Category: Transcendent Knowledge Podcast

Transcendent Knowledge Podcast, Episode 28 – Basics of Core Egodeath Theory

Transcription, including Cybermonk’s comments

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Episode Link & Outline of Topics

Transcendent Knowledge Podcast Episode 28
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO7hBuvUmiI
March 29, 2021

Max and Cyber explain the core, phase 1 part of the Egodeath theory. Topics covered include:

  • Mental modelling
  • The egoic and transcendent mental worldmodels
  • States of consciousness, ordinary and altered
  • Stages of psychospiritual development
  • Tight and loose cognitive association binding, dissociation
  • Mental representations and their referents
  • Metaperception, explicit representationalism
  • Conceptions of person-hood
  • Cybernetic homunculus, control agency
  • Popular attitudes and misperceptions about ego death
  • Cybernetic instability, control-death
  • Fatedness and its transcendence
  • The will to exist in Schopenhauer’s philosophy
  • Postulating higher control, humble prayer
  • Helpless dependence on higher control, Schleiermacher’s theology
  • Struggling to control the future, panic-attack freakout
  • Physical metabolism and thought-processes

Cybermonk’s commentary voice recording

https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2021/02/19/idea-development-page-12/#Ep71-TK28-Reaction-Video (deciding whether to refresh this .mp3 download link as of March 18, 2022; the 3.5 hour recording that I’m transcribing).

Todo: Transcribe my recorded comments, read aloud resulting transcription.
[mx] = Max Freakout
[cb] = Cyberdisciple
[cm] = Cybermonk

Enhanced Transcription with Response Comments

Top of transcription; read-aloud of this polished 3-way transcription = “Ep81a TK28 Core Basics.mp3”

I recorded a read-aloud of the top third of this transcription:
“Ep81a TK28 Core Basics.mp3”
https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2022/03/09/idea-development-page-13/#Ep81a

Cyberdisciple:

Hello and welcome to the Transcendent Knowledge Podcast, episode 28, with Max Freakout and Cyberdisciple.

I’d like to start by reading a quotation from a great mystic of ego death:

“My followers are taking something that is the epitome of simple and clear, and then they’re applying their big brain analysis to it, and quickly, by the time they touch it, they leave it a smoking, complicated ruin and wreck, that’s all complicated and broken and the opposite of what it is.

Cybermonk

Good; with that beginning, I think we will venture on to a new attempt to make the Egodeath theory a smoking ruin and wreck.

Cybermonk:

That quotation was the opening of my first voice recording of my 2021 series, “2-Level Egodeath Model.mp3” (January 20, 2021), effectively the beginning of the Egodeath Mystery Show.

I’m not comfortable labeling anyone as a “follower”.

Like the word “fan”; I could hardly imagine describing myself as a fan of anything or anyone under any circumstance.

Because that’s not the sort of character or mental connotations I have.

Same thing with ‘follower’, I couldn’t really imagine describing anyone explicitly as being a “follower”.

Only a few minutes into my January 20, 2021 recording, which Cyberdisciple read that quote from the opening of, I realized that there actually are 3-level systems or scales, in some areas of the Egodeath theory.

The Egodeath theory does not entirely consist of exclusively binary, 2-system comparison contrasts, but there’s also spectrums in it in some places; like for example: minimal, moderate, and maximal entheogen theories.

They had mentioned doing a basics episode, and I had too, it’s a good idea to do a back to basics, and that’s what I’d been preparing to discuss. This episode reminds me to review and practice speaking about the basics.

Cyberdisciple:

This episode is dedicated to the podcast guest Strange Loop, who indicated he would be interested in hearing us discuss the Egodeath theory in detail, and trying to describe it in simple terms, and its importance.

And that made a lot of sense to us.

Cybermonk:

Interesting contrast there, he said ” detail” and then he said “simple”, which usually are contrasted against each other; are we going to do Basic? We are going to cover all the basics, in detail.

Prediction: In 1 minute, they’ll end up talking in terms of “possibilism” and “eternalism” – so much for simple terms.

Cyberdisciple:

We started this podcast series project first with our own biographies with this theory (Episode 1 & 2), and then we used that to launch a critique of the popular narratives, or common media narratives about these plants, and what they’re for, and what they do.

Cybermonk:

Those were some of my favorite episodes of the Transcendent Knowledge Podcast: I really like Episode 1, 2, those are the autobiographical ones:

In Episodes 3 and 7, they talked about plans for future episodes:

So I group those together in my mind: episodes 1, 2, 3, and 7.

The topmost important thing is to discuss, in a fresh way, discuss the value of loose cognitive association, and the mental transformation that it reveals.

Discuss what people have thought before, about valuing that.

Discuss various criticisms of that, and various doubts and critiques, and putting down “gnostics”, putting down gnosis, gnosticism; putting down “esotericism”; the exoteric Christians putting down anything other than exoteric Christianity; then all the attempts to have an esotericism, to define an esotericism, which all flop; they all seem to flop and fall flat.

And thus the popular efforts at esotericism, although they make noises about leaving the nest of exotericism, they just kind of fall on the ground!

Cyberdisciple:

That’s our beginning suite of episodes, back in 2016 and 2017.

