Transcendent Knowledge Podcast episode 27

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Contents:

• Links
• Outline
• Commentary
• Machine Transcription

Links

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkmpbFAAJXI

Outline

• The meaning of the word ‘mystic’
• Precise definition of mystical transformation
• Setting the bar for attaining mystichood
• How special are mystics?
• Idealisation of mystics
• The relevance of mystics to the egodeath theory
• Mystics tripping frequently
• Comparable concepts such as gnostics, hierophants and prophets
• Verbal communication compared to written communication
• The relevance of Ramesh Balsekar’s thinking compared to other self-help gurus
• Fusing the two states of consciousness; joining vs blending
• Hesychasm as a natural means of accessing the altered state
• The incompatibility between Jimmy’s book knowledge and his experiential knowledge

Commentary

• The word ‘gnostic’ is recently controverted. April D. DeConick defends its use, in her book The Gnostic New Age. Reclaiming and redefining it better.
• Like Max said here, I too have a tepid idea about the usefulness of the term ‘mystics’, it’s kind of a joke, not a respected concept to me.
• ~”none of them impress me that much. … What’s impressive [re: brands of mysticism] when you’ve got the Egodeath theory ? … Ramesh weak compared to.” 24:44 quotable
  24*60 + 44 = 1484s
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkmpbFAAJXI&t=1484s
• “jimmy is a mega advanced mystic” ~29:00 “but i don’t like the concept of ‘mystic’”
• he wants something more than, perhaps, a panic-stricken psychotic trip to Hell” ~47:29 todo: audio clip.
  47*60+29 = 2849s
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkmpbFAAJXI&t=2849s
  • That gives me an idea for a new marketing/branding plan:
    the Egodeath theory = a panic-stricken psychotic trip to Hell

Machine Transcription

hello and welcome to transcendent knowledge podcast episode number 27. now this episode is subtitled the mystic episode this episode is going to be a solo podcast with just myself max freakout experimenting with a new podcasting format going to see how this goes so the last episode of the podcast was a three-way conversation between myself cyber disciple and jimmy and it generated a large amount of discussion and analysis and also controversy and even about the fundamental issue of whether or not it is even appropriate for me to have jimmy as a guest on the podcast given his whole disorganized conversational style and also his disorganized and incomplete understanding of the ego death theory so with this episode i wanted to carefully respond to what came up in the time since episode 26 came out and i also wanted to clarify my own point of view point of view on the various issues which i think is much needed at this point so in particular i need to fully explain why i said several times that we are not mystics and that the ego death theory is not relevant to mystics or it doesn’t address mystics because during the conversation with jimmy and cyber i never really said what i personally think because i was purely split between either paraphrasing the ego death theory or else paraphrasing jimmy kind of saying stuff back to him what i understood him to be saying or implying but maybe the recording didn’t go exactly according to plan i didn’t keep it focused enough i failed in that endeavor because before we did the recording i had planned to try to make the conversation focus very specifically on the topic of determinism so that we could clear up some specific misconceptions about the ego death theory in jimmy’s understanding but so i didn’t exactly succeed in that name because jimmy does have an exceptional ability to throw curveballs into the conversation so we ended up talking about some topics that i hadn’t planned at all and indeed i hadn’t even really ever thought much about a lot of the issues that that we talked about during that episode

so it mostly centers around the meaning of the word mystic and the connotations of that word it was maybe the the point when the podcast was thrown off track in terms of what i had planned for it was the moment when the word mystics reared large in in the conversation so i want to state absolutely precisely what i think about the word mystic and about the definition of the word mystic as well well so first of all the basic point of grammar is that the word mystic has two forms it can either be an adjective or a noun and the ego death theory already contains a very clear robust definition of the word mystic in the adjective form as in the the phrase mystic altered state which appears all over the ego death theory

so when you’re just considering the adjective form of the word mystic it very straightforwardly just means the same as loose cognitive but i think something about in the specific etymology of the words is to do with the two-stage dynamic of first secret and then revealed

