solid base of experiential evidence and artifact evidence and written evidence to back up my assertion and my evidentially justified assumption that mystics normally and generally access their experiences via entheogens. The official opposite story is baseless, and vague, and evasive, unjustified, and lacking in evidence. The much stronger position is my position: mystics used entheogens unless proven otherwise in individual cases; the much weaker position is that mystics used various hardly specified methods though grudgingly the official position might admit an exception or two among heretics, such as later, degenerate shamans (as Eliade asserts).

There is a false, implicit theory buried in all entheogen-minimizing (which is to say, standard official worldview) scholarly writings. The work of the rational critic is to extract the vague, implicit picture hardly worth calling a “theory”, that is buried in all the official paradigm’s writings. Extract the vague, implicit “theory” or rather arm-waving set of notions, a non-theory of how mystics supposedly traditionally access mystic experiencing, pull that non-theory into the light of day, and show how the article contradicts itself to hold up its nonsense view.

Such writings pretend that the official view has a determinate theory, model, and explanation of how mystics access mysticism. But this article says “there has been no adequate theory of mystical states”, “there has been no theory of mystical states”, and “those who have had both [drug-induced and “contemplation”-induced mystic experiences] are obviously few and far between.” Part of the official view is that almost no one ever experiences mystic states, using “the traditional methods”.

The assertion that few people had traditional contemplation-induced mystic experiences and drug experiences is a covert indication of the badness of the official non-theory: the official theory can only be sustained by assuming there are practically no mystics (of the purported “traditional methods”) and, that very few people have drug-induced mystic experiences.

The official story upholds itself by preventing and dismissing all mystic experiencing, pushing mystic experiencing out of reach. The official story serves to push all mystic experiencing out of reach, so that the official story is not challenged by any actual evidence, but is purely a story, an ideological stance.

I am smashing the official bogus non-theory: there is no such thing as “traditional, contemplative practices”, there only exists in history entheogen use, entheogen-induced mysticism. The notion of “the traditional, non-drug contemplative practices” is nothing but an artificial construction by the official phony scholarship; it’s an invented chimera, an artifice, an illusory construct of writers.

The article mentions that even Buddha continued to meditate, showing that the purportedly traditional non-drug methods still require refreshing. The article there *assumes* silently and uncritically that the Buddha character is historical (not fictional) and that the Buddha character didn’t use entheogens. The article is inconsistent because it looks that the start of Buddhism in Buddha’s practice, but utterly fails, silently, to equivalent treat — as Pilch correctly does — visionary experience in the New Testament. Instead, the article props up the bogus official non-theory by equating “traditional mystic experiencing methods” strictly — again, silently, without attempted justification — with later Christian mystics, not visions in the Bible.

So Walsh’s sneaky, dishonest and incoherent article (all articles in the official paradigm are forced to be dishonest and incoherent this way) pretends as if (without drawing attention to this) the New Testament Christians sat around in zazen meditation, which is an absurd implication, once I drag it out into the light. Unlike Pilch, Walsh has no theory, not even a pretended theory, of how New Testament Christians got their visions.

Walsh mentions “the wine of Dionysus Eleutherios/Liberator” without comment, implying that this is mere alcohol rather than entheogen wine.

He delivers this false story, taking it all for granted: “in the West. For centuries psychedelics were all but unknown, until in the 1960s they came crashing into a culture utterly unprepared for them.” The entire article — and this entire genre of writing, by big-name entheogen authors — is a massive exercise in begging the question and taking it, falsely, silently, as granted that we know for a fact that mystics didn’t use entheogens.

That’s the mechanics of this bogus genre of writing. All the authors commit this same set of fallacies and *bad writing*, bad, lack of critical thinking, at the foundation, before they start writing. The same massive foundation of fallacious presumptions, always silent, underlies all articles and books in this genre. Beware this entire genre, beware *all* of these “leading” writers and “authorities on entheogens”! It is complicit, a project of robbing entheogens of their central credit in religious history.

This is sheer noxious bias by Walsh and all the rest of the complicit non-theorists, a massive specious begging-the-question, presumption, a huge false dichotomy that implies the opposite of the historical truth of the matter: “The contemplative’s mind may be prepared, but there is no guarantee whatsoever that the drug user’s is.


Entheogens: True or False?
Roger Walsh
http://www.transpersonalstudies.org/ImagesRepository/ijts/Downloads/Entheogens%20True%20or%20False.pdf

The following list of phrases is indicators, signs, bearers of a lie, constituting the specious, silently assumed, implicit non-theory according to the official entheogen-diminishing tale. I extracted this list from Walsh’s typically bad and Prohibition-complicit article. These phrases all are taken for granted by Walsh as being opposed to — that is, distinct from — psychedelic experiences; these are all silently assumed to be non-drug methods of accessing the intense mystic altered state.

genuine mystical
contemplative practices
genuine mystical experiences
genuine religious and mystical l experiences
genuine spiritual experiences
truly mystical
the experiences of genuine mystics
experiences hard-won by years of contemplative discipline
contemplatives
natural mystical states
drug experiences … their natural religious counterparts
natural mystical experiences
mystical experiences of mystics throughout the centuries
mystical rapture
genuine experiences
the contemplative should labor for decades for a sip of [such experiencing]
natural mystical states
natural mystical experiences
really genuine
meditation
a yogi might focus unwaveringly on the breath or a mantra
a Christian contemplative or bhakti yogi might cultivate the love of God
Buddhist vipassana and Taoist internal observation practitioners
religiously induced mystical experiences
mystical experiences
A contemplative might finally taste … mystical unity after years of cultivating qualities such as concentration, love, and compassion.
natural mysticism
spiritual practice
transformative disciplines
religious disciplines
practice … Zen … sit … zazen … seated meditation
satori requires … the purification of character … zazen
the method used … long-term practice
contemplative mysticism
The contemplative … may spend decades deliberately working to retrain habits along more spiritual lines.
the contemplative
spontaneous mystical experiences

Against Walsh and all the writers of his ilk — Schultes, etc.; who *isn’t* tainted and complicit? — I assert that historically, all these items are actually things that were done during the entheogen-induced altered state, by far more commonly than without entheogens. These are merely supplemental activities to do *during* the entheogen loosecog visionary state.

— Michael Hoffman, January 6, 2013, the definer and advocate of the Maximal Entheogen Theory of religion and culture, based on theory-development since 1985.
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

Clarifications:

Grof is as full of lies, distortion, incoherence, self-contradiction, censorship, and Prohibition-complicit prevarication, as anyone, and MAPS is complicit too: Walsh’s article “Entheogens: True or False?” cites him:
“Grof [2001, LSD Psychotherapy, p. 270, pub. MAPS], the world’s most experienced psychedelic researcher, concluded that “at present after 30 years of discussion, the question of whether LSD and other psychedelics can induce genuine spiritual experiences is still open.”


The article is inconsistent because it looks [at] the start of Buddhism in Buddha’s practice, but utterly fails, silently, to equivalent[ly] treat — as Pilch correctly does — visionary experience in the New Testament.


[The following statement] is sheer noxious bias by Walsh, [like] all the rest of the complicit non-theorists, a massive specious begging-the-question, presumption, a huge false dichotomy that implies the opposite of the historical truth of the matter: “The contemplative’s mind may be prepared, but there is no guarantee whatsoever that the drug user’s is.”
________________

Philosophy of Science claims that the new theory is adopted after it is seen to have greater explanatory power than the old theory. I object that often, the old theory isn’t even a “theory” at all, whatsoever, but is merely a heap of notions and silent unconscious presumptions, implicit and contradictory.

— Michael Hoffman

What do you mean that the feeling of deja-vu is dangerous? I love reading your material, it is very dense.

I have had an interesting experience that fits right into the block determinism regarding the most intense deja-vu
I have ever experienced or even heard or read about.

I’d love to discuss it with you, if you’re interested.

Deja vu can be dangerous and transcendent in conjunction with other classic mystic state phenomena. Someone could gets the deja vu feeling and idea that’s convincing:

“I remember here is where I realized that for ingenious reasoning-chain xyz, the right moral obedient God-reverent thing I must do now to save and enlighten humanity is transgressive act T, which initiates the end of the world for our shared delusion regarding moral responsible agency. This looks psychotic but it’s actually transcendent and unavoidable; I remember putting these ideas together, deja vu helped me remember this glorious ego-transcending idea.”

Skewed thinking, malformed transcendence, can be dangerous, and even correct thinking might still be dangerous, as reports of explorers suggest.

Michael Hoffman

Passover blood of sacrifice protectively averts from threat of control disproof

Voice dictate

The Bible is all fictional intense mystic meaning stories interlinked

To avoid explaining blood is to completely fail to explain the Bible and major themes in world religion

the most important themes filled with transcendent meaning must include blood in terms of self control time the mystic state and metaphor

A explanation of the Bible and Greek and Roman religion and other blood thirsty mystic gods around the world in terms of decoding it into mystic experiencing in the peak state demands that we must have a theory of a vision of blood averting the wrath of God that would strike down our control power harmfully

I am the first one to have the explanatory theory linking blood averting danger and the phenomena of the loose cognitive binding state induced by entheogens

I explain the analogy how is mystic experiencing from entheogens like the threat of harm and death being turned away by affirming blood

how does affirming blood turn away the threat in the mystic altered state if you cannot explain that then you have no theory

I explain it I have the theory that works and satisfies providing completion and satisfaction and closure and transcendence of personal control power and demonstration of its limits that we want to know

there is Abraham and Isaac sacrificing the ram with a knife in place of Isaac from whom all of Israel descended and was dependent on

there is the Passover where the blood of the sacrificed lamb on the door prevented averted turned away the angel of death to enable the sacrificer to continue living into the promised land of Israel

there is Jesus celebrating the Passover with equivalent themes of giving his blood to avert wrath and enable lasting life in the kingdom of God

When you are in dire straits being threatened and excitedly pursuing the fascinating potential to transcend control to avert the wrath of God and make him change his mind because you realize that you have that God has decided to use you to demonstrate his power of making you go out of control and taking over your will and intention

you are made to see blood and you picture in your mind God providing some other mystic figure or animal that God in your mind will accept in your place as equivalent by picturing this blood given by God as sufficient in place of your blood that’s associated with your control breakdown the threat is averted and God sees the blood that he provided in the sacrifice idea and he sees that your mind acknowledges your dire need for and desire for transgression and self transcendence and self transgression of personal control power

picturing the sacrificial blood averts God’s decision which is your decision when your mind successfully attains to being possessed by God shaped thinking which satisfies and fulfills that minds transcendent desire for self transgression

God and your God shaped mind are fulfilled and satisfied and the wrath of your God possessed mind is averted and God changes his mind you change your mind and then are brought into the land of enlightenment Israel escaping from the threat of the angel of death in slavery in the land of Egypt while still not being harmed

your life continues now with enlightenment the wrath was full fulfilled and the desire to know our ability to transgress our control is fulfilled in the figure of blood while we are passed over the threat passes over

we are not literally demonstrating carrying out harm to ourselves though we instead envision and picture such as myth representations mentally picturing blood on the frame of the door of your room causes the angel of death to not harm your first born self-concept your egoic self is thus transgressed satisfyingly yet there is no harm done the threat which your mind discovers and threatens against its own ego like personal control power is both fulfilled and satisfied and demonstrated you as God thinking decide to violate personal control and cause blood in an enlightened transcending demonstration of understanding limitations of personal control and then you are made to picture the idea and myth realm of the ram or pagan pig sacrifice in your place and then you change your mind as God changes his mind and have averted his wrath as you avert your demonstration of self transgression of personal control power and you have satisfaction that you have intended death to your intention and yet lived without harm to enter the promised land

The mind searches its potential and discovers an ability to intend the transgression of intending in acknowledgment of the minds true control potentials and in acknowledgment of the vulnerability of practical personal control in relation to the uncontrollable source and factors in control that personal control secretly depends on

we were decided to be struck down yet that decision was the fulfilment of transcending personal control power and thinking so life continued sustained viable life now having also enlightenment but also having experienced desiring complete transcendence over your personal control system and willing against your will and satisfying and permitting acceptable changing your mind

you laid down your life so now are satisfied to take it up forever

you threatened and decided to end Isaac which is to end the entire Israel and that exercise of intending and obedience the metaphor of obedience satisfies and therefore averts

the important thing is to satisfy not only to avert wrath but to satisfy the logical requirement and coherent system systemically coherent requirement demanded in transcending personal control power and power claim to power

The goal of transcending personal control is not to avert not merely to be a wimp like prohibitionists not to merely avoid battle not merely stay safe and not merely continue meaningless life not merely to avoid loss of control that is not satisfying in fact that is definitely unsatisfying and the opposite of life

per Ken Wilber it is a death in life when one is stuck at a level of the atman project that one has outgrown and can no longer be satisfied when life fails to be fulfilling then when it is limited to mere safety and continuance mere sanity

we desire to have mystery religion mysterium tremendum the numinous acid rock electrifying control seizure and cancellation bringing amazing enlightenment threat rescue regeneration and completion of forcing the transformation of the mental model of self time and control

The mind is not satisfied with mere tame boring mundane life like a grade school student or worker done with learning but desires to have high experiencing and self transcendence of ourselves as agents who have control power or who are control power the wielding of control

life demands transcendence not mere safety not mere continuing life not near keeping control not merely staying sanity keeping sanity is not the main goal keeping control is not the main goal staying safe is not the main goal having a continued viable future is not the main goal

experiencing self transcendence and the power of the transcendent Creator over our mind is the goal safety is merely a practical requirement but transcending safety is a part of transcending the mind

This explains the theme of Jonah being disappointed Jonah tells the king of Nineveh 40 days and your kingdom will be overthrown but the entire city comically repents to the extreme immediately and God’s wrath is instantly averted

Jonah is mad because God promised to overthrow the Kingdom of men that that didn’t know its right hand from its left Jonah camped outside the city hoping for fireworks and destruction he was angry when God changed his mind

it had become very exciting the prospect of God’s wrath smiting nineveh as God intended God looked forward to smiting Minetta but John was angry at God for changing his mind and deciding not to smite the city kingdom of nineveh

you are Jonah you are God you are the king of Nineveh you as gods thinking decide you will overthrow your personal control power in the mystic state and you repent and change your intention and let your kingdom or control stability continue into the future instead

it is depressing after the excitement you have to back down and become boring and not smite your self to demonstrate control beyond control and a closure and completion of the self transcendence project that occupies your thinking in the peak state so it is a bummer and boring and depressing that you merely temporarily intended to demonstrate holy satisfying transcendent transgression against your personal control power and then boringly changed your intention and your wrath against your control was averted

That is the Egodeath theory and explanation of why blood figures in religious myth in blood sacrifice I explain it here the only compelling coherent explanation of this theme and its role in rescue and preservation of life in the problematized panic attack and rescue in the peak window of the advanced mystic altered state

how might envisioning blood of a sacrificed lamb or pig give you a feeling of protection in the intense mistake state of the loose cognitive binding

in the advanced peak loose cognitive state the mind clearly sees its vulnerability to recursive positive feedback envisioning control loss that it could quite well be fated that the mind unconstrained latches onto an idea in a positive feedback of reaching and successfully constructing a control state that is beyond practical control that the mind could make itself willing to violate itself

this is a capability and potential that the mind is capable of justifying when unconstrained

Blood represents a control instability transcendent self harm ability of the control system a self transgression capability of the personal control system

The fear of loss of control or entering an indeterminate unstable control state definitely implies all kinds of harm or violations of personal control constraints therefore it is quite logical to associate blood with such harm therefore solutions of meaning involvement sacrifice not of vegetables but blood which has a mental rescuing association that is adequate to the seriousness of the control violation