We jumped in to the deep end of the pool there, and didn’t necessarily describe in detail our own sense of this framework and theory that we’re using, that we used there to interpret other people’s attempts to describe visionary plants and the altered state and transcendent knowledge.

Cybermonk:

I’ll begin by summarizing the basic core Egodeath theory.

Transcendent Knowledge, sometimes called ‘gnosis’, is:
mental worldmodel transformation
from autonomous control within possibilism,
to dependent control within eternalism.

The words ‘possibilism’ and ‘eternalism’ are jargon, so here is an alternative formulation, that’s a little more verbose:

Transcendent Knowledge (‘gnosis’) is mental worldmodel transformation
from autonomous control within a possibility-branching world, with open, non-existent future,
to dependent control within an eternally pre-existing world, with closed, pre-existent future.

Finally, here’s a shorter version that uses commonplace words; it’s as short as possible without resorting to compact jargon words:

Transcendent Knowledge is mental worldmodel transformation
from autonomous control within a possibility-branching world,
to dependent control within an eternally pre-existing world.

The Egodeath theory critiques other people’s attempts to describe visionary plants and the altered state and transcendent knowledge.

Popular attempts so much jump to the conclusion, that they leap entirely over the whole issue of visionary plants for cognitive loosening.

The mental model transformation from one mental model to another, is driven by a series of immersions in the “loose cognitive association binding” state.

The main way, by far, that the human mind enters loose cognitive association is through visionary plants, not through any other alleged alternative methods, which are proven to not work; whereas in contrast, visionary plants are proven to work, reliably and strongly; whereas the other methods work weakly and unreliably.

Max Freakout:

What is the Egodeath theory?

The aim here is to make the simplest possible assertion about the Egodeath theory, which tries to encapsulate it as much as possible.

On a really fundamental level, what the Egodeath theory is saying, is that the mind, fundamentally, the absolute fundamental essence is that:

The mind models reality.

The focus, the subject matter of the Egodeath theory, is precisely the model which the mind creates in order to model reality; to model the world.

You have a thing called a mental world model.

The Egodeath theory is a theory about mental world models, or world modeling.

Crucially, it’s a dualist theory.

Cybermonk:

It’s surprising how little theories of esotericism talk explicitly about a mental worldmodel and changing it.

When we do talk in terms of a worldmodel, then it makes it easier to bring in rationality that happens in both states of consciousness: tight and loose binding.

About the Egodeath theory being a dualist theory: that is somewhat arbitrary, and is not true in all aspects; there are some – if you look hard, you can find some places in the Egodeath theory that use a 3-level system, or divide things in ways other than contrasting two opposed things.

It’s true on the whole; that is a distinctive hallmark of the simple description of the theory, it is on the whole a contrast, 2-level model; like I wish to do with “exotericism vs. esotericism”, except the problem is, that 99% of people who pursue esotericism, really don’t make any change compared to exotericism.

But in theory, maybe in antiquity, there was genuine esotericism, and not just wannabe esotericism that remains grounded within exotericism and the tight cognitive state, that really doesn’t make any change compared to exotericism.

Max Freakout:

The Egodeath theory asserts that there are two things.

Twoness is right at the core of the Egodeath theory; it’s a comparison and a contrast between two different things.

There are all sorts of ways that you can characterize what those two things are.

But first and foremost, it’s: two mental models of time and control agency.

And that perfectly corresponds to, two states of consciousness.

Then it’s just a case of filling in the details, of what is the one mental model of time and control, along with the corresponding state of consciousness that that model of time and control fits with; and then what is the other mental model of time and control, along with the corresponding state of consciousness.

Very simply, in regard to states of consciousness, you have the ordinary state of consciousness, number one; and the altered state of consciousness, number two.

Cybermonk:

We could also emphasize two experiential modes:
In one state of consciousness, the mind experiences time and control a certain way.
In the other state, of loose association, the mind experiences in a different mode.

And then, the mind builds a model based on what’s experienced.

And that model-building includes rationality, in both states – but, rationality that’s driven and shaped by the experiential mode, which is the first thing that’s a given.

In all of the lists of the ten effects of newbies in the loose cognitive state, there’s the standard list of ten effects, and that combination of ten effects, especially when taken through a series, drives the mental worldmodel transformation; so: experiential mode drives reconstruction of the two models.

Max Freakout:

Cybermonk has elucidated a theory of cognitive information processing which specifies that the ordinary state of consciousness is characterized as tight cognitive association binding, and then the altered state of consciousness is loose cognitive association binding.

Cybermonk:

I see several factors in such a cognitive model is the idea of two mental world models which was kind of Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen.

There are two cognitive worldmodels, let’s say, and then there’s tight and loose binding; that’s key.

Mental construct processing and mental constructs. The concept of a mental construct, and that mental constructs are whatever’s present to awareness; anything that you experience is mental constructs.

And that tells you how very diverse and unique each kind of mental construct can be.

Max Freakout:

Each of those two states of consciousness corresponds to a mental world model, but in particular, a mental model of time and agency.

This is an important point here, that on the fundamental level, the absolute most blunt basic assertion is that the mind models the world.

But when the mind models the world, there’s a very important connection between the way that the mind models time, and the way that the mind models control. You can’t separate those two things.

It’s as if the mind models time and control at the same time, and so the mental model of time, and the mental model of control, are inextricably linked to each other.