however the ego death theory does not have a corresponding definition of the word mystic in the noun form unless i’ve missed it i think this now this kind of recent discussion this is the first time that this has come up as a big issue in addition to jimmy saying explicitly like i think that the ego death theory should cover mystics to to a greater extent so the real problematic issue here is about the meaning of the noun form of the word mystic plural mystics which is shorthand for a mystic person so it’s like you’ve got these two definitions these two grammatical forms where the adjective form refers to a state of consciousness and at least partially it describes that state of consciousness so it picks out a certain crucial feature of the the altered state of consciousness this hidden and then revealed aspect but the noun form of the word mystic refers to a person either to a type of person or else to a specific person and it doesn’t really describe that person it merely designates them it’s a sign as opposed to a symbol

so my basic position about the noun form of the word mystic is that i am skeptical that it’s useful or helpful or meaningful as a concept and furthermore i suspect that it might simply amount to a kind of modern era mistake or a misreading of religious mysticism and what that’s all about so in other words i’m saying the word mystic makes perfect sense it’s easy to define when it’s an adjective describing the altered state of consciousness but it makes far less sense it becomes ambiguous and perhaps even misleads and distorts understanding when it’s used as a noun as in designating a person a mystic person

and i think um if i remember correctly some some writer it might have been elaine pagels made a very similar point about uh about the word gnostic in one of her books might have been um the gnostic gospels she said something like it’s not an accurate concept uh gnostic that is it it’s not a natural kind or it’s not an accurate sociological kind it’s more like a modern misunderstanding projected onto a past era so the people themselves the people who modern people refer to as gnostics wouldn’t have wouldn’t have seen themselves that way so it’s an anachronistic understanding of what agnostic is and also exactly in line with the ego death theory you can make this this kind of point about jesus does jesus refer to a person or does jesus refer to the altered state or does jesus refer to something else like um astrological symbolism or some some other theory so the attitude of the ego death theory is something like jesus as a historical person is essentially a modern era mistake uh the mistaken assumption of historicism and the ego death theory then clarifies that jesus is properly or esoterically interpreted as an altered state or at least a meta metaphorical arrow pointing to the altered state so the claim i’m making here uh is i basically i suspect that something similar to this is the case when when we consider the noun form of the word mystic it’s like perhaps it’s a distorted exoteric inaccuracy to interpret the word mystic as referring to a person

and also just with the definition itself the category of mystic the way i see it could be as arbitrarily broad or narrow as you choose to define it so it could mean any person who has ever taken acid and tripped becomes a mystic or you could narrow the definition uh it could only be people who have been through the the classic initiation progression culminating in ego death maybe those are the the mystics or it could mean only people who know about the ego death theory so it’s a question of how high do you set the bar for attaining mystic hood and it’s arbitrary and the dictionary definitions are completely inadequate for clarifying this matter they don’t tell you that they don’t even uh incorporate and integrate the information from the ego death theory to be able to think of mystic hood in this way