Tragedy and comedy comic relief inappropriate affect the loose mind mocks its own ability to threaten itself and be in fear and taunting itself at the same time religion is a mystic joke about bloody loss of control and how to intend it and transcend it and cancel to convert the wrathful satisfying God minded reference demonstration of obedience and transcending personal control in recognition of transcendence and transcending personal control and is part of a logical part of wanting to fully transcend and understand control just the same as if you create a virtual reality game the first thing anyone and everyone wants to do is break the game

the mind desires to break and play with its own personal control limitations and study and demonstrate transcending of control when you receive mental constructs as such in meta-perception it life becomes unreal like a comic strip or animated cartoon unbelievable like a virtual reality game but it is not hard to understand why the mind desires to transcend control envisioning blood just like so many people do in video games or wanting to drive through a wall within the video game or otherwise test the limits and demonstrate the limits of the game

it is no different at all in the video game of the loose cognitive state where the game is to play with the mechanism of personal control and study and break that just like fraternity hazing or military training breaks the old limitations and transcends who you were

therefore more idea development is actually needed here not to avoid it but not to avoid the this subject but like in our Greek Roman Jewish Christian religion and Kali the blood-thirsty gods are virtual reality programmers and users give them the controller and the first thing they will do is play with breaking the game

we desire to break the game of egoic personal control limits and push the wrath and smite button

Blood is boring it is all in many video games and movies and all throughout religion so it is boring to confront our interest in transcendent and transgressive violence not for the purpose of blood or violence but for the purpose of breaking which is what the mind wants in studying its control breaking and transcending and fully knowing about personal control and how the transcendent thinking can deliberately intend to break control and show and reach understanding including a desire to carry out some expression of our helpless being subject to our stated near future worldline

there are several distinct ideas interacting at play here but in religious myth they join together in a system such that picturing blood from control transgression means acknowledging the dominance of time in which we are embedded helplessly

a full treatment of converting your wrath by picturing satisfying satisfactory mythic sacrificial blood should discuss each of the dangers that I listed of each mystic phenomenon such as meta-perception the unreality and mental constructs like comic book of experience

This is the good transcendent heart of religious sacrificial violence idea which is actually not about blood or violence but is about transcending the minds control limits and understanding the uncontrollable hidden source of our stream of control thoughts and intentions that we receive

This is a compelling mystic state explanation of the logic and mechanisms at work in the mystic peak window a thorough start covering the basics of the phenomenon including the role of intending wrath picturing blood satisfying the driving logic and project of understanding control dynamics and the ultimate source of control and why picturing the sacrifice animal blood averts the wrath of the god in Greek Roman Jewish and Christian and other mystic state brands to show the God blood is to show your own transpersonal mind your complete grasp of limitations of personal control and effectively meaningfully virtually demonstrating that personal control is subject to transcendent control sources such as ones creator given unchangeable space time worldline

Michael Hoffman January 7, 2013 egodeath.com
Copyright 2013 Michael Hoffman all rights reserved

Change convert to avert
Change stated to fated

I want to tell you about my experience so you may just shed your opinions on it:


Years prior to my first use of an entheogen (psylocibin), I would have a recurring “dream state” that was induced whenever I huffed gasoline (stupid as hell, I know) that I could never quite make out.

Years later, on my trip, that earlier “gas trip” actually PLAYED OUT IN REAL LIFE, right there, and as it did, I literally thought I was dying, and I remember in that moment realizing that we are not autonomous agents at all, but like cars on a cable.

I here define a new field of study and theorizing, a domain of knowledge and discussion and model-construction that is informed by the Egodeath theory aka my Transcendent Knowledge, including the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence, and also is informed by the extreme Maximal Entheogen Theory of religion and culture, which I have defined.

The extreme Maximal Entheogen Theory of religion and culture is a useful theoretical tool that must be used and leveraged to its full potential, distinctly from the matter of whether it is true in all details. Block Universe Eternalism is also the official beginning or starting premise, the most useful point of reference possible, for any theory of time. My main Egodeath article serves this role as not exactly the final word, but rather the final starting point that can be carved in rock.

Toward completion of basic mytheme explanation, I do want to explicitly add 2011-2012 mytheme connections such as the following:

o Branching-tree / possibility bush in relation to worldline snake/worm, along with branchless tree/pole/stake.

o Door-frame blood of the sacrificed lamb causing pass-over of the angel of death, into the promised land, and equivalent themes in the Bible where the entire city-founding-like future of the entire nation of Israel was entirely put into threatened jeopardy, such as sacrificing Isaac which would annihilate the entire future of Israel. Tackle explicitly, head-on, why vision of blood sacrifice provided already is a relief in the peak window of the advanced intense loosecog state.


The Philosophy of the Loose Cognitive Binding State

Existing philosophy topics must be all re-styled with a central focus on loosecog. The entire field of Philosophy, as with other fields, must be moved onto a different basis, of loosecog, to, for the first time in modernity, start to find what the field is really potentially all about.

Also, in creating a new field, that interacts with and transforms all other fields, define a domain-specific approach to thinking about loosecog. My thinking is its own authority. The field of Loosecog Studies stands on its own, though it commands power in other fields to electrify and amplify them how they ought to be. We thus combine the unique character of modern era clueless ordinary-state-limited thinking, with classic pre-modern entheogen-based thinking in all fields and domains of life. The modern era was influenced by entheogens but not officially.


It’s not a matter of importing some other, existing domain’s type of logic — such imported logic is reductionism, like Rodney Stark explaining religion as social meme spread, or other full-on reductionist “theories of religion” that say religion is really nothing but neurological activity, or social network; before the turn of the century, people back then committed such totally dismissive reductionism that they “explained” Christianity as nothing but sun worship, being blind and ignorant of the entire subject matter to be explained, utterly failing to provide a theory of religious experiencing, even though some such writers wrote correct assertions about visionary plants in mystery religions. Must use a logic and fitting-together, that is practical and loosecog focused, per my 1988 distinction between “practical control rationality” vs. “pure rationality”.

I steer theorizing by valuing highly Coherentism (a theory above all must be self-coherent) and Phenomenology, rather than airtight math-like positivism. The theory must be generally coherent, though not necessarily with a positivistic math-like coherence. Other fields must not try to reduce or distort this unique field of Loosecog Studies, such as materialist reductionism (“loosecog insights are mere brain neuron misfiring”) or “Loosecog is really just Campbell and Jung.” No, Loosecog Studies is Loosecog Studies: it is not Transpersonal Psychology, nor is it neuroscience, nor is it subsumed under “Theories of Religion”.

Even having mere thematic coherence, in describing 10 driving phenomena in mystic-state experiencing that produce mental model transformation, is the right relevant kind of truth this field must be devoted to and steered by, or directed by. This field is devoted to relevant kind of transcendence of control, thinking, the mind, and cognitive states, and time, and the dynamics of mental model revision and construction (like Paul Thagard’s work). The relevant kind of theory, certainty, and sure-footed knowledge in this field, is, pursue theory development such that it affects control dynamics, ability, and capability, in relevant, practical ways. This model and theory that results is not driven by truth, but by powerful practical effect, as experienced, as a personal control wielding agent.

For example, my theory-construct of the “control seizure vortex” is not driven by truth/logic, like, “positivistic logic dictates there must be control seizure”, but rather, the right kind of theory-work here is to usefully and powerfully describe, ergonomically, in potent shocking fashion, how the mind gets enticed, seduced, hooked, attracted to, as well as horrified, shocked, repelled, hiding and shielding itself from seeing the resulting dynamics and apparent (at least *apparent*) compelling ramifications, like “If I see that fearsome idea clearly, I will be forced out of control.” A thousand dry-canal books by analytic philosophers in the OSC (Ordinary State of Consciousness) are irrelevant here.

The given fact, the datum to be theory-described, is that, in fact, the mind sees a strangely attractive idea in loosecog, and panics, saying “seeing that idea will cause and force and compel myself to practically go generally psychotic-type out of control.” You can argue “no, that’s not convincing, such going out of control is not logically justified and it’s not even properly defined, since Philosophers don’t agree on the nature of our having control.” The latter OSC-type armchair objection is horrifically irrelevant and is irresponsible, shirking the duty, the claimed work the Philosopher claims to be doing: the modern-era Philosopher *claims* that he is explaining things, so, he must do what he claims he is doing, and *explain* — not explain-away or analyze-to-death egodeath until egodeath is prevented from occurring, by sheer force of definition.

Philosophizing must not demolish and explain-away and dissolve the very dynamics that it purports to be good at modelling and clarifying. The labor of Philosophy is to *clarify* what the mystic-state mental dynamics are — not to deny those as merely illogical thinking that’s epistemologically unjustified. Loosecog Studies is firstly about *modelling* the explanandum, of cognitive phenomenology of the loosecog state, as I have done since at least April 1987, and as Benny Shanon exemplifies better than most, in his book Antipodes of the Mind.


Runaway positive feedback of the idea of loss of control

Runaway positive feedback of the idea of loss of control, is another loosecog dynamic phenomenology that brings its own distinct dangers, that combine with the many other dangers from the other classic typical loosecog phenomena, thus producing explosive, severely, fatally dangerous control instability, truly fully problematized, a red-alert ecstatic emergency, that requires and demands a transcendent rescuing and reset of the personal control system in the advanced intense loosecog state.

Personal control thinking gets hooked, like in an invisible net, a labyrinth pulled into the center unavoidably, the effort to avoid seeing the attractive control-death thought exacerbates seeing it, forming a positive feedback loop, runaway feedback of thinking is what the mind senses and panics from:

oh no my kingdom is definitely about to fall because, like I experienced Spring 1986 in daily life in intending to do classwork, or like alcoholism: per Daniel Wegner’s book White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts, the very effort to identify the idea that must be avoided, and test whether the mind is able to avoid it, brings the idea more into attention and out of control, so my control power is doomed to fall because I see that the harder I try to avoid the runaway positive feedback of the thought of loss of control, the stronger the envisioning and mental constructing of the loss of control scenario becomes. That’s much of the referent of the figure of the king caught, power dead, in the tree; for example, that dynamic is exacerbated by the experience of a control explosion sitting unavoidably on the worldline ahead.

That dynamic of positive runaway feedback that every effort only exacerbates, is a distinct dynamic distinct from the other dangerous interlocking phenomena-dangers that I listed in recent writings.

There’s revolution, lying ahead on every road
There are new thoughts, ready and waiting to explode
The bell may toll for some
Nothing can change the shape of things to come
— Max Frost

In the chronic controlaholism vortex, which is our seizure passageway to heaven, the old monster that stands against viable self-control that’s required for continued civilization, causes futile battling to retain control. The mind’s attempt to push away thinking about a thing must focus on that thing with full intensity, forming a vicious cycle that crashes the personal control system.

That dynamic happens, as the given explanandum, regardless of naive positivist propositional logic in analytic philosophy and objections such as “But that can’t happen logically, because your terms are not yet defined unambiguously, and thousands of years of philosophers aren’t unanimous. Therefore the problem doesn’t exist.” The dynamic wonderfully does assuredly exist as sure as conscious present awareness, and as sure as “the bus driver controls the bus” in some sense (cue Magical Mystery Tour: tires screeching, 2-second silent cliff fall, then crash explosion).


We have a direction-challenged plethora of tight-cog (Ordinary State of Consciousness) based Philosophizing. We have a little bit of exposure to loosecog, plus my Egodeath theory: see there the immense gap that is to be filled, filling-in the gap between our mountain of crappy OSC-based Philosophizing (at least officially, Hofstader’s book GEB is not about LSD, nor is Rucker’s The Fourth Dimension about LSD, officially). There is a large existing gap, in 1985 or 2013, between loosecog and areas of investigation and writings. Now that wealth of presumably tight-cog-based, OSC-mode Philosophy, books, and writings, is converted, to cover primarily the loosecog state. That instantly doubles our span of knowledge and relevance.


What do all mystics think? It is powerful to assume that all mystic philosophers in the peak state are unanimous and agree with my Egodeath theory, that the Egodeath theory is the explicit completed basics of the Perennial philosophy (against Katz). Thus I assert the mind has innate egoic and innate transcendent mental structures regardless of the corporate brand of mystic religion or era or region or planet or cognitive substrate (android or human or alien makes no difference; control agency switches the same way, from egoic mental model to transcendent mental model). Thus I take the ideas far Furthur than Perennial philosophy and generalizers who say all mystic experiencing is the same. I assert that all mystic experiencing is the same when alien androids ingest their version of acid-equivalent to produce loosecog.

Attention all planets of the solar federation
We have *assumed* control

Importance of forming a foundation of the simplest possible views per main Egodeath article. This singular simple starting point that my Theory defines is more important than some variants possible, some book “4 Views Debated on Topic X Within Loosecog Studies” in 2050. The first order of business must be to define and describe the proposed model that’s the most useful point of reference — my Egodeath theory; *not* trying to test and doubt and kill the thing, the theory/model, through hyper-critical analysis that dissolves-away the entire topic of loosecog ideas, right from before it is even started. The first order of business in Science is form a tentative explanation, which means you must define that tentative explanation.

The official view on mystic altered state experiencing fails every effort to even be a start toward a Science, because in the official story, there’s not even an attempt — despite John Pilch’s work, and books about the Catholic Eucharist and its Holy Spirit salvific effect — to present a *theory* as such, an explicit, summarizable theoretical model of how specifically the altered state is induced and how it works. The “old theory” is no theory at all. Ask the official writers: how did New Testament Christians access the intense mystic altered state? How does the mystic state regenerate us, or our thinking? What is your theory and theoretical hypothesis and explanatory model? The official answer is a heap of words amounting to silence.

There is no official specific hypothesis or explanation of how the New Testament people got into the mystic holy spirit visionary state, nor how that state specifically regenerated the person’s psyche. My new theory competes against the old non-theory, which is but an evasive foggy haze exactly the same as Wasson’s hazy, evasive, noncommittal, prevaricating, self-contradictory and nonsensical, unintelligible non-view, a non-position: his is the same non-position, the same non-theory, as Letcher and all the rest.

John Allegro actually has a *specific* summarizable theory: my theory can really be said to displace Allegro’s *theory* because he actually *has* a bona fide theory, unlike the other writers who posture with lots of words but they have no goods to deliver, no specifiable theory of *how* mystics get into loosecog and are changed thereby, or a theory of to what extent are drugs the driving force throughout religious history? Allegro too, fails to provide a real, specific theory on the extent of entheogen use — he flatly contradicts himself, show us his lack of integrity as a theorist: he is only intent on discrediting Christianity, so he uses kettle logic: Christianity began as nothing but merely a drug cult, which was then forgotten, and that’s proved by the big public mushroom tree in the *middle ages* chapel on the cover of his book without commentary.


In the new field I define, Loosecog (the Philosophy and Theory of the Loose Cognitive Binding State of Mental Functioning), we don’t need general Epistemology. We need Epistemology specifically regarding loosecog phenomenology. Loosecog is the ultimate microscope/lens for doing Philosophy (as with Religion and Cognitive Science, and music, and drama, and Political Philosophy). The loose cognitive state is the Philosophy state of consciousness and is the source of Philosophical thinking, and of Theology. The ordinary state of consciousness (tight mental construct binding) is the non-Philosophical state, where our attempts to philosophize are forced, stilted, and crippled, a travesty of proper philosophizing, which must be loosecog based. To each section heading in a Philosophy book, add “in loosecog”.

The driving goal of theory construction about loosecog phenomenology isn’t truth, but rather, forming a good useful descriptive coherent intelligent model of loosecog, Transcendent Knowledge, myth, religion, and religious experiencing.

The field I define, of Loosecog Studies, is more about ability-knowledge than propositional knowledge. The field of Loosecog theory requires mode-consistent, mode-relevant modelling, not armchair (ordinary-state-based) general airtight logic that compels intellectual consent or even action-consent.

Sitting in loosecog in an armchair, or a room in 1993, all is fine, relaxed, supernally preternaturally mentally relaxed, then you latch a thought and jump up and enter the panic ecstatic mode and your thoughts are compelled and drawn to envision control insights, harm, trembling, excitement, repudiation of the claim to wield freewill-type power, followed by the experience of rescue and re-stabilization, then boringness and loss and depression, the mind busily constructing a new model now, and appreciating the control-loss blood vision being expressed already in the figure of the pass-over sacrifice.