Cybermonk:

He’s saying “time”. Time can be either the possibilism model or the eternalism model. I would not just say “time”, it’s also – very important is possibility branching; and thus you have all the artistic depiction of branching.

For example, mushroom stems that branch into a Y shape.

What’s the relation between time, or models of time, versus models of branching?

I talk about two different models of self in world.

Changing from one model of the controller , in not just time, but in a world where we have possibility branching across time, or through time as we move along into the future of time, there is presumably possibility branching, and what was the open, and non-existing future, then becomes a specific, single future, it becomes –

whereas there was no future before, and it was open; it could have been this or that; that’s the possibility branching model.

So I don’t think it’s quite adequate to call that a model of time; it is a model of time and possibility branching.

So I tend to say “models of control agent in world.”

When I say “world”, I mean specifically time and branching.

We have two different models of control agency, in two different models of time and possibility branching.

Max Freakout:

So then you have the ordinary-state-based model of time and control, which is Possibilism. Possibilism meaning branching time.

The past does not branch, and we experience time this way in the ordinary state, that the timeline from the beginning of the universe, or the beginning of my lifetime ’til the present moment, only has one, single course of events.

That’s like saying I only remember one life; I don’t have different possibilities of different lives that I could have lived up to the present moment.

I’ve only got the one memory of life.

But in the future, there’s multiple different pathways, according to the choices that I decide to make, from the present, moving into the future.

So that’s the ordinary-state model of time and control.

And then the crucial insight of the Egodeath theory is that, when a person takes cognitive looseners, chemical substances which cause temporary cognitive loosening during a loose cognitive session, during that window of time when the mind is under the effect of those plants, the mind switches to a different way of, first of all, perceiving, and then concomitantly, modeling time and control.

Cybermonk:

“Perceiving” time and control is true, but also maybe more immersively, I would say experiencing and perceiving time; experiencing and perceiving control, experiencing and perceiving the openness or closedness of the future and possibility branching.

Or only pseudo-possibilities and monopossibility.

Max Freakout:

That’s the Eternalism model of of time and control.

That means that the past is still fixed, so Eternalism and Possibilism share the point of view that the past up to the present is monocausal.

But they differ in that Eternalism says that there’s only one possible future; there’s only one actual future.

There are no alternative possible futures.

Cybermonk:

Monocoursal labyrinth: Before I really dived into entheogen history and mythology, I had a vision of the labyrinth.

It was not a super rich or deep experiencing but it was exactly spot on and key and crucial.

This was almost a milestone turning point from my phase 1 work to my phase 2 work where I went from pure theory into more mythic descriptions and analogies and history of the altered state.

In late 1996 to late 1997, I had a vision of the monocoursal labyrinth, before I was reading much about mythology. And there’s another kind of maze pattern which is open, and branching around the border in Greek art.

There are two different kinds of border art: one is monocoursal, and then other is branching at every little square grid.

Max Freakout:

The way that I like to understand that sounds quite Christian:

When you get to the end of time, or when you get to the end of your life, there’s no more life ahead of you; all you have is memory.

Possibilism has already established that memory only refers to a single course of events.

So when there’s no more future, then by default, you have to say that the whole thing was always monocoursal, and that from that point of view, the possibility branching was only ever illusory; that time was never really branching.

A common thought that can occur to a person when they’re experiencing intensely (I don’t want to emphasize that too much and say “voyaging really hard really really hard”):

Cybermonk:

It is fair to emphasize, because in an 8 out of 10 level of experience, the mind does experience frozen block time. It is towards the higher end of the spectrum that eternalism is experienced, and that control seizes and reconfigures.

That’s not going to happen on the more mild or even moderate levels of loose cognition.

It is fair to use the expression “intense mystic altered state”.

Part of that is also to contrast it against these emotional, vague, hazy, mystic-type writings, which do not imply all that intense.

I mean to differentiate the strong, plant-induced levels of strong, intense mystic altered state rather than the phony, wannabe, pretender, poetic gentle weak emotional mystery; I mean to emphasize extreme experiencing.

Max Freakout:

A common thought when a person is in the intense state of loose cognition, is that there was never any real option of life leading to this event; that my life was always inevitably leading me to the point where I would use plants and then die afterwards, or experience the end of time, the end of sanity, the end of the world, the end of ordinary life, that kind of thing.

Cybermonk:

Important mythological figure or mytheme of the snake bringing, the snake brings the fruit or mushroom or that which , the fruit which brings immortality is brought by the snake.

There’s really, the god has brought the followers to the god’s banquet. The followers are brought to the god’s banquet by the god, in the form of the snake, which is the inevitability; anyone who does ingest, is made to ingest, that fact is frozen into time.

Funny, he says “end of sanity”; it could be the end of having less than sanity.

Max Freakout:

The Egodeath theory in that way explains why this feeling can occur to people when they’re journeying hard: that time has somehow ended, or life has ended.

That phenomenon is colloquially referred to as ego death, hence the Egodeath theory.

That’s my neatest way of summarizing what the Egodeath theory says.

Cyberdisciple:

What’s it like for the mind to switch from this tight cognition to loose cognition?

From tight cognitive binding to loose cognitive binding?

What are those two states like for the mind?

What is tight binding?

What is it, when I’m experiencing tight binding, what am I experiencing, as opposed to what am I experiencing when I have loose binding?