and it and also like jimmy was playing this exact same definitional game that’s a large part of what he was saying was attempting to set a bar for being a mystic for attaining mystic hood and i think one one issue that came up in if you combine transcendent knowledge podcast episode 26 with all of the discussion that came after it was one clear indicator of how fuzzily defined the word the noun form of the word mystic it’s because there were so many different qualifiers that got added on to that word without really even commenting on on the qualifiers all that much so for example during that conversation we hear about great mystics and professional mystics shamanistic mystics dictionary defined mystics aspiring mystics and so on so all these different qualifiers which are going to subtly change the the meaning of what we’re talking about and also looking at the various dictionary definitions they’re they’re mostly quite vague and imprecise uh in the sense that you can clearly make all of them basically can be made more precise by integrating the information from the ego death theory which none of them have done so so for example there was one one definition that i saw in the merriam-webster dictionary which defined mystic as a follower of a mystical way of life or an advocate of a theory of mysticism and it strikes me both of those are quite vague and both of them stand to be corrected by the ego death theory to say a follower of a mystical way of life needs to be clarified precisely in terms of what changes in a in a person’s daily conduct before and after psychedelic initiation um and to say the second definition they’re an advocate of a theory of mysticism well that’s you can straightforwardly just just just say an advocate of the ego death theory perhaps i mean are there other forms are there other theories of mysticism that you know would also compete for that title of turning a person into a mystic but anyway having said that i would also say that any definition of what a mystic person is would surely have to include people like me uh and jimmy and michael hoffman and cyber disciple you know us like altered state explorers and thinkers to have any any real meaning if i mean it’s like if if we are not mystics in this world then nobody is i mean like that’s crazy to think of what you would have to do if if if we didn’t fit the bill so jimmy said twice that he thinks he’s an aspiring mystic and i take that to mean like like not really a mystic especially in the way that he couched it of like oh you know i i should trip more often to be to be like the mystics were you know he wasn’t including himself in the in the group known as mystics by calling himself an aspiring mystic but you know i would i would be more inclined to say no he’s not aspiring he’s a highly advanced mystic because well two reasons first of all because of his personal experience he’s had really hardcore bad trip on mushrooms which is such a central part of of understanding mysticism understanding religious metaphor but also because because of the fact that he’s engaging in this dialogue he’s coming on the transcendent knowledge podcast and even though he might not be fully able and and you know as as competent with understanding the theory of some other people that have been on the podcast at least he’s engaging in a dialogue at least he’s not just ignoring it and or turning the other way like not wanting to engage with it at all so he’s actually you know he’s he’s an advanced mystic uh he just doesn’t think of himself that way but so to be absolutely clear that’s my opinion that’s what i think personally which i explicitly avoided saying during episode 26 of the podcast because it’s too it’s too complicated and nuanced and it was completely not relevant to what i was trying to achieve with with jimmy which is to have a a a conversation about the intricacies of the concept of determinism and we we’d gone off course by that point uh so yeah that’s that’s how i understand mystical like a fairly you know unhelpful concept i think i have a tepid opinion about about the word mystic in the noun form of the word so i need to explain very carefully why i said and why i repeated several times the claim that we are not mystics

so it’s crucial to understand the context of that claim in light of the conversational dynamics that i was immersed in at the time rather than just isolating that claim we are not mystics you know to do that is to take it out of context it was a highly unusual highly specific context that i was saying that in uh because i i as i said i i planned that conversation to be very specifically just about the com the the concept of determinism just to clear up what i a crucial place where jimmy seemed to be getting the ego death theory wrong but at the same time i knew from experience i know from a lot of uh dialogues that i’ve had with jimmy that it is difficult typically to pin him down um to keep a conversation focused on a specific topic and to get him to come to a specific concrete conclusion about any particular topic it’s it’s a challenge and it’s something that i’ve tried to do a lot in the past and been met with a lot of frustration when i’ve been doing it so i was very much in the mental mode of i must just keep this conversation on track keep bringing it back to the core focus this time i’m i’m going to succeed with jimmy like i have to achieve what i failed to do last time so i was really psyched up to lock horns with jimmy and try to keep his mind focused and just have a productive conversation that actually goes somewhere you know goes towards further clarification and no longer repeating errors misunderstandings um but then so the conversation was progressing and then at some point it occurred to me that jimmy was talking about a concept that he had constructed in his own head and he was he was uniquely defining this thing which he was calling mystics sometimes he said shamans i think once or twice he used the word shamans to mean more or less the same thing but mostly he was saying mystics and he was explicitly defining this this concept is a group of people there’s various things that he said about mystics various characteristics that he picked out in his his idea his idealization of of what mystics are he said things like they were from a bygone era he said they don’t really exist in the modern world and he said that he didn’t say maybe but he implied that they’re holier than we are they’re more special than we are because they have better ethical conduct for example um like we were talking about jainism at one point where they’re known for being you know highly you know morally um conscious on the on a day-to-day level um and also he said not just not just better ethical conduct but that they trip more often he he said that they were frequenting the altered state and that he doesn’t see anybody in the modern world including himself frequenting the the altered state like these ancient mystics uh were um and he said that these mystics they lived in like secluded temples in the forest in some places and also he said mystics can sometimes uh access the psychedelic state by natural means like hazy chasm he didn’t go into much detail about hazy chasm i looked it up afterwards it’s like uh the christian concept of contemplation like um basically probably something like sitting around meditating probably but he didn’t really define that he just said yeah they go into the psychedelic state by natural means they don’t need to take drugs those are all things that jimmy said more or less explicitly during that conversation in episode 26 um about what mystics are like that was his concept of a mystic so he was setting his own bar for the level of specialness that mystics have he was suggesting his own definition of what mystics are and generally at least like i strongly got the impression that he was defining mystics in such a way that uh it’s like he wanted to push them out of reach of us make them more special or better like he was striving to just define mystics as a special class of people somehow above everybody else different from everybody else and yet crucially he was including himself in the set of non-mystics he wasn’t claiming to be a mystic uh like aspiring mystic to me means failing to attain mystical and he said that he himself didn’t he didn’t trip often enough uh he was even if it was like he was lamenting himself and not tripping often enough to be a proper mystic he felt guilty about it because he said he does it once a year