These dynamics are the most important to theorize, to model, to publically discuss, such as the mental dynamic in loosecog, of the vision of Jesus on the cross as the wrath-averting blood of the lamb that causes the angel of death to be satisfied that we are in trembling respectful relationship toward our transpersonal power = God’s power = our given worldline’s power over our freewill-shaped personal control thinking. In that perspective, one’s personal control power is dominated and nullified by the power of God the creator of our given, frozen worldline. Ordinary-state philosophy objects that the worldline is a mere hypothesis — missing the relevant point or dynamic. The mind can construct a compelling mental model of time as a given frozen worldline, that causes a perspective that causes power to collapse, in experience.

The point is not certainty or truth so much as what are the actual capacities of the mind; what control modes is it possible for the mind to subjectively experience, as a matter of *cognitive phenomenological* fact, as the given? Given: loosecog accesses the mind’s ability to experience the frozen worldline helpless puppet perspective. How does that experiencing and mental modelling work? That has nothing to do with truth or compelling analytic philosophy or airtight epistemology. Overthrow the idol of Epistemology and Ontology, Propositional Logic; instead, Theory must worship the god of *cognitive phenomenology*. What are the structures possible in our loosecog experiencing? How do those work? What sparks fly? What explosions are possible, climaxes, and how are those climax capabilities isomorphic or analogous with bodily climax?

Theory propagation and development is War. Treat the official story (historicity, entheogen-diminishing/minimizing) as a conspiracy, a war, a battle. For example, the Ptolemaic model is the conspiracy status quo view that the official culture is bent on enforcing, and the Copernican model must fight against those forces of suppression, censorship, and dogma to spread and develop and propagate and link-up to become commonly available or dominant. The social theory of how science actually occurs.



The theme of “believe” is a central mystic theme in the New Testament. It means learn the transcendent mental model of self, time, and control (per the Egodeath theory) including reading and deciphering mystic metaphor, or Hellenistic meaning-flipping, and also, socially and politically align with and be faithfully committed to and allied with the movement against hierarchical society and power and economics, aligned with the flat-society, no-kings, anti-aristocratic movement that was associated with the Jews.


Loosecog Studies requires domain-appropriate structuring of the model of that domain. What is important and worthwhile is not whether the Egodeath theory is true, or whether we must experience these phenomena as if math equations lead us in airtight fashion compelling us through the search-labyrinth in a single way every time. What’s critical for a good useful field of Loosecog Studies is to generally describes the common personal control dynamics that reliably occur classically, to model this target domain well, to bring relevant explanatory power, in a coherent, intelligible, summarizable model, far more intelligible and relevant than other views or rather other heaps of notions, which are nothing more than hazily ill-defined non-theories.

The first and only real bona fide *theory* of religious experiencing is the Egodeath theory. There are now some “Psychology of Religion” books that don’t suck quite as totally bad as the other clueless junk, in other approaches or domains, that sort of discusses or pretends to discuss religious experiencing.

It is perfectly effective to postulate usefully that all mystic experiences are entheogen-induced. Some precision is warranted, and some generalization to form a compact specific generalized model, Katz and postmodernist hyper-plurality or diversity be damned. Here is harmful, mentally stultifying and useless, defeatist, even nihilistic hyper-specificity in writings about mystic experiencing:

“Every person’s experience is different, so there can be no psychology nor mind nor such a thing as thinking.”
“Every atom is unique, so there’s no such thing as atoms in general.”
“Language is inaccurate and misrepresents, therefore language must not be used.”
“There is no such thing as self (it’s an illusion), separateness, consciousness, mind, freewill, truth, personal control, persons, Gnosticism, a single Christianity, …”

Such defeatist, extremist views, and inept command of language, amount to semantic hyper-caution or political correctness gone insane and committing suicide. My mind is trained by practical engineering mentality, and I objected to the direction QM interpretation went, in my Modern Physics class.


The fact to be explained, which I have done, is that the various cognitive phenomenology of the loosecog state gather their stormy dangers together, in the mind, forming a perfect sea-storm, regardless of whether block universe determinism has a math-like forcefulness of your control-loss, regardless of whether Analytic Philosophy writers all agree that the mind *legitimately* is compelled by logic to say “the block universe idea made me lose control”, and regardless of how they tell the mystic in panic “Wait, you cannot legitimately lose control or enact some notion of such yet; you must first define to all of our standards, what the supposed concept of ‘having control’, and ‘losing control’ mean, precisely.”

I watched my friend die in 1980, he hadn’t even been initiated yet, he had no time for delay but needed ergonomic complete enlightenment, my 1997 or 2006 Egodeath article, though the infantilizing nanny state considers him a ‘child’ in this backwards country. My father discovered his cancer around June 1986 and was gone April 1987. We have no time for further pussyfooting around but I only have time perhaps to deliver the heart of the matter, absolutely directly, not with pretended formalism and such irrelevancies. Thus I now immediately without delay model the heart of the dynamics of the loosecog state.

I turn the story problem around and start with the central peak dynamics and explaining those by the scientific method which is a combination of anything goes and Paul Thagard’s Conceptual Revolutions explanation: replacing the old non-theory by an urgent emergency get-to-the-point executive elevator summary for those who have less than no time to beat around the bush. Loose Cognitive Studies, or the Theory of Loose Cognitive Phenomenology, this field I define, its own authority answering to no one, to no other field, is characterized by my 1997 core summary and 2006 summary main article, which get to the central point first, the central dynamic of the set of classic conspiring Egodeath mental control dynamics.

— Michael Hoffman, January 8, 2013
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

Phenomenological Coherence is what matters for loosecog theory. What’s important in Loosecog Studies, in modelling loosecog dynamics and ideation, is Phenomenological Coherence. I hold block universe determinism a little loosely. It’s not that we realize or prove that Eternalism is certain and true, and that’s what causes or threatens loss-of-control. The causation among the loosecog phenomena which arise together is not the force of propositional logic, but is the force of phenomenological coherence; that is, the block universe supposition (including perception, sensation, and thinking) is phenomenologically coherent with (though distinct from) other standard loosecog phenomena such as runaway positive feedback upon trying to avoid thinking and envisioning and mentally constructing the dreaded intention to lose control.

My main top-level concern is, what is the relationship between main areas 1 and 2 constituting the Egodeath theory:

1. Self-control dynamics
2. Frozen pre-set block universe fatedness
3. Loose cognitive binding, mental construct processing, mental model transformation
4. Mythic metaphor, analogy in religious themes

Especially — despite the recent explosion of popularity of no-free-will — I try to only *loosely* couple the holistic Determinism premise with compelling fireworks in personal control dynamics. I don’t say that block universe fatedness necessarily causes loss of control or such control effects. Nor do I say that the main important truth that’s revealed in loosecog is block universe determinism. The main thing revealed in something called control loss, and that, too, can be doubted and dismissed by criticism. What’s revealed is a combination of, primarily, self-control dynamics shift, and also, the block universe perspective. Those are revealed in loosecog state, and are described by metaphor. What’s revealed isn’t the loosecog state (though, metaperception is revealed, and thus mental construct processing is perceived as such).

Factor 3 reveals factor 2 and especially factor 1. 1 and 2 are distinct; they don’t directly force the other, but they a phenomenologically coherent and mutually supporting. The main point is certainly point 1, not 2. 2 is auxiliary and assists in exploring 1; the block universe perspective works as a helpful tool to trigger and explore personal control dynamics and violations and limitations, so that the mind or thinking can play with and transcend personal control.

All the classic phenomenology are distinct and bring their distinct dangers which don’t each force each other with a math-like linkage or necessary causality, but, these dynamics and dangers have strong compelling Phenomenological Coherence.

— Michael Hoffman, January 8, 2013

Here I earn my claim to leadership in the field of explaining Schizophrenia, madness, and demon possession. My Egodeath theory is a key, essential part, the main part, of curing the modern mental disease of Schizophrenia, and works with Mad Rights. Madness, enlightenment, who can tell the difference?

Why are you frightened
I am enlightened
-lyric

Here is everything Martin Ball’s explanation of the entheogen-induced threat of control-loss: “trust”.

The Egodeath theory delves fully into modelling and explaining the experienced trains of thinking, feeling, and perceiving in loosecog, including the attractive meaningful promise of and anticipation of enlightenment packaged along with the concommitant pearl-guarding threat of control loss; and why we think of violating personal control and acting out a deliberate loss of control, and why the *idea* – not act – of mythic sacrificial self-violating harm of personal control power is what gives complete mental model transformation and purification of thinking about personal control power.


Another phenomenon and its concommitant distinct danger it brings, in the loose cognitive state: *the sheer feeling of not having control* (regardless of specifics like:

“Per my at last attaining ego-transcendent thinking, I must obediently harmfully violate personal control and act out noncontrol… “

“because control thoughts and intentions are forced upon the mind unavoidably and unchangeably by frozen fatedness per the Eternalism model of time” or

“due to my source of control-intentions being located outside the domain of mr practical personal control power” or

“because the mind is now loosened such that egoic safety control ruts/restrictions/limiters/constraints are disengaged” or

“because the theory of what it means to achieve mature transcending of personal control dictates that the mind must formally demonstrate it has overcome personal control restraints”, and so on).

These are all distinct dangerous trains of reasoning, along with sensations and perceptions. When analyzing and distinguishing these interwoven mutually phenomenologically coherent thoughts/feelings/perceptions, it’s easy to overlook the simplest given, the simplest present subjective reality that’s so vivid, simple, and immediate in loosecog: *the sheer simple immediate feeling of not having control*, is inherently dangerous, and stands alone distinctly, and is exacerbated by all the other dangers that might lead to the total resulting danger.

*The total dangerous conclusion-insight* is the purported “reasoned conclusion” that “therefore I must formally ritually act out the loss of control to repudiate my claim to have power, against God’s power and I must demonstrate obedience to God’s command he has injected into my mind”.

We can agree with this logical conclusion, yes to transcend false egoic implications or claims that you wield a power that’s tainted and polluted with false claims that trespass on the true origin of cybernetic power, you must demonstrate violating personal control constraints.

But if we agree to that reasoning, with Abraham’s knife held obediently above the Isaac who is the future existence of all of the nation (like a Greek citystate founding myth) Israel, we must also *complete* our thinking, passing beyond psychotic scizophenic insight that is as-if-helplessly obedient to the divine command-transmission; reason must go on to say, like the mythic founder of a civilzed pious god-honoring citystate:

“… and, Zeus Easily Satisfied (Meilichios) has already provided this fully satisfying demonstration of mortifying and repudiating the false, contaminated, anti-God implications of personal control power”: god (or our own god-shaped thinking) already provides us the idea of satisfactory proxy sacrifice of our malformed control claims.

For example, assenting to the mythic idea of the satisfactoriness of Abraham sacrificing the bush-caught lamb, is equivalent to demonstrating your obedience to the divine command or demand that you prove your repudiation of your youthful original misthinking about your having autonomous control power.

Schizophrenics agree that we are commanded to transcend and violate personal intention and control; the healed and demon-exorcised mind agrees that mentally affirming the idea of substitute demonstration of repudiating our malformed egoic control-claims is good because no harm is done and we go on into the viable future of the citystate or nation of Israel and have been purged and cleansed of impure control-claims.

Proxy sacrifice (and the sheer *idea* — not the dramatic enaction of proxy sacrifice) enables absolutely completely demonstrating the person’s overcoming of personal control claims, while forever allowing no harm and a viable thriving future for individual and community who agrees to this principle of satisficing by proxy sacrifice — or better and less magically, by agreeing that assenting to the mere *idea* of proxy sacrifice is sufficient and completely establishes purity of our thinking about our claims to have control.

Religion of sacrifice that has eliminated literal sacrifice is meta-proxy sacrifice.

Here is proxy sacrifice: Instead of harmfully demonstrating your repudiation of claims to personal control power through self-harm (terminating one’s viable future as control agent, like sacrificing Isaac/Israel), it’s satisfying and complete to merely sacrifice a piglet or bush-trapped lamb instead.

Here is meta-proxy sacrifice: instead of sacrificing the proxy bush-caught ram, merely think and assent to the *idea* of that God-provided, God-smote sacrificial lamb fastened helplessly and obediently to the spacetime block. The ultimate proxiness is to recognize the proxy idea as purely idea, purely a matter of understanding, not any physical sacrifice work or act.

Salvation is through faith, through idea; fullest perfection of repudiation of malformed egoic claims to have control-power can only be through sheer thinking; it”s 100% a matter of mental comprehension, not any bloody sacrificing to prove repudiation of your control-power claims.

THEREFORE the ultimate pure effective sacrifice is strictly the idea of sacrifice, strictly understanding the mythic meaning of the sacrifice metaphor as such: Jesus’ sacrifice is strictly a myth, not a historical literal event; salvation is through faith not magically efficacious literal physical harm gore blood death.

If we couldn’t be saved and our thinking be purified purely by understanding the fictional mythic story of Jesus’ crucifixion as mythic fiction , then no amount of bloody literal sacrifice can purify our thinking either; salvation and mental purification is a matter of mythic understanding about control-claims, not a matter of physical proving of obedience.

Physical action sacrifice is incapable of proving that you understand control limits. Only your mental judging of your understanding of control and mythic sacrifice can prove to your god-shaped mind that you have exorcised your false claims to control-power.

Are all these ideas airtight per logical positivism? That’s irrelevant. Modelling the dynamics and the given, actual thinking about control in the loose cognitive state, is wgat matters – not QM, not Neuroscience. A theory of myth and sacrifice must apply to the time before Abraham and explain the idea of Isaac’s ram and the idea of Jesus’ salvific sacrifice: how it is efficacious as fiction, not physical magic/acts/works.

The work and blood that actually saves us, purifies our thinking, and without harm, is ingesting the Eucharist, chewing thus the real flesh of Christ between our teeth, receiving thus purified, continued life, not harm, not through dramatic physical magic bloody sacrifice-depicting acts of doubtful proof intended to prove that we supposedly understand our noncontrol. Resorting to physical sacrifice of the mind’s controller claim, to violate and mortify egoic malformed power-claims, only proves, if anything, that you are unclear on the idea of mythic sacrifice.

My explanatory solution involves and finally explains historical debates about the Catholic Eucharist as salvific act and magical “work”, once-for-all sacrifice, and transcending physical sacrifice — but we must literally ingest that flesh of Christ which is literally physical, particularly alchemical.

I have figured out and explained directly, for the first time, now and since 1988, how mystic-state religious experiential insight works, and the neaning of the myth of sacrifice in terms of mental model transformation in the entheogen-induced loose cognitive binding state, regarding self, time, and control.

Michael Hoffman January 10, 2013 egodeath.com
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael Hoffman. All rights reserved.

Worshipping toward the black cube of Mecca is acknowledging block universe fatedness and its personal noncontrol implication. The black rock is spacetime fatedness to which we are subject, against our natural animalistic childish thinking in terms of autonomous control power.

To sacrifice, you must find and gather Rock, to build an altar of block universe divine Rock, and sacrifice the mentally purified, rightly willing victim who repudiates his egoic animal yiuthful cross-time control claims.

I claimed to roll, but now in sacrifice on the Rock altar I formally acknowledge that I am a rock.

At this altar of Rock, I formally acknowledge that I, including all my control thought and stream of intentions, am a product of the block universe. My entire worldline stream of thoughts and experiences, mental constructs, is like a worm-shaped, snake-shaped vein that is frozen in a spacetime marble block controlled by the creator of fate. I am not asserting about holistic determinism, so much as, my ultimate point is, aseeting a particular noncontrol. I assert Eternalism and brass rigid snaked shaped worldline *because* that forces my real, main point, which is a kind of repudiation of my assumption that I have a certain kind of control power: that type of control power which fits whith the Possibilism model of time. I repudiate the “tree”; cybernetic possibility branching not that that is important in itself, but rather because I repudiate *the type and conception of personal control* that *fits with* that model of time and possibility. I sacrifice my kingship claim on the tree, my kingship claimed fastened to the tree, hung on the tree. I affirm the snake and its Eternalism Rock altar and that’s not important in itself, but because I affirm the model if personal control that fits with that model. Metaphor’s correct logic, relevant and mathematically perfect: Tree ~= altar of Rock = snake = god-given sacrificial lamb = worldline = ultimately:

Mental model of personal control power that fits with the Eternalism model of time as opposed to the Possibilism model of time. The important ultimate point for mental regeneration or mental model transformation isn’t what time-model you have, but what control-model you have. Focus on the time-model is not important in itself, but is important insofar as it implies, forces, or phenomenologically coheres with your control-model you hold.