Max Freakout:

There are two different ways of explaining this:

There’s the way that is just cognitive modeling, and then there’s the way that makes reference to familiar experiences that we have.

Cyberdisciple:

That distinction between the Egodeath theory’s “cognitive modelling”, versus describing “the experiences that we have”, strikes me as an important move that the Egodeath theory makes.

The Egodeath theory is concerned with providing a relatively non-metaphorical, and relatively non-poetic, relatively precise explanation of these phenomena.

That’s part of the guiding principles of the development of the Egodeath theory, is that all past attempts to describe this have floundered or run aground on too much metaphor; kind of hazy, not very precise, not very clear.

Cybermonk:

That’s pretty much just a standard given for me, as an engineering student.

Naturally, we always want to express everything in plain, simple , and have good textbooks that help us as much as possible present everything explicitly, simply, efficiently, and plainly; that’s just how engineering and science works, until we hit Copehagenism, which gleefully threw away comprehensibility.

So then after that, after Science committed suicide, with the Copehhagen interpretatin and then it was left to Engineering to be the final field to express itself in a way that’s intended to be clear, direct, and comprehensible, as the norm, always; never gleefully embracing ineffable or contradictions or unvisualizability or anything like that.

Cyberdisciple:

That distinction that you just made between trying to use precise language, cognitive modeling, and then more familiar or metaphorical terms, that’s an important part of when we talk about what is the Egodeath theory.

The Egodeath theory is a way of thinking that tries to focus on getting the most precise use of words to describe these two states.

Cybermonk:

“Precise” is one way to put it; another way to put it also is “appropriate and effective” especially the word ‘effective’; what’s an effective way of describing a system that’s being modeled?

Precision is part of that, but sometimes, in some contexts, hyper precision actually leads to less clarity.

If I describe a first-order model of a transistor response curve, a first-order model is less precise, but easier to comprehend.

But then when I start bringing in all these subtle details, of nonlinearities, and the 0.7 volts before it really kicks in, then it becomes harder to comprehend.

So we have that tradeoff: in the first-order, simple model of the transistor response curve, the transfer curve, we, the first-order model is less precise but more clear; then the 2nd-order model is more precise but less clear.

There’s that tradeoff and balance then, in combining, by having, by presenting a pair of models, 1st-order and 2nd-order, we can manage to combine clarity and precision.

So precision has to be balanced out with clarity and effectiveness and relevance.

We could have a lot of systems that are precise; maybe measuring chemicals or something might be highly precise, but not relevant, and not effective for explaining the subject matter, or modelling the subject matter field.

Max Freakout:

It can be difficult to make the connection between the cognitive modeling and and the familiar experience. That’s why traditionally, metaphor has been applied.

It’s challenging to understand the full mapping of the visionary plants phenomenology to the cognitive modeling.

You asked what’s it like to shift from the one state to the other state.

In terms of familiar experiencing, when you’re in the ordinary state of consciousness, the solid external reality seems solid; it has the appearance of being solid.

Then you take the visionary plants, and the state of consciousness changes, and then that solidity is pronouncedly or markedly less.

Cyberdisciple:

When we are in the tight cognition, we are immersed in the mental constructs, or are immersed in the mental representations of reality.

Then when we take the cognitive loosener, we perceive those mental constructs, or those representations of reality; we become aware of them.

Cybermonk:

Awareness is lifted up out of the usual structures, gaining the ability to perceive the workings of those structures; we don’t , awareness doesn’t just then see mental constructs; awareness sees how mental constructs normally work.

Cyberdisciple:

It’s a feeling of stepping back, or being elevated away from, some sort of distance from, those representations, such that we can perceive the representations themselves.

Max Freakout:

We perceive the representations themselves, but perceive them as representations.

Cybermonk:

Awareness watches the workings and learns to observe the workings of the perceptual system, including the inward-directed perceptual system too, the idea, the mentation and thinking about oneself as a control agent across time.

Awareness can then look at the way the mind usually thinks about oneself acting across time.

Max Freakout:

Whereas in the ordinary state, they are so consistent.

This quality that representations have in the ordinary state is so consistent and solid and reliable; the representational appearance of of the world appears so consistent, so solid, and so reliable, that that the mind doesn’t make the distinction between the representation and the thing that it represents.

In fact the mind conflates those two things; the mind treats the representation and the referent as if there is just one thing, and so it looks as if perception is directly in contact with an external, objective thing: direct perception.

In Philosophy, they call that naive realism: the view that the world as it appears is the world that actually exists.

Cybermonk:

The mind perceives the usual mental model working as it usually does, modelling the self as a control agent operating within a branching possibility tree.

The mind in the higher awareness then sees that entire system of thinking about oneself as an agent working across time, and, the context of a branching world, in which that control steers and causes a future particular branch to become manifest where it was formerly allegedly open.

All of that assumption is made present to awareness in the loose cognitive state.

Max Freakout:

The mind doesn’t – this is a crucial application of the word ‘tight’, because there are two things here: you’ve got the mental representation, and then you’ve got the external thing that the representation purports to represent.

Those are two different things.

But in the ordinary state of consciousness, those two things are tightly connected to each other; they’re fused together; they’re indistinguishable from each other.

In the ordinary state, that distinction just isn’t apparent.