so so i explained like how i personally i think that the concept of the noun form of mystic in general is poorly defined i think that’s that’s a broad overall opinion that i have it’s not a concept that i would normally use myself i wouldn’t bring a concept like that into a conversation it was it was very much prompted strongly prompted by jimmy to even start talking about mystics in this way and so then like it’s like so i i start out by thinking uh without really thinking about it very much i just have this general feeling that the word mystic is poorly defined and not very useful and then jimmy is saying all these things about um mystics in the forest and mystics who uh have really good ethical conduct don’t kill insects uh that kind of thing and at that point i got the feeling that he was basically pushing the concept of mystic even further into the the realms of feeble definition than they already are

i mean i think that probably inevitably a big part of this is simply the fact that the nature of verbal communication compared to written communication it’s a completely different thing like in in a written conversation like on a web forum or email exchange it would be so much easier to explicitly spell out the respective definitions of the word mystic you know the the truly philosophical approach to a you know breaking down a discussion like this but given like you have to understand this was a spontaneous unscripted verbal conversation and furthermore like it was a conversation with jimmy like of all people like this very particular type of person with a very particular style of communicating you know michael hoffman was talking about um adhd attention deficit um asperger’s um to characterize you know this this way of communicating

so it’s like whenever i’m talking with jimmy like what’s going on in my head is you know if i’m the one that’s doing the talking at the time like okay i’ve maybe got a few more seconds to make a point to say something and then jimmy is going to start talking again and he’s gonna come up with some other tangent you know plucked out of some place he’ll say something like i don’t know if you’ve heard of this person i don’t know if you’ve heard of this idea and then i have to listen to him say talk about this and figure out how to integrate it into the theme of the conversation and it’s almost inevitably going to be some trites predictable pop spiritualism you know making the same kind of predictable familiar mistakes when compared alongside the ego death theory and what they’re trying to explain spiritual issues uh nothing really impressive um he doesn’t he’s like he impresses me with the breadth of his his book knowledge like it’s impressive that he’s he’s got a good bibliography attached to to him to his message but none of the individual writers impressed me that much like like what’s impressive when you’ve got the ego death theory you know ramesh bolsakar is feeble compared to the ego death theory in terms of you know the depth of the explanation and so so the conversation with jimmy is just not a particularly organized situation on the contrary it’s chaotic and disorganized you know to have that like hour and a half period of engaging in in verbal dialogue with this guy it’s like i want him to be a part of the conversation because like the alternative approach would be to just say to him okay jimmy sit down shut your mouth and i’m going to lecture you about the ego death theory talk to me at the end ask questions at the end but it’s it’s that’s not the way i’m doing it that’s not what not the way i do things you know i’m hoping that his comprehension will gradually just kind of come about um over time via like this back and forth communication so i give i give him all the space that he needs to spell out what he wants to talk about but i’m always trying to link it back to to the the core concept of the ego death theory i mean that’s one thing about jimmy that did impress me is like sure he’s kind of all over the place with his citations of different writers but i like the way that he um really gives so much attention to ramesh balsa car like he’s got an instinct about that at least that ramesh balsa carl probably one of the most um like explicitly relevant writers uh in in the the domain of pop spiritualism for the ego death theory like in like given that basically ramesh bolsikar’s whole presentation was a self-help guru um and if you take all the self-help gurus and then measure them up you know for the criteria of um relevance uh applicability to the ego death theory like so he’s you know he jimmy jimmy has focused on ramesh bolsikar um because he recognizes i i hope he does the had the closeness of the the model uh so yeah i mean written communication is just so much more organized than verbal communication because it allows for the possibility of re-reading um when you write a comment you can like go over it and i always do this when i’m when i’m engaging in written discussions on like by emails or um