The egoic control-model fits with the Possibilism time-model. To affirm the Possibilism or branching-tree time-model is tantamount to affirming the egoic (animalish, childish, youthful, first-born, condemned, original, malformed, impure, diseased, passing, under a sentebce of death, sinful, rebellious, evil-doing, lying, demon-possessed) model of control, control-model.

The transcendent control-model fits with the Eternalism time-model. To affirm the Eternalism or nonbranching-tree time-model with spacetime worm worldline is tantamount to affirming the transcendent (enlightened, loosecog-informed, mature, adult, initiated, divinely approved, non-dying, lasting, permanent, last-born, subsequent, purified, exorcised, healed, cleansed, well-formed) model of control, control-model.

To reject the Possibilism time-model is to reject the concommitant egoic control-model.

To affirm the Eternalism time-model is to affirm the concommitant transcendent control-model.

Our heart or core since we are firstly control agents, is our control-model. Further out but fitting with that is our time-model. Mecca black Rock worship: I assert the Block Universe Eternalism model of time and thus am considered pious and reverent not because I have the right model of time, but because I have the right model of personal control or noncontrol that fits with that model of time. I am, my mental model is, divine-conformant, because I hold the model of noncontrol which is implied by my model of time and possibility non-branching.

Original resarch findings by Michael Hoffman, theorist of ego transcendence since October 1985

This has been another post typed with one finger.

Max efficient compact model:

tightcog gives autonomy/Possibilism;
loosecog gives puppethood/Eternalism

Voice dictate

The goal is not to model the truth of physics but rather to accurately and efficiently model the truth of how the mind’s experiencing is shaped and characterized in tight cog versus loose cog

in tight cog experiencing is shaped as autonomy, possiblism with branching future possibilities, naïve realism of perception, and literalism of reading

in loose cog experiencing is structured as puppethood, non-control, 2 layer control with hidden uncontrollable thought source and helpless thought receiver, block universe eternalism with worldline
monocoursal non-branching possibility, meta perception and unreality and explicit mental construct processing with pure awareness separated out from mental construct binding, and metaphoricity metaphor awareness consciousness of analogies

this the goal of good theory in the field of loose cog studies or ego death theory : efficiency not accuracy of describing individual things but rather the goal is to come up with an extremely simple model explanatory that has extremely broad explanatory power regardless of that mere facts and data and reality

the main driving concern is not truth data facts history but rather accuracy of generalization in characterizing thinking feeling and perceiving in the tight cognitive binding state and the loose cognitive binding state

what is revealed in loose cog is a mental model alternative which can be described as a single subject that is really conceived or as two or three or four or 12 subjects regardless of whether the subject of rethinking is presented as one subject or divided into two distinct subjects such as control model and time model or four subjects such as self time control and possibility or 12 subjects as I attempted in 1988 through maybe 2005

it was a breakthrough in efficiency of theory structuring to present what is changed in your mental model divided into two subjects : control and time, or personal control agency and block universe time and possibility

axiom: however many subjects you divide it into 1,2,4 or 12 these mental model areas that are transformed in loose cog always transform interlocked together

even though the topics or subjects are distinct they all change together as a system and they each arise together and arise distinctly and independently

these phenomena and thoughts and perceptions and feelings or sensations arise independently but they are mutually supporting ; the arrows of influence go every way and moving from tight cog to loose cog, it’s not only that a changed view of time causes you to have a changed view of control; also your changed view of control causes you to have a changed view of time

time feels frozen in loose cog and Control feels gone in loose cog and the feeling of non-control suggests frozen time and the feeling of frozen time suggests non-control

it is a holistic shift from the holistic tight cog mental model (and experiencing; thinking feeling perceiving ) to the holistic loose cog mental model plus the mystic does not assert in isolation the eternalism model of time nor does the mystic assert in isolation non-control

the mystic asserts the entire system as we see in myth and religious writing it makes little difference whether you depict time in myth or possibility branching or the king losing his power it is all one system

in todays breakthrough in efficiency and simplicity of theory especially a four quadrant diagram that is universally equivalent to all mythic figures of snakes kings time branching possibility all of those , and hunting searching the mind and Elevated awareness unbound from mental construct processing , and being in love and attracted to the God that kills oneself upon seeing the God’s power , and hero and monster guarding the treasure that is attractive , all of that is suggested efficiently in four quadrants

on the left is tight cog which gives egoic thinking

the upper left box is the mental model of egoic control ,the egoic mental model of control labeled
Autonomy
or other one word label

lower left : egoic mental model of time labeled
Possiblism
( branching future)

The right side is tight cog binding, which is transcendent mental model

upper right: the transcendent mental model of control labeled
Puppethood
(non-control, two level control: hidden uncontrollable thought source and helpless thought receiver )

lower right :the transcendent mental model of time labeled
Eternalism
(block universe single pre-existing future with no meta-change)

we could merge the time model and control model in one box “the mental model of time self ,control and possibility “, but per myth and rock lyrics the most efficient way to present all the data the topics that are changed remapped in the mental model is as two groups :control and time

in 2006 I thought metaphor is not what is revealed , loose cognition and mental model transformation is not whats revealed

what’s revealed is mainly not one monolithic subject but two distinct subject areas in theory of religion and in myth and rock lyrics

those two main distinct interlocked subjects are control and time

all the details of what mental model topics change can be placed into those two key fields and in January 1988 I pictured when reading “way of Zen”, Minkowski space time frames of reference possibly going back to Edwin Abbott around 1880 with roots in theology of god’s eternal perception and predestination when relativity started in 1905

Relativity distracted everyone from the ego death implication of Monkowski space-time diagrams which clearly depict the theology eternal and some perspective and the antiquity idea of and ask experience of frozen time block universe time as space bike dimension which is not an idea that requires Einstein and special relativity in modern 20th century but is self evident in intense loose cog state

The ancients knew more, and more relevant, content in cognitive science and philosophy of space-time than the stupid modern non-thinkers, single state thinkers childishly limited to the ordinary state of consciousness in the dark ages of the 20th century

what kills the ego is not relativity but Minkowski space time especially particularly time as a spacelike dimension which happens to be precisely the mystic model of time and people object to determinism but especially people object to pre-existence of the future because that above all kills the ego and

people should have recognized that this is exactly what is revealed in religion and the Mystic state both the eternal model of time and yes absolutely the ramifications that go with it of non-existence of the moral agent and implies no free will which is exactly the concern the focus of religion and mysticism

but people didn’t understand religion mysticism or metaphor so they did not recognize that the adventures of a square by Edwin Abbott taken up by Rudy Rucker in 1976 first edition of the fourth dimension indeed does talk about the God eternal point of view that reduces us to puppets and snake shaped world lines frozen in space time

yes absolutely time as a spacelike dimension leading up to relativity absolutely has ramifications of ego nullity but people didn’t know enough about myth and mystic perception and theology to recognize that time as a spacelike dimension and its implication of noncontrol is exactly the heart of religious revelation in the loose cog state

The latest fad by materialist reductionism is to claim that no-free-will follows from reductionist science

they are ignorant as a rock about the mystic state and myth and religious experiencing and theology and religion or they would realize that no free will per the block universe eternalism model particularly time as a space like dimension regardless of quantum mechanics is exactly the concern of mystic religion and transforming ideas about moral agency

these scientists have a immature outsiders view a non-initiate view of religion reading it completely literally

they fail terribly totally to recognize that no-free-will, and the resulting supposedly problem unacceptable of personal non-control, is what is actually experienced vividly, not merely abstractly thought about, revealed in the mystic peak entheogen state that is esoteric insider religion real religion interpreted intelligently not childishly like these ignorant atheist reductionist scientists who are bad philosophers and ignorant of mystic experiencing or reading deciphering mythic metaphor

All throughout the ignorant single state modern era people stupidly only objected to causal chain determinism and time as a spacelike dimension saying these are unacceptable this view must be rejected because it eliminates moral responsibility and free will and leaves no role for the self and personal agency

they were blind, these points are precisely the points that are revealed in the mystic state but people failed to connect these ideas because they were ignorant of deciphering myth and recognizing metaphor in which religion has always asserted time as a space like dimention block universe eternalism and everything that implies for the illusion of self personal control autonomy and personal control power which is all exactly what is revealed in esoteric religion

but people simply dismissed that without, they dismissed these supposedly objections such as non-control without even realizing that they were exactly rejecting that which is experienced and felt and perceived in the loose cog state

I am the first modern theorist to explicitly recognize in summary the extremely efficient depiction moving from egoic mental model on the left to transcendent mental model on the right which is goes along with switching from the tight cognitive binding state on the left to the loose cognitive binding state on the right

regarding the subjects which change in the mental model it is best it is most efficient to present the monolithic change as two subjects: the control model and the time model so that:

in tight cognition the mind is programmed to hold and think and feel and perceive the autonomy control model in conjunction with the possibilism time model and

in the loose cognitive state the mind is programmed to have and think and feel and perceive structured as the puppet could control model in conjunction with the eternal is him time model

the control vortex loss of control dynamic is part of the process of mental model transformation and recognition of metaphor is part of the transformation process and meta-perception perceiving mental construct processing as such factors in

but mainly what is revealed in the mystic state is grouped under the subject heading of control and time

those are the master themes interlocked though distinct

I do not say that Eternalism is the truth and that is reality that is revealed , that the enlightened person must agree with is eternalism

rather I say absolutely and efficiently that tight cog makes you have the possibilism perspective and loose cog makes you have the Eternalism perspective in conjunction with , in tight cog makes you have autonomy and loose cog makes you have puppethood

The breakthrough today is simplifying like myth not even sentences:

Tight cog: egoic mental model , autonomy, possiblism; also naïve realism, and literalism

loose cog: transcendent mental model, puppet hood, uncontrollable thought source& helpless thought receiver, eternalism block universe worldline; meta-perception = awareness unbound from mental construct processing to look at it, and metaphor awareness, also perception solipsism the bubble of awareness like in a cave of mental constructs experienced as a small room filled with television screens

but my main most efficient most compact myth depiction ,the shortest formula most potent and efficient is:

loose cognition gives autonomy and possiblism feeling
tight cognition binding gives puppet hood and eternalism feeling

Islaam is a religion in the shape of a people worshipping a big cube of marble sent down as message from heaven to earth, message of block universe eternalism together with puppet hood, personal noncontrol.

when the block universe meetyourright fell to earth it killed many heathen unbelievers in no free will and eternalism and noncontrol but by a miracle Mohammed who believed correctly in these things survived and walked away to have a future

I am a nature worshiper I worship rocks and snakes and trees especially trees without branches also sacred springs from which streams flow and caves and a fork in the path where a decision is forced to occur

Original research findings by Michael Hoffman, theorist of ego transcendence since October 1985

This is my book review.

Entheogens, Myth, and Human Consciousness
Carl Ruck, Mark Hoffman
http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/1579511414
158 pages (not 224)
Ronin Publishing
Publication Date: January 8, 2013


Myth refers to entheogens & slight phenomenology of consciousness

“Entheogens, Myth & Human Consciousness” summarizes the Carl Ruck paradigm. This book is a short summary and survey of his work, of the books and articles in his school of thought, which includes Mark Hoffman, R. Gordon Wasson, Blaise Staples, Clark Heinrich, Jonathan Ott, and Jose Celdran. Ruck and Hoffman show that psychedelic entheogenic psychoactive visionary plants are the origin of religions and religion. Despite the word ‘Consciousness’ in the title, this book and the work of Ruck and his circle does not cover cognitive phenomenology.

Given that this book is a general survey and summary of Ruck’s work, I’m critiquing and commenting on his general approach: how Ruck’s coverage advances understanding, and what the limitations of that approach are. I won’t go into details here, such as some points Ruck makes about Wasson that are debatable.

It would be a mistake to focus on whether Ruck proves that religion and myth refer to entheogens. I axiomatically assume that priests and scholars agree with Ruck even if censorship artificially gives the appearance that scholars agree with the official entheogen-diminishing paradigm. Entheogen scholarship should, like Ruck, give little attention to the official, entheogen-diminishing view. This book reviews the 20th Century history of the reception of the Entheogen theory of religion. Ruck shows how Wasson told Robert Graves to self-censor Graves’ 1950s discovery of mushrooms as the foundation of Greek myth and initiation religion.

Ruck’s work, if extrapolated to the maximum, shows that religion comes strictly through visionary plants. This use of his work supports a simple coherent model of intense mystic experiencing. The theory-development work at hand is not to compel a change in the official dogmatic story of religion, but rather, to make a compelling, actual explanatory model of religion, given that religion is accessed through entheogens. Recognizing entheogens as Ruck does is only the starting point; we must not stop theorizing where Ruck stops.

As far as I’m concerned, the only scholars who matter are those, many scholars, who agree — silently or vocally — with Ruck, or at least who, under the reality of heavy censorship, ensure that their writing is compatible with Ruck’s entheogen theory. Ruck is certainly correct; actually he doesn’t go far enough in emphasizing that every religion or brand of transcendent knowledge originates from visionary plants. That aspect of Ruck’s thinking isn’t worth critiquing; it is the starting point or mere preliminary for a critique. The entheogen theory of religion is not controverted or in doubt, as far as I am concerned, as an entheogen theorist.

Rather, the necessary critique is: how well does Ruck explain the meaning of religious myth, given that all religion comes from visionary plants? Not very well; his explanation is a long way from satisfying meaning. Ruck’s approach is misleading in that it puts the main emphasis on the visionary plants instead of correctly putting main emphasis on specific cognitive experiential dynamics as the main referent which myth describes by analogy and metaphor. This book does not present a new kind of coverage of myth and cognitive phenomenology, as Benny Shanon’s book does (The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience http://amazon.com/o/asin/0199252939), and as my work focuses on.

The Ruck paradigm is that myth points to the sheer use of drug plants in religion, as if what is revealed in religious revelation and enlightenment is the sheer presence and the fact of use of the visionary plants in religion. But I have always treated entheogens as merely the threshold outside the area that needs theorizing, merely the starting point and given; given that visionary plants are the way that the mind accesses religion, what then, is revealed within the resulting cognitive state, after ingesting the sacrament? How does the mind structure its mental construct processing in the non-visionary and the visionary-plant states: what’s the difference?

What’s the difference in experiencing, thinking, feeling, sensation, and perception, in the non-visionary contrasted with the visionary plant state? Ruck and his school halt at the doorway, showing how religious experiencing is accessed, but not what the cognitive phenomenology are, that are accessed. The barely touches on the topic of “consciousness”, or cognitive phenomenology. Benny Shanon goes somewhat further past the doorway, as if Shanon has experience with the visionary plant state and Ruck does not. Ruck writes from an outsider, armchair-theoretical, non-experiential perspective: this book doesn’t cover entheogen-induced experiencing.

For example, Ruck frames the myth of the battle as the battle to get the visionary plant. But within the religious cognitive state that the visionary plant induces, battle occurs, but which you would hardly glean by reading Ruck. Ruck and his school are not useful within the mystic intense peak altered state; the explanation of myth halt at the threshold: his theory gives us the visionary plant, but doesn’t discuss what to do mentally with myth once the mind is within the visionary plant state.

After reading Clark Heinrich’s book Strange Fruit: Alchemy, Religion and Magical Foods: A Speculative History (http://amazon.com/o/asin/0747515484) and Mark Hoffman’s Entheos journal issues, I gathered additional compelling evidence to define the simple extremist maximal position, that religion and the mystic state is and was always accessed through visionary plants. But my contribution to entheogen history scholarship is merely in support of my main focus, which is all on the “consciousness” aspect, the cognitive effects of the visionary plants, which is barely covered by Ruck, despite this book’s title.