In the ordinary state of consciousness, that distinction is purely a speculation of armchair philosophizing, and nothing more.

Cybermonk:

That’s quite a metaphor, analogy brought in there, the whole “armchair”, and then we have to translate that into more specific direct terminology as well.

What is he trying to say by drawing in the metaphor of sitting in an armchair; what’s he trying to get at there?

We need to discuss this armchair; what is it about; what if it didn’t have arms?

They are spelling out and translating their metaphor of armchair into non-metaphorical, why- what is it with the armchair?

“Armchair” means treating – in the ordinary state, when we think about time and control, we’re in a certain experiential state, abstractly thinking about a different experiential state, but from within the ordinary, tight-binding state of experiencing; that’s kind of what’s meant by “armchair”.

Cyberdisciple:

The loose cognitive state rather forcibly makes the mind perceive that distinction, and be aware of it in a way that that the armchair speculation of ordinary state philosophy can only speculate about.

Cybermonk:

“Speculation”; the word ‘speculation’ means ‘see’; ‘perceive’; which he just contrasted to armchair.

But when we talk about perceiving and experiencing, it’s perceiving/ experiencing, so I talk about “experiential phenomena”, or “experiential awareness” in the loose cognitive state; it’s both experiencing and perceiving, simultaneously, in a different mode, that’s contrasted with the ordinary-state mode of perceiving and experiencing.

‘Speculate’ means look.

Max Freakout:

In armchair philosophy, in academic philosophy, in socially sanctioned philosophy, they talk about philosophical problems.

The word ‘problem’ is very interesting in that context, because when you’re sitting in an armchair in the ordinary state, doing philosophizing, these issues like “what is the distinction between the representation and the actual world” are “problems”, but they’re not very serious problems.

They are quite light-hearted problems, that philosophers can just spend all day idly debating about.

But then in the intense altered state, the same philosophical problems emerge and arise, but now they’re much more problematic; they can become very seriously problematic, and that’s the the core phenomenon that the Egodeath theory is focusing on, is the problematization of these issues in particular.

Cybermonk:

Those problems do not arise in the mild loose cognitive state, but they do arise in the intense loosecog state.

There’s a strong tendency for those problems to arise and become a problem in some immersive sense, in the intense, but not in the mild, loose cognitive state.

Max Freakout:

The Egodeath theory is talking about the problematization of personal control.

Cyberdisciple:

How do we get to the problematization of personal control, from the loose cognitive binding state?

Loose cognitive binding can apply to something as simple as well: visual perception. For example, when people voyage in the intense mystic state, they often report that their perceptions of things seem to blend or smear or swirl, or there’s an unusual movement of light and color and audio effects, and things like that.

Cybermonk:

There are analogies of all that physicalistic sensory perception; there are analogies of how the mind works in loose cognitive associations, with leaps of associations beyond, that are much more flexible and fluid and creative and innovative, scarily, frighteningly.

That can be a problem, that the imagination is frighteningly nimble and flexible, in the loose cognitive state, together with the perception of being fluid and flexible, rubbery – both rubbery perception – very stretchy, rubbery, plastic perception, along with stretchy, rubbery plastic associations.

And we have to bring in schizophrenia, where that phenomenon is noticed.

Cyberdisciple:

How do we get from there; that sounds like a kind of perceptual looseness, but how do we get from there to a problematization of personal self-control?

That sounds like a higher-level concept than just perception.

Cybermonk:

That includes the problem of how to control the unbounded imagination that’s become too clever, too insightful, and too perceptive, and too creative

Max Freakout:

The perception aspect is the very definition of superficiality; it’s surface level. It’s not very deep.

Cybermonk:

Then consider perceiving the fountain of thoughts that are arising.

One thing we are perceiving and able to perceive now in the loose cognitive state a la meditation, the mind becomes unusually able to watch its source of thoughts and see the uncontrollability of that source of thoughts.

The source of thoughts in the mind is itself now an object of direct explicit perception.

The mind is now able to turn its attention, turn its gaze to looking at the source of thoughts a la meditation.

And the source of thoughts becomes extra fluid and flexible and unpredictable, at the same time that the mind now becomes able to see how that source of thoughts or fountain, that uncontrollable fountain works –

What will come out next, a dragon-serpent monster?

Max Freakout?

We’re talking about what visionary plants do on the absolute surface; what they do to the surfaces of objects, and they make the sounds sound warbly and distorted, and they make the surfaces of objects look like the surface of a liquid, or it can undulate and flow.

Cybermonk:

And these various types of, open-ended types of thoughts that are now coming from the uncontrollable source of thoughts, the fountain of thoughts:

These thoughts that are coming out all have an unreal quality to them, just like the sense of vision becomes warped and warbly and unreal, so does the fountain of thoughts becomes warped and warbly and unreal.

The fountain of mental constructs produces output that is rich and unpredictable and also has an unreal quality to it.

Max Freakout:

So that’s a low-level perceptual phenomenon, in terms of what we’re talking about.

But at the same time, it’s an introductory level into the deeper part of experiencing.

Cyberdisciple:

Perceptual loosening can point to the problem of the change from our accustomed solidity.

The perceptual undulation can point “upwards”; perceptual distortion can point to that higher-level concept of the problem of control over our thoughts, and over those mental constructs; over that representation.