web forums like i don’t i will edit and re-edit and keep reading and refining um the way that i write something but it’s completely different in verbal communication because you just you know as soon as as soon as a comment a sentence has left your mouth that’s it you can’t go back and and change it so invariably the you know the quality of the communication is going to be sub-optimal compared to written anyway um so jimmy mentioned being an aspiring mystic he said that three times in total over the course of the the episode so one time he said i am an aspiring mystic so it’s like he was in some way he was characterizing his relationship with with mystics um but then a second time he said like hey remember that i am an aspiring mystic he was like putting that issue back into the the conversation like but then on a third okay a separate occasion i don’t know if it was before or after he said he actually contradicted himself on that point and he said if i was an aspiring mystic i would trip more often than once a year so that implies that he’s not even an aspiring mystic let alone an actual mystic so in other words uh jimmy stated three times the logical equivalent of i am not a mystic um but you know that that contrasts with like what i said a minute ago that the way i see jimmy personally in my opinion um is like if someone put a gun to my head and insisted on pain of death that i have to answer the question is jimmy a mystic i would say well yeah that’s a no-brainer of course he’s a he’s a mega advanced mystic even though he doesn’t think he is from my point of view he’s a mega advanced mystic he’s quite close to the cutting edge like the the growing tip of of mysticism which is the ego death theory but but of course in any normal situation i would never do that because i don’t like the concept of mystic in the noun form it’s a sub-optimal concept i never use that concept naturally you know of my own volition because i just i don’t really agree with the whole edifice the whole network of associations of using the word mystic to refer to a person instead of a state of consciousness so i think that that definition of mystic it’s it’s like a suspicion like i suspect that it’s grounded in modern era distortion concerning what mysticism is really all about i mean it’s like i think there’s a question that comes up here is who exactly gets to do the etymology in cases like this like who’s on whose authority do we take the etymology do we leave the etymology up to the kind of people that write the dictionaries who don’t incorporate the ego death theory and who knows if if they themselves are psychedelic initiates or not um but they they don’t explicitly incorporate uh the concepts of psychedelic initiation into their dictionary definitions of the word mystic um or or can we trust ourselves as as psychedelic initiates as advanced initiates who know about the ego death theory can we decide ourselves so michael hoffman has talked about this issue in regard to the the etymology of the word baccalaureate and whether it relates to bacchus and laurel um and he asked the same question like who who do we leave it up to who is the correct authority in etymology for these you know very central relevant concepts um like like like like the meaning of mystic the meaning of what a laurel represents that kind of thing

so so like i get to this point in the conversation with jimmy in episode 26 where i suddenly realized that he’s doing he’s doing this he’s talking about mystics in this way like it’s like i felt that he had succeeded in throwing the conversation off track away from determinism and into irrelevance like like concepts about mystics that i don’t even agree with that i’ve never even thought about when i still hadn’t achieved my goal of pinning him down on a clear understanding of the way that determinism is relevant to or the way that it applies to the ego death theory and so i said emphatically like several times i said we are not mystics and like when i said that i was basically paraphrasing jimmy i wasn’t expressing my own opinion i was repeating back to jimmy what i understood him to be saying that we are not mystic so he was saying that he isn’t mystic and then i guess uh i guess to establish kinship with him like put myself at the same in the same bracket maybe i i don’t know um what was going through my head exactly at that point but according to his definition of what a mystic is as i understood him to be said these ancient uh forest dwelling people who trip very regularly by natural means etc this idealized concept of a mystic who’s basically better than us above us more holy than than we are uh but that’s not that’s not what i think at all um my opinion on the question of is jimmy a mystic or am i a mystic is far more nuanced than a simple binary yes or no answer we are mystics we are not mystics and i i’ve never thought about it in this much depth and like spelled it out in this much depth because it had never mattered to me that much like