Another author starting to build on Ruck’s work to go further than Ruck through the doorway into the altered state is Luke Myers, Gnostic Visions: Uncovering the Greatest Secret of the Ancient World (http://amazon.com/o/asin/1462005489), but again we there get more of a tour of mythic philosophy and metaphors but without resolving those metaphors into their ultimate, non-metaphorical referent in terms of describing cognitive phenomenology and the difference between mental construct processing in the non-visionary versus the visionary state of consciousness.

This book is a good survey and summary of the essential Ruck paradigm. Ruck’s work is not the final word on myth and entheogens, but is an essential intermediate building block, which gives us the fact that religion and religious myth comes from religious experiencing which comes from visionary plants. The end of the book states: “… there always seems to be something more to explore, just a little bit further along the way.” Ruck only shows that religious myth is generally concerned with the entheogen state of consciousness. But no details within that subject are provided: what are the cognitive phenomenology that occur within the entheogen-induced state of consciousness, and how are those cognitive phenomena experiential dynamics themselves described by myth?

Ruck’s paradigm has nothing to say to the person who is in the intense mystic cognitive state, or to describe to scientists what the person is experiencing; in the final assessment, his theory’s contribution is just to repeat “Religious myth refers to the use of entheogens.” This is the point of failure or petering out, of the Ruck paradigm; its boundary past which his map shows only “terra incognita” and “here be monsters”. Ruck’s map only shows the shoreline of the new land; his map doesn’t extend within the land that’s given after ingesting the plant and then turning attention beyond the plant.

Ruck’s paradigm mainly maps mythemes to the physical plants and the sheer fact that they are used, but only slightly maps mythemes to “consciousness”, that is, to the cognitive dynamics that result from visionary plants. His mapping of myth isn’t equipped and capable of describing the difference between the dynamic cognitive phenomena in the non-visionary state versus the dynamic cognitive phenomena in the visionary state.

Benny Shanon points the way significantly further here. Shanon is more truly based within the visionary state, providing a starting effort at describing how the visionary state works (after ingesting the plant then turning attention away from the plant itself) and how the visionary state contrasts with the non-visionary state.

I have found Carl Ruck’s work, including this book, to be valuable at showing that religious myth comes from visionary plants (though he doesn’t take that idea to the simple radical extreme of my maximal entheogen theory). I also found Rucks’ work valuable for providing an initial hypothesis of myth: he shows us a myth and explains how it refers to the visionary plant, and I then read his mapping and say: yes, so far as you go, that mytheme maps to visionary plants, but you are missing the more important, more ultimate, non-metaphorical mapping and meaning of that myth you have informed me of; ultimately referring to certain experiential dynamic phenomena about self, time, control, and fatedness.

Benny Shanon asserts: myth refers to visionary-state cognitive phenomenology, whatever they might be. Ruck asserts: myth refers to the use of visionary plants, with whatever experiencing results from that. The book Gnostic Visions asserts: Esoteric myth refers to experiential Philosophy describing the altered-state experiencing, whatever it consists of. My approach is more specific: religious myth refers to the use of visionary plants to cause a specific mental model transformation from a particular non-visionary mode and mental model, to another particular visionary mode and mental model, of self, time, control, and fatedness.

Thus Ruck and Shanon provide a subset of entheogen-revealed knowledge: they are correct so far as they go, but Ruck is incorrect in putting primary emphasis on the sheer use of visionary plants instead of putting primary emphasis correctly on the particular cognitive dynamics that result from the plants after having taken the plants — Ruck’s theory is not particularly equipped to focus on describing how myth maps to cognitive dynamics, as Shanon rightly calls for but as Shanon himself is not adequately equipped for.

Ruck’s paradigm is a transitional bridge to support explaining how myth points beyond the visionary plants, to the specific mental dynamics that the plants produce, such as the threat of loss of control, the snake monster guarding the specific visionary knowledge the mind desires and is attracted to, and divine help and rescue from the threat of the monster that’s part of the package deal, forming a gateway or boundary crossing — as a specific cognitive dynamic regarding our mental model and mode of experiencing, of self, time, possibility, and personal control agency.

That’s what wrong with Ruck’s school, though he contributes an essential building block toward transcendent knowledge: he puts the main emphasis on mapping myth to visionary plants, when instead, the main emphasis is correctly put on mapping myth to the specific dynamics of personal control power and mental model transformation that result from visionary plants. Visionary plants are the entryway, or the welcome mat outside, not themselves the content of what’s revealed in the peak window of the intense mystic altered state.

Carl Ruck and Mark Hoffman are absolutely correct that religion comes from visionary plants and that myth (to some extent) refers to the use of visionary plants, as summarized in this book; that’s the only explanatory theory of religion worth committing to developing. But their emphasis is mistaken and limited, mis-structured, missing the mark, and misrepresenting what myth means to the mind within the resulting intense mystic altered state. Their work is useful as a building block in support of a proper, well-formed focus on identifying and clearly modelling the true structure and concern that myth describes, with plants as a mere given and starting point but not the heart of what myth ultimately refers to and describes.

— Michael Hoffman, January 12, 2013
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

My Egodeath theory amounts to a history of the idea (across all fields) of free will, no-free-will, causal-chain determinism, Possibilism, and Eternalism (block-universe holistic fatedness with time as a space-like dimension and a single, pre-existing, frozen future, with snake-shaped worldline spacetime worms). The one view or the other fits with perception, thinking, and experiencing in the ordinary state of consciousness (OSC) versus in the intense mystic altered state of consciousness (ASC) induced by entheogenic visionary psychoactive drug plants and chemicals. These ideas were mapped by mythemes.

This history awakens and surprises people. The history of the two main opposing ideas was completely misunderstood and barely considered — as surprised as people are when they read my theory; as surprised as fundamentalist scholar Dave Hunt when, after decades of writing Christian books, he discovered Reformed Theology for the first time, and was shocked. As surprised as New Age spiritualists when they discover with horror that Ramesh Balsekar portrays Advaita Vedanta as not only non-self, but no-free-will.

Idiot newagers (not Timothy Freke) love with peace and light the idea of non-self — yet are shocked at the idea of no-free-will: well, what the hell did you expect: self doesn’t exist, yet we have the power of free will?! If free will exists but the self doesn’t, who inside your mind has free will? The self, in this sense, is precisely that which owns and has and wields and controls the power of freewill. All spiritual theorists say that enlightenment is knowing non-self. Only Balsekar and I say (and many others, but people didn’t realize that!) enlightenment is precisely about knowing no-free-will, but also, experiencing it and perceiving it, in addition to thinking it.

The Myth of Free Will (3rd Edition)
Cris Evatt
http://amazon.com/o/asin/0970818181
August 2010
140 pages

Chris Evatt’s survey book The Myth of Free Will shows sacred branching crossroads on the cover, which she doesn’t recognize as reinventing classic entheogen-inspired myth. Her survey book constantly relies on the OSC-based, inferior concept of causal-chain determinism as the supposed “reason” there’s no-free-will, whereas mystics consider block time, the frozen spacetime Rock, which is experienced and perceived in the psychedelic cognitive state, as the reason there’s no-free-will. This book constantly makes the single-state generalization fallacy error of saying “we feel we have free will” — showing that she, like the other writers, is illiterate about multi-state knowledge.

I fully vividly explained, explicitly, in my 1997 and 2006 summary articles, that whether we feel freewill is a function of whether we are in tightcog or loosecog, and lately in 2013 I am 100% forceful and crystal clear and simple about this: the OSC gives the feeling of free will along with the autonomy-puppeteer prime-mover feeling and Possibilism (branching future); the ASC gives the feeling of no-free-will along with puppethood and frozen-time Eternalism block universe fatedness. When you switch between tight and loose cognitive binding, your mind switches between feeling free will and no-free-will, together with the concomitant feeling of time, possibility, control, and existence of personal self agency. Generally, the mind switches from one model of control-and-time to the other model of control-and-time.

2-state, not single-state, thinking is required to recognize this simple theory that only I am genius enough to spell out for the uninitiated and those whose minds are polluted by the last-ditch effort to Save the freewill delusion by sacrificing to the god of QM, demonstrating that we are confronted with a choice between rationality (no-free-will; single future, which is as easy to visualize as a Rock) and insanity (QM, freewill, manyworlds as in infinity to the power of infinity number of worlds).

We feel freewill when we are in tightcog, but we are programmed to feel no-free-will when we are in loosecog, though that experience comes with the experience of chaotic unconstrained non-control or instability which the author unknowingly (in roundabout way, not making the connections) describes in what we “fear” about no-free-will. She is correct on page 29 (3rd Edition) but she doesn’t realize her description applies to psychedelic mystic revelation! “We think of ourselves as first causes, prime movers or little gods.” (She there assumes unconsciously the tightcog state.) Actually her description of how unstable we’d be if we had freewill, and how people fear no-free-will: all the fears she describes in either scenario match exactly the dangers encountered in the entheogen-induced loose cognitive state.

She has no idea of this; she doesn’t see the massive connections to be made here. It’s uncanny because her book is filled with descriptions of monsters, fears, revelations, spirituality, and fragments of such wording — disconnected, accidental, unconscious, fragmented words from mystic religion here and there throughout her book but this set of writers hasn’t put the pieces connected together, which I have. My theory and thinking is structured, coherent, interconnected, organized; not scattered and incoherent and willy-nilly like her book’s accidental dis-integrated incoherent borrowing of mystic language.

Just as many writers in the 60s were totally wrong when they expressed the delusion that psychedelics are a “new” way of mystic experiencing, so now are the many scientist, atheist, naturalist, rationalist writers totally wrong when they express the delusion that no-free-will is a “new” conception of spiritual enlightenment. What did they *think* religion was *all about*? What they ever lack still though is the realization that the feeling of freewill is programmed in the mind’s structure that is in the OSC, and that the feeling — the experience — of no-free-will (*not* the experience, though, as imagined in the OSC, of causal-chain determinism) is programmed in the mind’s structure that is in the ASC.

Religion is precisely the switch from the experience of freewill original sin to the experience of no-free-will regeneration and enlightenment. The “new” writers are under the delusion that their theory is superior to religion, when in fact, their theory is a clumsy, ignorant, OSC-based groping in the dark toward what is the essential nature already of religion, religious experiencing, mystery religion initiation, as my 1988 draft describes, as my 1997 core summary defines, and as my 2006 main article describes with detailed mapping of mythic metaphor to the non-metaphorical referent: nullity of personal control power, and no-free-will, within a frozen Eternalism block-universe model.

After ingesting the traditional psychedelic sacred meal, block-universe Eternalism and your frozen, pre-existing worldline is intensely *experienced*, not modern armchair theory with its bad malformed explanation that’s based on OSC notions of “causal chain determinism”. These mystically illiterate outsiders, today’s naturalist rationalist scientist writers, say there’s no-free-will as a “new kind of spirituality that replaces religion” but they argue there’s no-free-will *because* causal chain determinism, whereas instead, mystic initiates say there’s no free will because they saw and experienced and felt fatedness, they were turned to rock, frozen and attached, fastened to spacetime and disempowered, seen by helpless awareness that felt no power to control thinking.

— Michael Hoffman, January 12, 2013, based on original research and idea-development since 1985
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

The danger of being Dionysus instead of yourself: profound uncontrollable shift or handover of intention

Another aspect, angle, or vector of danger in loosecog is the feeling that you are not yourself but your will and sense of self is now that of some other transpersonal self. Your normal self identity is in abeyance, including your usual intentions, restrictions, constraints, ruts, controls, and restraints. When you enter loosecog, at the start, you say “I intend to keep control.” But that ‘you’ goes into abeyance together with its intention to keep control, safety, viable future, and sanity. The mind of Dionysus, God, the Holy Spirit, or your transpersonal daemon takes over your center of intention.

Despite the lack of feeling of personhood or control in loosecog, there is still a kind of feeling of a personhood center and control, though it is different than usual and lacks the usual connections, style, and character; it is an alien center, though still experienced as a subjective control center. You have control in loosecog, but the problem is, it is a different, unconstrained ‘you’ who now has control over your thinking. The you who declared the intention to keep control at the start is disengaged — so much for keeping control; that intention becomes a joke and the mind of Dionysus that you now are, laughs mocking your original intent as comically, pathetically impotent and null.

Dionysus — that is, your thinking now, with ‘you’ now being Dionysus instead of the usual you — desires to show you finally and definitively, your transpersonal thinking or mind desires to definitely demonstrate so that you forever remember and are thus forced to permanently change your thinking and not re-incarnate into the egoic mental model, that your cross-time control power is null, illusory, and a mere convention or habitual assumption.

This danger overlaps with other danger aspects I’ve listed and accounted for, or inventoried in my systematic model of all the mutually supporting dangers of loosecog.

— Michael Hoffman, January 13, 2013, based on original research and idea-development since 1985
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

Rock, granite, marble, stone in religious myth and religious practice:

Rock is a metaphorical analogy description of the vision (thought, feeling, and perception) of Eternalism: the frozen single-future easily visualizable fate-given Block Universe with your pre-existing future worldline (snake-worm shaped) forced upon you uncontrollably, unavoidably; holistic vertical determinism (heimarmene/fatum/fate) with time as a space-like dimension (not causal-chain determinism acting “horizontally” from one time to the next).

Stone temple (classic-style Rock band: Stone Temple Pilots) (‘stone temple’ was the first item that came to mind in starting this list)
All carved stone/rock/marble in Antiquity, and literary themes of carved stone/rock/marble
Rock cave of initiation to be reborn out from
Jesus’ rock tomb, roll away the stone door
Enemy king sealed in a cave tomb then hung on a tree in Old Testament
Gathering a pile of stones to form an altar (Old Testament)
marble altar of sacrifice, sometimes with a block universe Eternalism worldline snake/worm sculpted in relief
Black rock meteorite sent from heaven to earth in Islaam and pre-Islaamic stone worship
Cave of rock in mountain of rock
Moving statues/idols
Rock city: Petra
Jesus is the Rock we cling to
Peter the Rock, PTR
Rock tomb
The rulers (kubernetes, governors, control-agents) see Medusa’s attractive beautiful snake-haired head and are turned to stone
Turn to pillar of stone or salt
See the goddess and be turned into a statue
Petra stone-cut city
stone sarcophagus
Prometheus chained to the rock volcano mountain (fastening to spacetime block like you experience vividly, intensely, and tangibly in Salvia)
creation of man from clay: clay = malleable rock; non-rigid rigid material; water vs. rock; clay vs. rock
Rock banqueting bench
Mithras (= you the initiate) born from a rock
Leoncephalic (lion-shaped) god of time sculpture holding keys to boundary or state-crossing, wrapped by heimarmene-snake, heimarmene-snake head above the lion-man’s head, in Mithraism
Amanita in its egg-shape non-split phase as rock
Pine cone like rock like Amanita egg in Mithraism
Hermes pillars of stone
Split open a rock and God is there
Volcano crucible = liquid rock
Metallurgy, dissolve and coagulate, turning metal from rock mountain into liquid and then shaping like sculpting it
Water from a rock; water vs. rock
Divine crystal palace
Jesus descends to Hell or purgatory where flames purify and burn away illusory aspects of thinking, and rescues and pulls the saints out from the rock cave (possibly pictured as lion’s mouth, lion’s rock den, with heimarmene-snake body)
Recognizing that the water waves in the divine palace are an illusion, crystal is real (Jewish mysticism)
Snakes bind Pirithous to the rock banqueting bench in Hades’ at a visionary-wine banquet
Rock sculpture of grapes (fruit of the ivy-shaped vine) containing a heimarmene-snake

Metaphor: born from the rock cave tomb underworld
Jan 10, 2005
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath/message/3757

— Michael Hoffman, January 13, 2013, based on original research and idea-development since 1985
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

ego death :: block universe fatedness perception
=
bodily death :: burial in rock/stone/marble

Typically made of rock, to connect ego death and block universe perception to bodily death and burial in literal rock:
ossuary
catacomb
crypt
necropolis
tomb

Often with relief sculpted depiction of banqueting on entheogen wine, snake, or other mythic themes. All items in antiquity were deliberately mapped 100% to mythic analogy for mystic-state experiencing, which is the starting point. Never “does this item refer to mystic state experiencing”, but rather, “Given that everything should be made to refer to mystic state experiencing, that we ancients must so map everything as best we can, what is the best way we can think of to map the item to mystic state experiencing?”