Max Freakout:

The early insight that a loose-cognition explorer is likely to come across is that in the ordinary state of consciousness, the way that the mind conflates the representation with the thing that it represents, that assumes that the perception of an external object is truly external to the mind.

The thing that’s represented by the mind is something that exists out there in the objective world.

But then it becomes apparent, that when we are journeying in the loose cognitive state, when we’re in a world of solid objects that are looking less solid; they also look less external, and less objective.

The world that was previously taken for granted to be an external thing, an external object, now starts to look like it’s mentally generated.

People say things like “the world seemed like a cartoon”, where the cartoon is an artificial image of something, rather than a real thing.

Cybermonk:

Impressionistic painting.

Max Freakout:

The initial problem is the conflation of the representation and the referent.

That act of mental conflation becomes problematized; the connection or association between the representation and the real world is loosened; it comes apart to some extent.

This kind of analysis, in this meta-perception analysis, you’re describing a point of view which the mind and the perceptual apparatus is shifted into during the course of the visionary plants experience.

Cybermonk:

God-mode perception point of view.

Max Freakout:

You can use the same analysis to, instead of looking outwards at the external world, you can turn that round 180 degrees and look inside yourself.

Then you can make a very similar comparison between the ordinary state and the altered state.

This is where the Egodeath theory type dynamics come in, because what we’re asking is, instead of saying “in the ordinary state of consciousness, how do you perceive the external world”: answer: you perceive the external world as if it were solid and external and mind-independent.

You’re now saying, so in the ordinary (tight cognitive binding) state, when you look within, what do you see?

What do you perceive; how do you perceive yourself; what do you perceive yourself to be?

Cybermonk answers that question very forcefully:

He’s saying that:

When you look within, when you turn your perception inwards 180 degrees in the ordinary state, what you perceive is a cybernetic homunculus, as if your truest identity – the thing that you are, most fundamentally and most centrally, is a control agent.

You can think of yourself as being other things, too.

You can think of yourself, for example, as being a physical body inhabiting physical space.

Or, you can think of yourself as being a sense of self.

That’s something that the Pop Sike audience is is very keen on saying, is that it’s a sense of being a person, without reference to “control” at that point; that comes later.

“Sense of self” just means a thing with a name, and the name follows the thing around with it.

The thing remains the same from one day to the next, from one minute to the next.

You have a broad, different range of things, ways that you can characterize what your “self” is, but there are certain core characteristics, like, it’s stable, and persistent – very much like what we were saying about external objects:

The sense of self has that same solid concrete type of characteristic, that I have a very solid and concrete sense that I am a single person in a world, and that my identity persists across time.

That’s the ordinary state-based way of characterizing my inner life, my self.

Cybermonk:

The autonomous control agent.

Autonomous: very packaged, very contained; modular; a whole, single – what people sometimes are thinking of when they go rushing to Alan Watts’ “skin-encapsulated ego”:

The autonomy, it’s not really about the skin, that’s more of an analogy; but usually the sense of oneself as an agent is wrapped up, it’s tightly bounded and very firmly bounded in a way across time.

Cyberdisciple:

Cybermonk has focused too on how we so often conceive of that self as the self that makes decisions, that moves around, and has thoughts, and decides what to think, and decides what to do, such that that seems totally natural, normal
to us.

Cybermonk:

And moves through time. That’s something so inherently a part of usual thinking of how the self and world is structured, how the model is structured:

So intensely in terms of being a control agent who is moved through time, or who moves through time.

We have to step back and look at this and say, what is this all about, this idea of me being a control agent who is moved or who moves through time?

That is so much of a part of the essence of our being, of our core of mental construct of self and world, that it’s hard to think about, ordinarily, which is one reason why we don’t talk about it as much as you might expect in philosophy, of being a control agent, though there are plenty of books on the subject of agency.

Being a control agent moving through time is so much, so fundamental to what we are, it’s our inner core.

When we talk about navel gazing, navel gazing would have to mean, largely, thinking about oneself and actually explicitly thinking about oneself as a controller moving through time, explicitly.

That is very much my focus that I had in 1987, working up to the Egodeath theory.

Let’s model, and talk about, and think about, and look at, and experiment, and probe, this mental model of the self as a control agent, moving through time, and what kind of control does it have and not have, across time?

Cyberdisciple:

Our self is like the “I”, or ourself is the person who, the thing or whatever in our head that has those thoughts, that makes those decisions.

The loose cognition state also pulls us away from that; it shows that those thoughts are, that sense, that construct of being a self who makes decisions, is itself a construct.

It’s a becoming aware of that construct, that construction, or that set of ideas.

It’s not perhaps a phenomenological or perception-oriented separation of representation and referent, but there’s an analogy between the perceptions and that sense of being an agent who makes decisions.

There’s a connection there, a movement there, from the perceptual realm to this sense of stepping back from being immersed in making decisions.

Max Freakout:

Normally, decision making just happens, without any kind of meta-reflection; you don’t really need to think about it; it’s just a taken-for-granted configuration of the way that you are in the ordinary state; is you’re a decision maker.

Cybermonk:

Steering, controlling, and decision-making are pretty much synonymous.

Max Freakout:

There’s a line in one of the songs by Rush which Cybermonk has talked about where he says, “Even if I decide not to decide, I’ve still decided; I’ve still made a choice.”