so i think that my strategy in the conversation at that point saying uh i am not no we are not mystics i think what i was really saying is like something along the lines of jimmy i don’t want to talk about your artificial conception of what mystics are please stop talking about mystics they are irrelevant to this conversation let’s go back to talking about determinism like i have planned to

uh another thing that i said which i need to carefully address here um saying that the ego death theory is not relevant to mystics and i think when i said that specific comment i was uh somehow tacitly using the same kind of definition of mystic which belongs only to jimmy you know this um this idealized way of like special forest dwelling people who who trip very often that set of associations that jimmy was using um it’s like the the the kind of definition of mystic that pushes them away artificially from the scope of the ego death theory um you know for example just to explain this like as i see it irrelevance between lack of relevance between the ego death theory and jimmy’s conception of a mystic it’s like the ego death theory contains no account of the psychological effect of tripping very frequently which is distinct from its account of the psychological effect of the standard initiation sequence which culminates in mystical ego death death and rebirth experience um the ego death theory doesn’t explicitly um distinguish that from what jimmy mentioned about like mystics tripping frequently as like almost a daily thing because because you know the standard initiation sequence it’s like michael hoffman has clearly spelled that out it’s it just requires a small handful of psychedelic sessions it’s not about some some unknown number done very very frequently as like a a major life practice it’s a circumscribed thing psychedelic initiation it takes a finite amount of time to it has a beginning a middle and a and a completion to it which didn’t sound like like what jimmy was describing at all so no i could clarify then i suppose what i exactly meant i think that mystics are as irrelevant to the ego death theory as jimmy’s sense of frequenting the psychedelic state of consciousness is irrelevant to the ego death theory given that the ego death theory is about this um this progression this psychological progression that happens during a finite number of sessions and similarly the ego death theory contains a completely different model of the meaning of the transformation in morality the transformation in moral consciousness which accompanies psychedelic initiation which actually denies the kind of egoic free will based idea of moral transformation that jimmy was talking about so he he said he gave the specific example of he found it harder to kill insects since his psychedelic tripping experience so that’s that’s an egoic style of um modeling morality and and modeling the transformation immorality whereas the ego death theory has this much deeper issue of this much deeper way of describing it as like there’s whether you kill insects or not according to the ego death theory any actor killing an insect or or refraining from killing an insect or whatever is eternally contained within the four-dimensional crystalline block universe the the pre-existing future and so god the sculptor of the block is ultimately responsible for all acts whether they are good or evil in the conventional egoic sense of of morality but again in in my own personal opinion which i did not express on the last podcast i think that the ego death theory is relevant to mystics but to mystics who are defined differently you know it does it so it may be irrelevant to jimmy’s definition of mystics but it’s relevant to a different definition of mystics and and then to to further flesh that out i would say that the optimal definition of what a mystic is which would then bring mystics within the explanatory scope of the ego death theory is probably going to be some combination of the various dictionary definitions of the word from the various dictionaries but then additionally upgraded or clarified by the information which the ego death theory reveals so you need to look at the dictionary definitions with the ego death theory in mind and then come up with a new

combination like a a new absolutely airtight version of uh how to define mystic which takes the ego ditherian into consideration

um but but then when you think about that that’s like a blatant tautology it’s circular logic because what you’re saying is the ego death theory is relevant to the ego death theory’s own inferred definition of what a mystic is as opposed to jimmy’s irrelevant definition of what a mystic is but there’s so many other um words and phrases that we can use to try to define what exactly we are like our small group who are actually engaged in in this uh this conversation so it’s like are we mystics are we gnostics are we shamans are we hierophants are we wise men are we shepherds are we god’s chosen elect etc and and many others um you know shorthand words for psychedelic initiate