An ossuary could be made of wood or metal, which map readily to mythic analogy of loosecog phenomena, but stone/rock/marble is typical.
wood = tree of virtual illusory possibility branching, rooted in spacetime
metal = dissolve and coagulate, rock to liquid to rock-like

— Michael Hoffman

I have done innovative breakthrough work condensing wider and wider scope of connections and insights denser and denser. Do not take for granted that any of these connections and structured models are obvious, just because I have succeeded after decades of labor in discovering and engineering a scheme, a solution, to make this all become simple. If you say that now, after my Egodeath theory, Transcendent Knowledge is simple, you must say that it has become simple because I did the hard work of designing and discovering the possibility, how it is possible to describe all this simply.

There’s all the difference in the world between a simple elegant theory (E = MC^2) versus the labor and intelligence and strategy behind that like Maxwell’s formulas or Copernicus and Kepler’s solar system model. It’s now simple and obvious, any fool knows, planets orbit the sun elliptic orbits. That’s foolishly self-evident now only thanks to hard work; you are in fact standing on shoulders.

In 1997 I condensed core enlightenment to a few pages. In 2006, I condensed core and periphery to just 27 pages including a few-paragraph condensed yet clear summary from which the rest unfolds or unpacks. Now I condense religious revelation to a couple Maxwell’s equations of electricity and magnetism, electro-magnetism. I have made revelation and enlightenment simple and easy but this does not mean that anyone could have done that.

Kepler and Copernicus worked *hard* to discover and formulate the *easy* model. I worked *hard* to discover and engineer, like the iPhone or GUI, or graphical web browser, or light switch: this Egodeath theory is a breakthrough ergonomic technology, that required decades of ergonomics work at the same time as capability expansion (such as explaining and deciphering myths; expanding the descriptions of all aspects of ‘danger’ in the loosecog state).

___________________________

This is my innovative groundbreaking breakthrough of the past few days, regarding use of labels for time-model and control-model, and for lining up egoic vs. transcendent binary contrasts more thoroughly than before. Here is a 4-word elegant model of enlightenment, or transcendent knowledge:

Autonomy / Puppethood
Possibilism / Eternalism

Similarly efficient was my extracted contrasts from Elaine Pagels’ book The Gnostic Paul in 2002. http://www.egodeath.com/pagelsgnosticpaul.htm

I put some effort in the 2006 article toward labelling Block Universe Determinism as a mental model of time and possibility. But I didn’t and should have made an efficient label — not only a description in sentences or long phrases — for the other contrasting tightcog original youthful conception of time and possibility. I dislike ‘determinism’ because it’s always defined as causal-chain determinism, which is an abstract notion from the ordinary state. I like ‘heimarmene’ because it is defined in the ancient Greek mind as frozen future, pre-given future time as spacelike dimension, metaphorized as “rock”, the Block Universe, William James’ “iron block universe”, as people started to think of again in late modern era around 1880-1910 — though then it was too conflated with causal-chain determinism.

I like ‘Eternalism’ because it is a model of time and possibility, and is not conflated carelessly with causal-chain determinism as the supposed “reason” or mechanism. Proper Philosophy advocates of Eternalism don’t carelessly say “Eternalism is the case *because* of casual-chain determinism”.


We cannot move forward with the Epic of Evolution focusing on no-free-will until advocates understand the full history of no-free-will (not merely the history of causal-chain determinism). Only in 2006, with my Egodeath theory summarized on the Web, are people able to understand, identify, and recognize the history of no-free-will. No-free-will is broader than the history of this strange recent late-modern concept of so-called “determinism”, which means, quite narrowly and specifically, causal-chain determinism (too narrow with un-considered presumption). Determinism, which is always conceptualized and defined as, specifically, causal-chain determinism, says there’s no-free-will *because* of causal-chain determinism.

Thus the idea of “determinism” attempts not only to assert that there is no-free-will, but also — as I point out and object to — it conflates the general assertion of no-free-will with the narrow, particular explanation of *why* there’s no-free-will: the notion of ‘determinism’ is over-specific and sloppy, ill-defined, in that it asserts that supposedly the mechanics underlying no-free-will.


Description A or B below: B fits my system-wide binaries better, so therefore, I don’t want to say the Egodeath theory is agnostic about the mechanism that justifies the no-free-will view; rather, loosecog dynamics do give a particular mechanism or system of reasons why no-free-will is held: not because of causal-chain determinism, but mainly *because of time* being seen as a space-like dimension, and also, due to non-control feelings, non-self feelings, and other cognitive phenomena of the loosecog state.

A. Mystic-state loosecog perception of freewill is neutral and agnostic: it states that no-free-will is the case, but doesn’t attempt to state the underlying mechanism, and doesn’t conflate the assertion about the underlying mechanism with the overall result (no-free-will). I don’t think this description is accurate; things are more systemic, system-wide, in the contrast between non-mystic and mystic thinking/feeling/perceiving.

Or, description B is probably more accurate and relevant: we strike the reasoning of “no-free-will, because of causal-chain determinism” and specifically assert instead “no-free-will, because of time being perceived as a spacelike dimension, and other loosecog phenomena”:

B. Mystic-state loosecog perception of freewill asserts a different underlying mechanism and reasoning in support of no-free-will: it states that no-free-will is the case due to seeing the simple clear vision of time as a spacelike dimension. The mystic conception of no-free-will conflates the assertion about the underlying mechanism (time is easily seen as a space-like dimension) with the overall result (no-free-will). But mystic loosecog also argues that no-free-will is a result of several factors, and that many factors interact in a network that goes beyond the simplistic statement that “no-free-will is the case because of factor F”: time as spacelike dimension, no-free-will, nullity of personal control power with respect to time, noncontrol of your thoughts because your pre-existing worldline injects thoughts.


Similarly, loosecog is dangerous not because of a single reason, but because of a network system (per Paul Thagard’s book Conceptual Revolutions) with interconnections: you think, feel, and perceive several factors or phenomena, each which brings its own distinct dangers, and these distinct dangers interconnect to produce the overall danger, which we could vaguely label as “the threat of loss of control” (a partly misleading label for a serious and real experiential dynamic).

The loosecog mystic thinking doesn’t say “I have reason to believe no-free-will, not on a basis of causal-chain determinism, but I don’t know what the basis of my no-free-will view is.” When asserting no-free-will, loosecog thinking says “There’s no-free-will, and the basis of this is mainly time as a spacelike dimension, and partly the illusory nature of the self as personal control agent who wields freewill while causing one possibility branch to become real when that agent really could have made a different possibility branch real instead.”

Loosecog thinking doesn’t simply say, purely, “no-free-will is the case”. What’s delivered to the mind in loosecog is an entire system of thinking/feeling/perceiving regarding some 10-20 main cognitive phenomena.

Tightcog thinking doesn’t simply say, purely, “no-free-will is the case”. Typically, during the modern era, tightcog normally said “no-free-will is the case, because of causal chain determinism”. That’s extremely what Cris Evatt does to the extreme in The Myth of Free Will: she strongly equates and conflates no-free-will with the specific explanation of the underlying mechanism as causal chain determinism; for example, she doesn’t mention the linguistic philosophy argument of the A-series vs. B-series McTaggart (I dislike McTaggart’s focus on argumentation from grammar, though semantics certainly are important).

Ever since 1986, possibly October 1985, I’ve used the useful binary of “egoic vs. transcendent” (for example: egoic thinking, transcendent mental model, egoic mental mode, transcendent control system, egoic control thinking). And I came up with phrases to label my 1988 breakthrough “crystalline ground of being” idea, or “Block Universe Determinism” in my 2006 main article. But in the Philosophy of Time, there is a useful simple use of labelling: Possibilism versus Eternalism, which links simply to my Egoic vs. Transcendent labels and to my tightcog vs. loosecog labels.

My simplicity of labelling and organization made a breakthrough the other day by doing *more* like my long-established “egoic vs. transcendent” distinction and my probably April 1987 distinction “tightcog vs. loosecog” (those abbreviations are more recent; I wrote in 1987 like “loose mental construct binding” and “tight mental construct binding”. I mean to discuss the super-useful use of a single word label on 4 particular things, a breakthrough of a couple days ago, which leverages both my 1986/1987 use of ‘egoic’ vs. ‘transcendent’ and ‘loosecog’ vs. ‘tightcog’ on the one hand, and — an improvement over my 2006 article framing — the labels from the Philosophy of Time, ‘Possibilism’ vs. ‘Eternalism’, which also correlates directly to my recent, 2011 or 2012 (check the evolution of my ideas in my posts) strong simple contrast between snake vs. tree.

The breakthrough of January 2013 is this efficient compact portrayal using binaries and binary-labels fully:

Egoic control-model — Transcendent control-model
Possibilism time-model — Eternalism time-model

There is an entire list of contrasts with clean mapping or opposition, but that 4-box approach, where there is a single word label on each box, summarizes or highlights the most important thing in the contrast. Yes, like 1986, I contrast Egoic on the left and Transcendent on the right, but in particular, the breakthrough is to use a single word label applied to two (not 1 or 3, 4, or 12) boxes on the left: what’s most important is your control-model and time-model, which is sort of asserted in the 2006 main article, but is so elegantly, efficiently expressed like the named, clearly contrasting basic views in the Philosophy of Time, in addition to my long-established ‘egoic’ vs. ‘transcendent’.

Before the breakthrough, my not quite 100% efficient depiction or math equation (model) was:
egoic control — transcendent control
idea of time passing — block universe determinism

In that old messier depiction, I have semi-clean labels for control, but a bad asymmetry: I have a *label*, for block universe determinism, which is a long label (bad) and uses the word ‘determinism’ (bad), and worst of all, *lacks* a label for the egoic, tight-cog model of time.

My April 1987 breakthrough in style of thinking and writing (notation) was a matter of forging labels for my ideas, instead of — like my Oct 1986 notes show — only having complete sentences and phrases. I didn’t think much in terms of idea-labels in 1986, though I wrote “egoic mental model” and “transcendent mental model” then. My notation was clumsy and slow, I had no system of compacting my ideas by labels like my April 1987 start of routine strategic use of acronyms along with the clear new concept of “mental construct” also from April 1987. When I came up with the notation-style and thinking-style of acronyms and idea-labels as such, I simultaneously came up with the concept and language I formulated of:

mental construct [MC]
mental construct processing [MCP]
loose mental functioning binding [LMFB]
loose mental construct binding [LMCB]
mental construct relationship matrix [MCRM]
mental construct relationship matrix indexing
dynamic mental construct relationship matrix [DMCRM]

This efficient notation and use of idea-labels was like a programming language that enabled all throughout April 1987 to January 1988, my phase of ramp-up to breakthrough.

My notes in Pentel P205 mechanical pencil used a box, not square brackets, to declare acronyms, and mixed-size all-caps. I also used word processing files, with mixed-case and used ***MCP*** notation to declare acronyms, during that period. I have printouts of those files.

The time-model and control-model are the most important, overarching areas of the mental model that are changed during loosecog. That’s reflected by my priority-sequence, most important first:

1. Cybernetics; control
2. Determinism; time
3. Dissociation; loosecog
4. Metaphor; analogy

Relating those in order 4, 3, 2, 1:
Metaphor describes how dissociation changes the mental model of time and control.


To make the abbreviated list of binaries, only contrast 1, and contrast 2:
1. Cybernetics; control — Egoic vs. Transcendent mental model of control
2. Determinism; time — Egoic vs. Transcendent mental model of time/possibility


To make the complete expanded list of binaries, start by contrast within 1, 2, 3, and 4:
1. Cybernetics; control — Egoic autonomy vs. Transcendent puppethood
2. Determinism; time — Possibilism (branching future) vs. Eternalism (block universe & preexisting worldline)
3. Dissociation; loosecog — Tightcog & naive realism vs. Loosecog & meta-perception of mental constructs
4. Metaphor; analogy — Literalism vs. metaphor-recognition/facility


Then expand those 4 areas further, in that same order:
1. Cybernetics; control —
Egoic autonomy vs. Transcendent puppethood
monolithic control (“little god”; puppeteer; unmoved mover) vs. 2-level control (uncontrollable thought-source & helpless thought-receiver)

2. Determinism; time —
Possibilism (branching future) vs. Eternalism (block universe & preexisting worldline)
free will vs. no-free-will

3. Dissociation; loosecog —
Tightcog vs. Loosecog
Naive realism vs. meta-perception of mental constructs

4. Metaphor; analogy —
Literalism vs. metaphor-recognition/facility
Historicity of Muhammad/Jesus/Paul/Buddha/Church Fathers in Antiquity, vs. a 100%-fictional reading

It’s possible to add peripheral topics:
Chronological naive credulity vs. chronology agnosticism
Credulity in official story vs. ignoring official story
Credulity that published scholarship actually represents what scholars believe, vs. reading & writing while consciously taking heavy censorship into account


Add to that list of binaries: see my recent January 2013 lists of dangers in order to get my list of phenomena (which each bring distinct dangers). These phenomena/danger lists are mostly in the thread “Hypotheses for objections, closure, safety” (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath/message/6240). Present each loosecog phenomena via simple label contrasted with forging a simple label for the opposed, tightcog cognitive dynamic: Imagine a 1-word label or acronym for the following pairs:

the feeling of never having been in this thought-sequence before; jamais vu (‘I’ve never seen’ — here meaning, not “the unfamiliarity of something that you know is familiar”, but rather, meaning “I haven’t been in this thought-sequence before”)
vs.
the feeling of deja vu

The feeling that one’s intentions in the future don’t exist yet and you will later create them or will now constrain and help create them
vs.
The seeing/feeling/thinking that one’s intentions that are sitting on the near-future worldline, along which the mind is being unstoppably, unavoidably moved forward.

The feeling that you have the ability to constrain your thinking
vs.
Personal control power, that escapes any attempt, on the part of the mind, to constrain it.

The feeling that you have control over your thoughts
vs.
Perceiving that the mind’s thoughts arise from outside of the domain of practical personal control power.

Thinking is constrained, unimaginative, rutted, restricted, habitual, held within narrow unimaginative ruts
vs.
The loosened mind ranges over its entire domain of possible thoughts which the mind is capable of constructing.

Egoic, cross-time intention to retain sanity, safety, control, and a viable future; subject to and constrained by cross-time restrictions and safely limited thinking, limited to a safe boring shell or prison of restraints and limitations.
vs.
Transcendent control, deliberately demonstrating violating personal control constraints, able to deliberately override them. The transpersonal mind deliberately and formally (sacrificially) mortifies the egoic control system, to transcend it and be born out from it, to break out of that shell.

Naive realism of perception (I directly see, I directly perceive the world, the world feels real, I feel real, and my past feels real)
vs.
The feeling of unreality. Metaperception of visual perception and of mental representation of the world and your past.

The feeling of being your familiar personal self
vs.
The feeling of being Dionysus, a divine transpersonal control-identity.


All aspects of egoic vs. transcendent mental mode and mental model can be efficiently summarized by contrasting them in a 2-column table with 1-word labels or acronyms:

…………………….Egoic | Transcendent
Model of time: Possibilism | Eternalism
Model of control: Autonomy | Puppethood
Mode of cognitive, mental construct binding: Tight | Loose
Mode of perception: naive realism | metaperception/unreality
Mode of metaphor: literalism | deciphering; consciously mapped to Cybernetics/Heimarmene/Dissociation
Other aspect A: A[Egoic version] | A[Transcendent version]
Other aspect B: B[Egoic version] | B[Transcendent version]


My breakthrough of a couple days ago (or more accurately describing how breakthroughs play out, this is my current breakthrough of this week and now and tomorrow) is this compact, efficient, binary-switching description, with (ideally) single-word labels.

The mind simply flips between these two contrasting sets, each aspect interlinked and yet distinct, mutually supporting: for example, in tightcog, your control feels like Autonomy, operating control on the world that’s modelled with the time-model of Possibilism. The Autonomy-feeling operates in the mental mode or context of a Possibilism model of time, personal control, and possibility; while in contrast, in tightcog, control feels like Puppethood used like a transmission gear controlling the mind’s thinking within a framework or model of time that’s the Eternalism model of time, virtual-only possibility, personal non-control and trans-personal control.