Max Freakout:

You can’t escape from being a decision maker, in the ordinary state of consciousness, because no matter what you do, you could be said to be choosing to do that thing, as opposed to doing something else. An absolutely basic configuration of the self is decision making.

Cybermonk:

“Future pre-decided; opinions are provided, in the mass-production zone”, which is pretty much the whole world.

Cyberdisciple:

That’s a very funny line, in that the singer sings one line, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”, but the original lyric sheet printed “If you choose not to decide, you cannot have made a choice.”

So there’s a strange confusion between the song and the original lyric sheet. That was even addressed by the lyricist at one point, who said that “Well those are the words I wrote” or something, “I can’t control what was printed.”

Cybermonk:

In a newsletter, Peart said:

“That’s a funny question. I’ve had a few lately from people who are so sure that what they hear is correct, that they disbelieve what I’ve put in the lyric sheets! Imagine!

People have quoted me whole verses of what they hear, as opposed to what’s printed, sure that they are right and the cover (me) is wrong. 

Scary stuff, these egocentric individuals. 

I assure you, other than perhaps dropping an “and” or a “but,” we take great care to make the lyric sheets accurate.”

Neil Peart, Rush Backstage Club newsletter, December 1985

That’s copied from Egodeath.com > Rush Lyrics Alluding to Mystic Dissociative Phenomena > Freewill.

A later version of the printed lyrics is different. The first printing needs fact check. https://www.reddit.com/r/rush/comments/aubfzy/hidden_message_or_change_of_heart_in_the_lyrics/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Peart – “His parents bought him a drum kit for his fourteenth birthday and he began taking lessons from Don George at the Peninsula Conservatory of Music. His stage debut took place that year at the school’s Christmas pageant in St. Johns Anglican Church Hall in Port Dalhousie. His next appearance was at Lakeport High School with his first group, The Eternal Triangle. This performance contained an original number titled Visionary Plants Forever. At this show he performed his first solo.”

A lot of this double-speaking and mumbling and saying one thing while claiming to have said something else, goes back to Prohibition, affecting song lyrics vs. official lyrics.

Cyberdisciple:

It’s a funny moment that speaks to Rush’s interest in in double meanings and the whole topic of being a control agent.

I think more recent lyric sheets only printed what the singer sings, but the original lyric sheets don’t have that; they have a different version. For such a crucial line, they have a different wording of it that seems to point to the opposite.

Not to derail us into Rush trivia; this is not a Rush trivia podcast, even though I know plenty of trivia about them.

Mental construct processing:

Max Freakout:

In the tight cognitive binding, default, ordinary state of consciousness, there is this totally taken for granted, background impression or configuration, that what I am as an ego, as a self, a person, is a decision maker.

It’s really important to point out that that’s no small claim, that sure, in one sense, that just means that, in a very small way, I can make small decisions about my life.

Like if I’m thirsty, I can decide to go and get a drink, and that kind of thing; that’s just small rational actions on the part of a tiny body living in a massive universe.

But on the other hand, that power of ego to make decisions has a truly cosmic scale, when you think about it in the context of Possibilism as a model of time, as well as a model of control, because what you’re saying is that, every time you make an individual decision as an ego, you’re actually creating an entire universe, or, you are steering into an entire universe, to the exclusion of an infinitude of alternative possible universes.

Cybermonk:

You are the creator of the future world.

Max Freakout:

It’s not just your small life that is affected by your egoic choices; it’s actually the entire world, because you can think of, you’re steering into the world where your ego made a particular decision as opposed to just simply making that decision.

It sets the stage of what the whole world is, so it’s a universe-wide ability to be able to make decisions like that.

But it doesn’t feel that way; it feels like a very small thing that you do in this tiny localized bit of space that you inhabit.

That’s how it feels in the ordinary state.

Then if you’re voyaging sufficiently intensely, you become aware of the cosmic dimension to that decision-making ability.

Cyberdisciple:

That sense of the cosmic, or the sense of creating possible worlds via making those choices, that’s something that can’t survive the loose cognitive state, or the altered state initiation.

That whole idea is part of a set of philosophical theories: Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation.

But that is a completely ordinary-state-based theory. It can’t survive, it can’t happen in the altered state, the loose cognitive state; the many-worlds hypothesis can’t survive that kind of acid wash bath.

Max Freakout:

There’s two different interpretations of quantum physics: The Einstein interpretation, versus the Copenhagen interpretation which is associated with Bohr; “many worlds theory”.

Cybermonk:

Neils Bohr, who hung out with Einstein, and they debated and took opposite sides, Einstein says God does not play dice; Einstein affirmed block universe and Neils Bohr took the opposite view.

Then there was David Bohm, who was a determinist, and associated with non-local hidden variables, which is deterministic.

A key thing, an important thing in this determinism is that it says that there is one possibility, that it’s pre-determined, but he does not claim that the future already exists; that’s a big difference between that causal-chain determinism which David Bohm asserted, in line with Einstein.

So we have on one side, Neils Bohr, who asserts egoic freewill possibility branching, and then we have Einstein and David Bohm, who assert transcendent eternalism of one brand, one flavor or another.