so i mean personally my preferred my my favorite word which i prefer to think in terms of in trying to conceptualize my role michael hoffman’s role you know where we fit in in the work in the world is the word profit i think that’s a much more powerful term much more directly relevant to the ego death theory than mystic because it contains this um this implicit part of the etymology is like seeing the future as the reference to the pre-existence of the future is built into the word prophet and also it contains a connotation of rarity and alienation from non-profits so i mean in that regard i’d be fascinated to hear jimmy comment on whether or not he’s an aspiring prophet or who does he can consider to be prophets does he think that ramesh bolsika for instance is a prophet

so another issue that came up um with the whole concept of fusing the the two states of consciousness uh that was michael’s word that like michael was the one who brought that into the the the discussion um the way i said it in the last podcast it was something like collapsing the distinction between the two states of consciousness so the way i see it the way i understand the ego death theory it’s like in some sense the two states are as a matter of fact fused or they become fused in some sense at the point of ego death but in a different sense of being fused a different sense of what it means to be fused the two states of consciousness are not fused so again it’s not a binary straightforward issue of fused or not fused like there’s a semantic challenge here to define the sense in which the two states of consciousness are fused and the sense in which the two states of consciousness are not fused so it’s an ambiguity in the meaning of the word fuse because fuse can mean blend or it can also mean like like blend as in mix but it can also mean join or or fix like join together fix together so i think that the best way of saying it the two states of consciousness are joined but they’re not blended so they’re fused in the sense of joined but they’re not fused in the sense of blended they don’t become one but they do become attached to each other it’s like this is in line with the ego their theory like the two states are joined because they are contiguous with each other you go from the ordinary state into the altered state and then back again but the memory of each state is present in the other state so you can remember the ordinary state when you are tripping and you can remember what it’s like to trip when you’re back in the ordinary state it’s like a yin yang symbol with like that’s that’s the the shape of the join between the two states of consciousness

so i think the way that jimmy was defining the way that the mystics access the altered state of consciousness suggested to me a blending to some extent of the two states as opposed to mere joining jimmy was was veering in the direction of blending so for example he talked about mystics tripping frequently he didn’t i don’t think he spelled out exactly how frequently he had in mind but that that suggested to me like a blending of the altered state of consciousness into ordinary life to make it part of daily routine instead of a special thing set apart in circumscribed trip sessions and similarly he was talking about like he thinks that mystics use natural means like hazy chasm to access the altered state without taking drugs and that also suggests to me a kind of blending i mean so okay so maybe he’s not precisely defining it that way but it’s like i get the impression that’s what he’s that’s what he’s pushing towards that’s something like what he has in mind i mean so maybe i’m i’m stretching jimmy to make jimmy fit into the concept of blending of the two states of consciousness but i think it’s more general than that it’s a like a general i’m trying to understand jimmy’s whole mindset and i don’t i suppose the way i see it it’s like he’s got two competing forces in his head i think that’s a good way of understanding what’s going on with him um his book knowledge and his experiential knowledge compete and so he does understand the distinction between the two states of consciousness but at the same time he strives to blur that distinction

i think i get the impression that maybe jimmy is disappointed by enlightenment he’s expecting something more than deterministic non-control he wants something more blissful perhaps than a panic-stricken psychotic trip to hell and he’s seeing that blissful thing in the pop spirituality books that he’s reading because those those books like uh ken wilbur and ramesh balsa car people like that they’re so typically they’re based at most in the premature beginner stage um of the the non-dual style of thinking and then mistaking that for advanced enlightenment and ego death you know against his own personal experience of the altered state so he he did actually express explicit disagreement with michael’s characterization of non-dual experience as beginner’s level um he wants that non-dual blissful thing he wants to elevate that to the advanced level enlightenment so that’s why he comes up with this idealistic concept of a mystic for whom the distinction between the two states is different to how the ego death theory describes it

and and then because the ego death theory is for ordinary people it doesn’t apply to mystics in in that regard

so i think i’m going to leave it there for this episode but i think the next thing that should happen maybe is another trialog with jimmy um so we will see how that goes so until next time