The mind flips simply back and forth between these entire sets. But, assuming psychedelic initiation at puberty, which was normal in the late 20th Century, first for a long time there is only tightcog, and the associated aspects. Then, during the series of initiations, the mind is repeatedly exposed to the loosecog set or system of interconnected, mutually supporting thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, in some sense gaining a permanent memory of these dynamics, so that when the mind returns to tightcog, your knowledge in tightcog is now different than before you were exposed to loosecog. The goddess dips you into the flames in the fireplace each night — each initiation — gradually making you immortal by burning off your mortality.

I reject the premise, as a wishful expectation, that the enlightened person has loosecog constantly. The mind isn’t designed that way. The ancient authorities who used psychedelic mixed wine all the time in their recreational religious funeral-cult banqueting clubs, were not tripping all the time, but only during the initiations or banquet feasts, exactly the same as a late 20th Century Acid Rock lyricist or head. Non-drug-induced mysticism is a myth, a fabrication of official, OSC-only dogmatic censorship-driven scholarship, and in that same sense, the notion that we learn to be in loosecog all the time when we are enlightened, is nothing but fantasy conjecture and baseless wishful thinking.

No one is in loosecog all the time, except irrelevant people: we should reject the ideal or expectation that being enlightened means permanent constant loosecog. The mind normally is designed to only be in loosecog during entheogen use, and then to return to tightcog, only retaining an abstract mental model of what was seen and experienced and thought in loosecog (and will be seen again in the next loosecog banqueting sessions).

— Michael Hoffman, January 13, 2013, based on original research and idea-development since 1985
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

Corrections, and definition of ‘immortal’ or ‘eternal life’

[typo correction:]
B. Mystic-state loosecog perception of [no-]free[-]will asserts a different underlying mechanism and reasoning in support of no-free-will: it states that no-free-will is the case due to seeing the simple clear vision of time as a spacelike dimension.

[clarification:]
Tightcog thinking [naturally generates the freewill view, but when scientists in tightcog do try to think about no-free-will, they don’t] simply say, purely, “no-free-will is the case”. Typically, during the modern era, tightcog[-based scientist who ignored their feeling of freewill and tried to get rid of the illusion of freewill by OSC-based explanation] normally [argued by saying] “no-free-will is the case, because of causal chain determinism”.

[clarifying the table heading format:]

Aspect of cognition: Egoic | Transcendent
—————————– ——— ——————–
Model of time: Possibilism | Eternalism
Model of control: Autonomy | Puppethood
Mode of cognitive, mental construct binding: Tight | Loose
Mode of perception: naive realism | metaperception/unreality
Mode of metaphor: literalism | deciphering; consciously mapped to
Cybernetics/Heimarmene/Dissociation
Other aspect A: A[Egoic version] | A[Transcendent version]
Other aspect B: B[Egoic version] | B[Transcendent version]

[typo correction:]
The Autonomy-feeling operates in the mental mode or context of a Possibilism model of time, personal control, and possibility; while in contrast, in [loose]cog, control feels like Puppethood used like a transmission gear controlling the mind’s thinking within a framework or model of time that’s the Eternalism model of time, virtual-only possibility, personal non-control and trans-personal control.
____________________________________

The mytheme analogy of ‘mortality’ refers to the catastrophic collapse or control-seizure and instability of egoic control power during loosecog; the ego death experience. The mind after multiple initiations and studying the Egodeath theory eventually becomes constant, reaching a steady-state, no longer making fundamental discoveries and changes in your mental model during each loosecog session. The perfected, completed, mature mind flips into loosecog and back to tightcog during each psychedelics-banqueting religious recreation party, but your mental model no longer changes or dies or collapses and is re-constructed: those dynamics of mental model transformation are past; you have been cleansed of sin and death and gained eternal life, a-thantos, no-longer-dying, immortal life; you were a mortal but were passed through the fire and now are a victorious divinized hero.]

— Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com, January 13, 2013

In the egoic mental model, supportable by the New Testament, which is a meaning-flipping text:

o Heaven is where you go after bodily death if you are a morally good freewill moral control agent, who does morally good things.

o Hell is where you go after bodily death if you are a morally bad freewill moral control agent, who does morally bad things.

In the transcendent mental model, supported by the New Testament:

o Heaven is where you go if you are exposed to loose cognition by the psychedelic traditional Eucharist multiple times and understand no-free-will, the illusory nature of moral control agency. ‘Doing good’ refers to ‘knowing no-free-will’. You go there after ego-death.

o Purgatory is where you are if you haven’t fully transformed your mental model and are still being exposed to loosecog to change your model of your personal control power.

o Hell is the state of being separate from fatedness and the Creator of your worldline. To the enlightened mind, ‘doing evil’, and ‘idol worship’, refers to not understanding no-free-will, but instead holding to the animal youthful notion that you have autonomous power, independent from the Creator.

Sophisticated transcendent use of metaphor can handle such kinds of asymmetries. For example, when you do evil, it’s your fault as a freewill agent. When you do good, it’s due to God, who is all-powerful and you only did good because of receiving grace despite your evil natural nature. That’s the clever Augustine asymmetry, which leads people to assert that Augustinism contradicts itself. It’s a designed, cross-mode, meaning-flipping system, where definitions deliberately shift between egoic meaning-network connections and transcendent meaning-network connections. I figured this out and cover it in my 2006 main article. It has to do with mis-leading; it is a little tricky, because we expect symmetry and constancy in a system; we don’t expect to be tricked and have the meanings, all together, flipped in midstream to throw us off balance.

Similar dynamics of meaning: as The Myth of Free Will complains, freewill is a magical and supernatural irrational notion. No-free-will is rational and naturalist (scientific). But I ask with the New Testament: how then shall we describe your continued use of your freewill circuits, your practical childish animal notions of freewill, your return of your feeling of freewill when the mind returns from loosecog to tightcog? After the mystic peak seizure of no-free-will realization, the restoration of control stability and tightcog and freewill feeling/perspective/thinking, is described as transcendent magic and supernatural, back in the now-enlightened tightcog state. Show me a no-free-will-advocating rationalist, and I will show you someone who acts in a magical supernaturalist way but hasn’t made a coherent story about that fact.

The New Testament makes a coherent story: you start like a rebel magician claiming you have freewill; in loosecog you see no-free-will, the truth; returning to tightcog, you return to the feeling (which often makes the mind forget enlightenment, thus being “re-incarnated” into egoic freewill-morality thinking) of freewill/possibilism/branching future/autonomy: how do you justify your use of the freewill mental structures in your life after you have written a book denouncing freewill as a delusion? The NT way is to say metaphorically “now I am a divinized magician”.

Naturalism-spirituality writers are confused and ignorant: they in fact believe the same thing as the New Testament writers and original audience, and the ancient Greeks (but, not integrated with the *experience* of non-self and no-free-will), but they merely fail to decipher and recognize the metaphors of magic and supernatural. Such writers denounce freewill agency as a “ghost” and a “little god”. Those writers ignorantly think that their position is different than the New Testament or Greek religion.

They have the same position, and, ironically, they steal and borrow the same language, to condemn freewill thinking, as religion uses; but those writers lack the *systematic* deciphering of mythic metaphor: they lack integrity: they steal and incoherently (non-systemically) cherry-pick isolated mythemes without grasping and recognizing that the entire system of religious mythemes asserts — but with some deliberate misleading meaning-flipping — the same view and believe that these supposedly anti-religion, anti-supernaturalism writers assert. These rationalist advocates of no-free-will don’t realize it, but they are true believers in New Testament Christianity and ancient Greek religion, but those writers do a bad job of it; they are half-digested; they are still half-insane, half-incoherent.

A full comprehension, full purification of your thinking, requires not what they do — cherry-picking an occasional “funny” “clever” stealing of the analogy ‘exorcise’ freewill illusion. These nominally “anti-religion”, “anti-supernaturalism” writers borrow metaphor without seeing what they are doing: they are *agreeing* with the metaphors, and they are irrationally inconsistently unconsciously *assuming* that the New Testament system instead means these metaphors literally.

These writers are headed toward having no difference between their belief system and that of the Bible, except that these writers 1) lack the integrated loosecog state, and 2) falsely and ignorantly project their own literalism or literalism-assumptions onto the Bible, while privileging themselves as being so intelligent that they only take the supernatural Bible elements metaphorically.

These writers should be recognizing as I decoded, that the Bible expresses a 2-mode meaning-flipping dynamic of understanding and of recognition, systematically — not static, incomplete, incoherent, half-digested, like these writers who borrow “humorously” words like ‘exorcise’ and fail to recognize that they are following the meaning-path that the Bible already carved out. They are re-inventing, re-discovering the Bible’s meaning-system, *piecemeal* without realizing they should instead be asking what I asked since 1986, “How is the Bible expressing no-free-will — and the mental model *transformation* from natural animal childish freewill thinking to no-free-will, by systematic metaphor analogy?”

These writers fail to describe a system by which society first supports the child in forming their freewill thinking and then formally routinely sacrificing that delusion to teach and show no-free-will. That’s what religion is. But instead these writers don’t cover the concern, the consideration, of first teaching freewill before advocating to all people of all ages no-free-will. These writers only think in terms of always teaching no-free-will to everyone in the society without thinking about whether young children should be taught no-free-will.

http://www.naturalism.org/freewill1.htm
Thomas W. Clark wrote:
“Breer also addresses the supposition that even if a belief in free will is false, it is necessary for maintaining the social order:
…..”Despite the obvious restraining influence of guilt and pride, it can be argued that free agency represents one of the primary sources of the very anti-social sentiments against which civilization must defend itself. Teaching our children that they cause their own behavior and thus must take responsibility for it, leaves them open to far more than guilt. For those who do not succeed in love and work, a belief in agency invites self-loathing, bitterness, isolation, and spite. “

Does Naturalism advocate teaching young children no-free-will? The tradition in human history is likely to be like the ancient Greeks: freewill is for children; young adults should be initiated into no-free-will when growing a beard. That also fits our own de-facto 20th Century convention of young adults using entheogens. At young adulthood, the mind is drawn to entheogens; this fits with the model of psychospiritual development: first you develop ego and freewill, and then when that’s done, you sacrifice your limitation to that, and undergo initiation and sacrifice of the youthful self, and then form a more encompassing, multi-state mental model.


These writers have many of these elements, sprinkled throughout Cris Evatt’s book The Myth of No-Free-Will. But they are a long way short of first, recognizing that the NT is metaphor, and beyond that, identifying and deciphering exactly how the NT is metaphor and how all religious myth is metaphor that already has been asserting forever, what these ignorant “new” writers are “creating” as an “alternative” to “supernaturalist” religion. These rationalist advocates of no-free-will are piecemeal, slowly, unawares, while claiming otherwise, in fact re-inventing redundantly what has already been invented: Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian religious understanding and metaphor-mapping.

These OSC-limited no-free-will advocates, lacking systemic literacy of mythemes, claim to provide an alternative to supernaturalist religions, but they only show, by making that false claim, that they are merely illiterate about mythic metaphor and analogy. How many supernaturalist words are these blind writers going to steal before they realize they are preaching the gospel of New Testament Christianity, and just didn’t know it? They show themselves to be ignorant blind dense fools, in their assumption and misreading — falling headlong into the meaning-flipping trap that Hellenistic metaphor laid for them — that the ancient religionists are ignorant blind dense fools.

We finally are faced with the issue of whether to teach young children no-free-will, or whether we love and cherish and protect youthful innocent delusion of freewill: shield the eyes of the children lest they be sacrificed before their time and we lose them to Hades too quickly.

— Michael Hoffman, January 13, 2013, based on original research and idea-development since 1985
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

[historical clarification]
They are re-inventing, re-discovering the Bible’s meaning-system, *piecemeal* without realizing they should instead be asking what I asked since [1988 and especially in 2001], “How is the Bible expressing no-free-will — and the mental model *transformation* from natural animal childish freewill thinking to no-free-will, by systematic metaphor analogy?”


Since 1985 I’ve been asking “How is the Bible expressing transcendent knowledge?” I had a limited theory of transcendent knowledge and a limited theory of the Bible in 1985, when I began developing the Egodeath theory. I went to a Lifespring encounter training in Spring 1985, and was exposed to A Course in Miracles. My father was a leader in these activities, and in Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology.

— Michael Hoffman

I went to a Lifespring encounter training in Spring 1985, and was exposed to A Course in Miracles. My father was a leader in these activities, and in Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology.

Since 1985 I’ve been asking “How is the Bible expressing transcendent knowledge?” I had a limited theory of transcendent knowledge and a limited theory of the Bible in 1985, when I began developing the Egodeath theory.

Sometime in June 1986 to Spring 1987, I wondered what psychedelic was meant by the “scrolls” eaten in Revelation. I was entirely unaware of any entheogen books or articles; I didn’t really encounter entheogen history scholarship until quite late, 1999. Untainted by reading or conversations, I independently recognized and discovered the scrolls metaphor allusion to psychedelics in Revelation; I discovered and recognized the entheogen basis of the Bible independently, thus corroborating many traditional mystics across history, and demonstrating that myth is effective in communicating and continuing the traditional mystic practice and language of entheogenic mystic altered state metaphor.

I asked since 1988 and especially in 2001, “How is the Bible expressing no-free-will — and the mental model *transformation* from natural animal childish freewill thinking to no-free-will, by systematic metaphor analogy?”

— Michael Hoffman

This is my review of The Myth of Free Will, by Cris Evatt.

The Myth of Free Will (3rd Edition)
Cris Evatt
http://amazon.com/o/asin/0970818181
August 2010
140 pages

Unknowingly re-creates the esoteric layer of mythic religion

This book is well-written, intelligently presented, extremely clear in presentation, and presents the promised content. The author’s passages generally alternate with the passages from other writers. This book is a clear presentation of no-free-will advocacy as conceptualized only in the ordinary, non-mystical state of consciousness, based on speculation and abstract reasoning about causal-chain determinism and materialist neuroscience. This book is well-written, within its limitations of scope. She is clear in communicating the points she intends to make. It is easy to understand what she is asserting, and to see where the boundaries of her thought are.

I have a library of books on free will & determinism, Reformed Theology, theory of time, personal agency, cognitive science/philosophy, and connected topics. I highly recommend this book, as a survey of current conventional thinking about no-free-will, mostly as an isolated field — with my deep caveats here, based on my decades of theory development. I’m glad she dismisses quantum physics (the last-ditch shelter for the freewill delusion) as irrelevant. She doesn’t mention the oft-mentioned manyworlds view of QM; she silently assumes a single future, though this is a major pivotal distinction in models of spacetime.

When I made a theory of metaphysical enlightenment that was, unfortunately, based on no-free-will (surely a severe drawback and deal-breaker for popular reception), I readied myself to face enormous disagreement in Philosophy and Religion and Cognitive Science, but to my great surprise, most writers throughout history already agree about no-free-will. This survey book confirmed that realization further. It turns out that what’s been lacking in is not belief in no-free-will, but rather, thoroughgoing cross-field connections — this book does little to remedy that lack of cross-field connections. These authors are too insular, reading each other.

Despite her exposure to Ramesh Balsekar, who rightly explains no-free-will along with no-self in Advaita Vedanta, Evatt has a too-narrow, uninformed assumption that religion asserts freewill. She steals fragments of mythic themes from religion, and then misrepresents religion as monolithically asserting freewill, thus misrepresenting the mystical content of religion. The result is an outsider’s blind groping in the dark toward understanding how to interpret religious mythemes. She references fragmented, disconnected bits and pieces of religion. She has no coherent theory of religion, but only a sub-academic, late modern-era folk model of religion and its assertions of no-free-will.

If Evatt is actually going to shut out a real engagement with mythic or supernaturalist religion from her book, she needs to stop making claims that her view is different and better than such religion. She compares her own defined view to exoteric Christianity, ignoring esoteric, no-free-will Christianity. When we reject Christianity as too confusing outside its Hellenistic context of myth and mystery initiation and outside the associated social-political context, we need to comprehend the esoteric meaning in that system which we are rejecting and claiming to improve upon: experience no-free-will. I’ve shown that New Testament Christianity is a systematic two-state meaning-flipping system; there’s more than just pop naive exoteric freewillist Christianity.

She ought to doubt Sam Harris’ (page 70) uncritical assumption that the meaning of ‘sin’ is single, rather than two distinct meanings, surface and hidden then revealed, in the Bible. Such writers roll out the outsider’s view of religion and then complain that the result collapses upon critique — as if the Hellenistic writers and Bible authors didn’t know that and must have been as crude thinkers as these writers. If the view of the Bible’s religion that you present is bad, that can’t be the right way to read it; blame yourself: open your eye and blame your own inability to read mystic myth right.

Evatt doesn’t deliberately, intelligently engage with religious myth: her titles start with “Myth and (Topic)”; she isn’t qualified to critique the use of myth, including the mythemes of ‘magic’, ‘miracle’, and the ‘supernatural’, in religion; she takes a careless attitude when handling mythemes such as ‘exorcise’ and “little gods”. The book has only fragmented bits of the Possibilism and Eternalism models of time (such as, the future, your future path, already exists); there’s no discussion of spacetime worms or worldline snakes, which I’ve systematically revealed in religion.

Her book doesn’t include contributions from religionists, such as theologians. She ought to have included theologians. By not formally including religion or mysticism in her book, we end up with malformed caricature of religion and mystic experiencing, that misrepresents it. Which is rather a disaster, given that she ends up redundantly re-inventing and re-discovering religion, unknowingly, while claiming to bring an alternative. She needs to specify how her view is truly different than existing religion, and cover the history of no-free-will in religion.

This book assumes a particular mechanism behind no-free-will: causal-chain determinism: it repeatedly asserts that no-free-will is the case, because of causal-chain determinism. She isn’t aware of mystic themes of experiencing time as a spacelike dimension, which asserts no-free-will from a different basis than causal-chain determinism.

Evatt introduces Naturalism, which is a kind of religion that doesn’t involve supernaturalist themes or magical themes. Evatt (and apparently Naturalism) unconsciously asserts the same thing as a interpretation of New Testament Christianity, which I detail in terms of Hellenistic meaning-flipping which in the original mode implies freewill morality, and in the regenerated mode asserts no-free-will as purification and the truth about moral agency.

She says that no-free-will is safe, that we can rely on our habitual thinking. That is dangerously not true when possessed by spirituality consciousness. The fears that she dismisses, expressed by freewill advocates, the “worst case scenario” (her term) you can imagine, is fully constructible in the unchained imagination guided by God only knows what hidden, uncontrollable directors of the mind’s thoughts and intentions. The no-free-will advocates she surveys haven’t engaged in full-on battle with this fear of the forces they inadvertently mention and casually dismiss, even though they mention, in fragmented fashion, key religious mythic words such as ‘fear’, ‘madness’, and ‘battle’.

Evatt describes the severe problems of the mystic no-free-will experience without realizing it. “Working to live without the freewill illusion provokes a simple fear: what if I behave terribly badly? What if I give up all moral values and do terrible things? How can I make moral decisions if there’s no one inside who is responsible? This natural fear is why few people try to live without free will; they fear that if they stop believing in a self who chooses to do the right thing, then they will run amok and all hell will break loose. Is the fear justified? I suspect not. This common fear is no excuse to carry on living in delusion.” (page 11) Note her mention of mythic, religious, and mystic terms, in unsystematic isolation, to describe views about no-free-will (“all hell will break loose”, “living in delusion”).

She critiques “optimism bias” (page 88), but the rationalist no-free-will advocate, when in the mystic frame of mind, will be made to understand why one would ever pray for regaining optimism bias, which has been discarded. Famous last words of the zealous atheist no-free-will writer: “Because a concept’s worst-case scenarios display minimal similarity to the category ideal, the brain routinely distances them from active consideration. So it’s a struggle for the brain to bring up bad scenarios because it consigns them to the fringes of consciousness. In other words, the brain won’t take us there. It doesn’t want to get into trouble.” (page 88). Bible mystics laugh at this sure-to-fail naivete; trying to depend on our reliable animalish ruts of thinking fails when in the mystic state, and getting rid of optimism bias brings fatal instability of control.

Evatt (and Naturalism) doesn’t integrate the intense mystic altered state, and is unaware that that traditional Eucharist-induced state of consciousness enables the mind to actually vividly experience no-free-will. When listing the dangers of drugs on page 66, Evatt doesn’t mention the dangers of entheogens, such as the terrifying, fascinating, numinous experience of the threat of loss of control due to experiencing no-free-will. Evatt dangerously misrepresents and underestimates the dangers of fully and vividly believing in no-free-will, while the Bible, in contrast, presents fear and trembling. She neglects to cover the use of visionary plants in the so-called “Naturalistic” religion she introduces, leaving the reader to do that legwork instead, though college students aren’t good at researching the literature.

She could graduate from cutesy cartoons about free will and god and angels, to Reformed Theology — she’d do well to preserve her comic joking aspect, and incorporate the tragic or serious engagement with no-free-will in religion and cultural history. She uses magical and supernatural themes herself — inconsistently, unsystematically, carelessly, incoherently. She inconsistently and unsystematically steals or cherry-picks, “humorously”, words from supernaturalist-styled, magic-styled religion (“little gods”, ‘exorcise’), without recognizing that this is the same position as New Testament Christianity.

“Most scientists and philosophers intellectually reject the reality of free will while carrying on their lives “as if” it exists.” (page 12). But that continued reliance on free will, which she encourages, is like magic supernaturalism. These writers just don’t make the connections to see that they are re-constructing an already available intelligent reading of Bible religion. Evatt and Naturalism inconsistently claim to reject supernaturalist themes, but then, hypocritically, in disorganized, fragmented fashion, borrow or steal those same metaphors to clarify this supposedly “new” and “modern” position of no-free-will.

Before people claim that their “new realization” of no-free-will is new and evolved, they ought to first recognize the history of no-free-will across every field, and how religious mythemes are exactly designed to depict exactly what these unseeing authors purport to bring, supposedly as an alternative to supernatural-themed religion.

This book doesn’t describe the process of initiation into no-free-will, how to formally sacrifice children’s freewill self-identity, or how to exorcise the freewill demon. The book doesn’t present an initiation practice of transformation of one’s mental model from natural animal freewill thinking to rational no-free-will thinking, and thus is inferior to the New Testament and Greek myth and mystery religion. This book asserts that we have the feeling of freewill, and ought to change our thinking to no-free-will. It is sprinkled with descriptions of arguments worded in terms of ‘fear’, ‘terror’, ‘objection’, ‘apprehension’ about loss of control; ‘exorcise’, ‘little gods’ — and yet this is claimed to be a different system than the Bible.

My work shows how mythemes in Hellenistic and Bible fiction can be interpreted and deciphered systematically as already asserting, through intelligently recognized metaphor (revealing the meaning), what this book asserts and describes in half-digested, unsystematic cherry-picking of those same metaphors: that freewill thinking needs to be “exorcised” (her term) to “purify” (I think her book uses this term) our thinking and make it consistent, that we are off-the-mark in our original thinking as if we are “little gods” (her term). This book asserts that freewill is magic and supernatural thinking — and this book assumes that metaphor-using religion disagrees. Actually, metaphor deciphering is what’s needed, as I have systematically deciphered.

Despite this book being a survey showing how many people assert no-free-will, Evatt doesn’t realize: the problem isn’t convincing more people of no-free-will; the problem at hand is to intelligently make the connections across all the fields, especially religion, myth, and the mystic state, which gives an overwhelming experience of no-free-will, rather than being limited like this book, to armchair speculation in the non-religious mode of consciousness which scholars today normally mistakenly take for granted unconsciously, as normal.

Evatt asserts half-truths constantly: she says that “we feel free will”, but that’s only conditionally true; actually we feel free will when we are in the ordinary state of consciousness, but instead we feel and even perceive no-free-will when we are in the mystic state which is the religious state of consciousness, as my work has systematically explained. This book has helped identify the specific differences between conventional no-free-will thinking within rationalist fields that assume the ordinary state of consciousness, and my transdisciplinary, multi-state theory of no-free-will.

Evatt is an example confirming that “anti-religion” rationalists have gravely inadequate (exoteric-only) notions of what religion actually asserts and amounts to, whether conventional official books on religion or books about mystic and esoteric religion — even as they pluck isolated themes from that same corpus of thinking and experiencing.

— Michael Hoffman, January 13, 2013, based on original research and idea-development since 1985
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

[clarification]
Evatt is an example confirming that “anti-religion” rationalists have gravely inadequate (exoteric-only) notions of what religion actually asserts and amounts to [ — that they haven’t read the books], whether conventional official books on religion or books about mystic and esoteric religion — even as they pluck isolated themes from that same corpus of thinking and experiencing.

[typo correction; deleted ‘no-‘]
She references fragmented, disconnected bits and pieces of religion. She has no coherent theory of religion, but only a sub-academic, late modern-era folk model of religion and its assertions of []free-will.


Evatt titles her book “The Myth of Free Will”. Like the words uncomprehendingly uttered by Odysseus, ominous foreboding, she almost utters profound truths but without realizing it, lacking the connections; she doesn’t understand what she is almost saying: her title suggests what would be a profound title: “Myth Is About Experiencing No-Free-Will”. Myth is of (about) free will: as in, the will isn’t free; Myth is about the realization that free will is a myth. Myth describes the experiential realization that free will is a myth.

Evatt’s title is “The Myth of Free Will” and the cover shows a great illustration of the forking crossroads, she is oblivious to the sacred ground of ancient Greek myth she is treading on foolishly like Odysseus. Myth is exactly that: myth is about the experience-induced transformation from freewill thinking to no-free-will realization. The god of the crossroads. Janus and Hermes.

Extract the points, revelations, takeaways, implication from my review of the book The Myth of Free Will.

Myth is about Free Will. Her title is a grand irony, like Odysseus saying ominous words he doesn’t know the meaning of them.

Myth describes the experiential process of transformation of the mental model from the natural freewill premise (which is the original state of sin) to the rational, no-free-will realization.

— Michael Hoffman, January 14, 2013, based on original theorizing since 1985

I provide a Cognitive Science approach toward term usage regarding entheogens. The word or metaphor of ‘acid’ generally means entheogen, means (as the active mechanism) a cognitive-binding loosening agent. Psycholytic chemicals, in visionary plants. A good term per the Egodeath theory is psycholytic, defined as mental-connection dissolving, or mind loosening; a cognitive loosening chemical, a chemical that loosens mental construct matrix binding, a chemical that loosens mental construct relationship matrix binding.

lysis: In the field of Biochemistry, the *dissolution* of cells, disrupting the cell membrane. Dissolve and coagulate. Some connections are broken to some degree. A few connections are slightly loosened, or all connections are completely broken. Most useful for fastest, most efficient mental model transformation is the middle zones, where some connections are partly loosened or partly broken. If too loose, cannot remember or construct the new (albeit innate in the mind’s potential) mental model of self, time, control, and possibility. If too tight, not loose enough, the alternative perception isn’t seen or felt. There is a sweet spot zone.

Cognitive association binding intensity can be divided into these 5 zones:

Too loose
Very loose but useful
Medium loose
Slightly loose, but useful
Too tight

Mental model transformation occurs by ingesting a chemical that, like an acid for cognition, loosens cognitive binding, mental construct association binding. Thus we could well describe all entheogens as ‘acid’. Anything we say about LSD can be said the same for other entheogens; therefore, we can simply write ‘acid’ whenever we might have to decide whether to write: psychedelic, entheogen, mushrooms, visionary plants, 4-HO-DiPT, Salvia, Mescaline, Peyote, DMT, or Ayahuasca. Cannabis potentiates acid, and the point is the acid effect.

“Dissolve and coagulate” in the Esotericism era is exactly analogous to the term ‘acid’ in 1960s. Why did they say “dissolve and coagulate”? Because that’s exactly what their elixir does to cognitive associations, intensely tangibly so. You dissolve, your world dissolves, your mind dissolves, your perception dissolves, your control dissolves, and then, you experience it all coagulate again back into tightcog, now bringing some % remembering what you mystically un-forgot during the peak window of the acid-dissolved cognitive state. What a coincidence it is not, ‘acid’ in 1960s and “dissolve and coagulate” in the Esotericism era of visionary-plant alchemy.

— Michael Hoffman, January 14, 2013, based on original research and idea-development since 1985
Copyright (C) 2013 Michael S. Hoffman, http://www.egodeath.com All Rights Reserved.

The Many Faces of Biblical Humor
David Peters
http://amazon.com/o/asin/0761839585

http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/13252.aspx —
Book review by Tony Fitzpatrick: excerpt condensed by Michael Hoffman

“Peters’ favorite story is Balaam and the Talking Donkey. Someone [the bad king, against Israel] calls on Balaam to prophesy against the children of Israel and Moses for coming out of Egypt. God tells Balaam not to go, but he’s offered a lot of money, so he goes anyway. On the road, the donkey that he’s riding sees an angel of God with a sword [angel of death, you must die ego death to get past the flaming fire gateway, burning off your moral transient failable destructible volatile self-concept; egoic thinking can only last until the mind is exposed to loosecog, then the illusion collapses and can never be taken for reality again -mh], and the donkey stops.”

“Balaam can’t see the angel, and he beats the donkey. Farther down the road, the donkey sees the angel again and stops between two walls, crushing Balaam’s foot. There is no way getting around the angel [pre-set worldline -mh], so the donkey lies down. God enables the donkey to talk: `What did I do to make you beat me these three times? Have I ever done anything like this before?’ God enables Balaam to see the angel, and the donkey says `If I were you, I’d take better stock of the situation.’ When Balaam sees the situation for what it is, he faints.”

Balaam faints (control seizure).
His foot is crushed (the foundation of what he depends on for control-power collapses). See my posts on leg, foot, sitting, carried, riding.

— Michael Hoffman, January 14, 2013, based on theory work since 1985

Corroborating what I wrote, that the Egodeath theory is the crown jewel product of the Psychedelic 80s, Ben Sessa’s British book The Psychedelic Renaissance claims that 1988 was the Second Summer of Love.
http://amazon.com/o/asin/1908995009

My work on the Egodeath theory started in 1985.
My core breakthrough was January 1988.
My project announcement party (I have the videotape showing my college friends and presentation) was Summer 1988.
My Minnesota first draft manuscript was August 1988.
By the end of 1988, my article draft and notes covered all of the core theory as reflected in my 1997 and 2006 articles.

At the start of 1988, I didn’t have the core theory, though I was very near to having it.
At the end of 1988, I had the complete core theory, and many of the mythic elements that would fully come together in November 2001.

Thus the Egodeath core theory was created and developed essentially as such, as the core theory, defining some 12 principles forming the backbone/main structure, during 1988. It had roots back to 1985 and earlier, as everything has roots. But the Theory as such, recognizable fully as the Egodeath theory, was formed during 1988. If I pick one point in time, that the Theory is a product of, it would have to be January 11, 1988, before the 2nd Summer of Love; but, the announcement party was Summer 1988. The Egodeath theory is a product of 1988.

I actually think of 1987 as the 2nd Summer of Love, because I was in the midst of the main ramp-up toward breakthrough, writing in my Red Binder, the high point of my hand writing, my idea development notes. I was listening to the new album that everyone was anticipating in Summer 1987: Sgt. Pepper was finally released! That was a really big deal. We could finally hear the album, a wormhole into Abbey Road Studios opened up and we were transported into it. I was listening to the new albums I got, pristine: Her Satanic Majesty’s Request, by the Stones; Donovan.

In 1988 I also started serious work on electric lyre equipment usage techniques, and came really close to figuring it out then, but just slightly missed making the connections, then had full breakthrough in that field in 2012.

My work from the 1980s:
January 1988 (core theory)
November 2001 (myth/history theory-extension)

— Michael Hoffman, January 14, 2013