Probably neither Einstein nor Bohm explicitly said that the future is single and already exists, and we’re just discovering it, and that we are made to make whatever decisions along the way, too, and that all of those decisions along the way are pre-existing, and the future outcome is pre-existing as a single, pre-existing thing.

Einstein and Bohm align with that, with Bohr and branching and egoic freewill branching on the other side of the debate.

The other name we’d have to mention would be the guy who mathematically formulized these ideas which is Minkowsky, so we have Einstein, Minkowski, and David Bohm roughly aligned with eternalism.

Max Freakout:

The many-worlds interpretation in quantum physics.

Cybermonk’s criticism of the many-worlds view is that you postulate many worlds in order to try to protect and preserve egoic decision making, because the alternative is the Einstein (or Minkowski or “Parmenidian”) interpretation of quantum physics, which is pure hard iron block determinism.

Cybermonk:

William James also objected to iron-block determinism. We could make the list longer, too, including Parmenides (vs. Heraclitus), because Popper referred to Minkowski as “Parmenides”.

We have: Bohr on one side, and we have Parmenides, Bohm, Einstein on the other.

Max Freakout:

Einstein was on Cybermonk’s side in that debate.

Einstein is more like an Egodeath theorist; he said “God does not play dice”, meaning there’s not multiple outcomes; when you flip a coin, it’s not that there’s a 50/50 chance of the coin landing on any particular side; it’s more like there’s a one hundred percent that it lands on one side, and zero percent that it lands on the other side.

Cybermonk:

We just are ignorant of which side that the coin is to land on.

Max Freakout:

So it’s two different ways of understanding what probability is all about; what it involves.

Cyberdisciple:

There are two people: last name Bohr, and last name Bohm. They were on opposite sides of this debate.

Max Freakout:

The Copenhagen interpretation comes from a particular conference which occurred in Copenhagen in the days when these issues were being actively and presently discussed.

At the Copenhagen conference, they outlined the many-worlds idea, which seems to protect the integrity of egoic decision-making.

Whereas Einstein was not concerned with that.

Cybermonk:

There are a couple of books by James T. Cushing arguing that Copenhagenism was adopted too hastily and too gleefully, without giving due consideration to Einstein and Bohm and hidden variables; determinism.

Cyberdisciple:

Each new decision creates a new world along the branching different branching pathways

Cybermonk:

Kind of a megalomania: not only am I the creator of one future, but I’m the creator of an infinite number of universes, in every microsecond.

The many-worlds interpretation is ridiculous, because there’s no bound on the idea, no constraint or check of any kind.

In my eternalism model, with a single, pre-existing future, we have the opposite extreme, the extreme of simplicity and the ability to visualize.

On the other hand, with branching Copenhagenism or the Everett many-worlds interpretation, at each, infinitesimal instant of time, there’s an infinite future worlds being created, all thanks to you.

Every instant, a million times a second, you are creating an infinite number of universes – talk about megalomania of egoic thinking, run amuck without any constraint.

Exactly how many of these multiverses are created? An infinity, an infinite number of times per second. Talk about egoic inflation!

Max Freakout:

That’s the ordinary state perception and modeling of egoic decision making.

That whole set of assumptions and beliefs doesn’t survive the acid wash; the acid wash spells doom for the mode of experiencing and thinking.

It’s not just that the altered state spells doom for egoic decision making; it’s more like intensive loose-cognitive initiation.

You have to go through this process of initiation to get the full “brain washing” effect of it, where the the mental world model is permanently reconfigured to incorporate the new point of view.

Cybermonk:

1:11:15 resume here. total length of the conjoined/interspersed recording: 3:24:00. 1/3 finished transcribing my comments. I could read-aloud the transcription so far, as eg part a of 3-parter. can always recombine later. 1:11:15 of natural slow speech, read quickly, but w/ random comments i’d insert, would produce a 1 to 1.5 hours podcast.

Pull in Ruck’s idea of wild versus cultivated …

1/3 down the transcription; read-aloud of this rough machine transcription + realtime commentary = “Ep81b TK28 Core Basics.mp3”

I recorded a read-aloud of the bottom 2/3 of this transcription:
“Ep81b TK28 Core Basics.mp3”
https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2022/03/09/idea-development-page-13/#Ep81b-TK28-Core-Basics

Max Freakout:

Let’s spell out what that new point of view is.

You’ve got this meta-perception level, when you’re experiencing intensely, where nothing quite seems solid like it used to, and egoic decision making doesn’t seem solid like it did before.

The outcome of that, it’s a process of thinking that leads on from the observation that what was once perceived as a solid, stable, and consistent sense of self, which is to say a causally efficacious ability to make decisions and steer between possibilities, that starts to look undulating, wavy, and mentally generated, as opposed to being solid and external and real.

That leads to the thought of determinism, the thought that there is no decision making, and that time only goes in in one way, and that that nexus of causation which started at the beginning of time and carries on to this day is actually just leading inexorably in one way, and there’s no possibility of moving off of the fixed course of events.

I’m reminded of a limerick which occurs in I one of Alan Watts books: it said “I move in determinate grooves, I’m not really a bus, I’m a tram”, as in saying that your life is on a set of rails, and the rails control the direction of your forward movement.

Alan Watts quote about being on a tram line

https://www.bing.com/search?q=alan+watts+grooves+limerick

There once was a man who said “Damn,
For it certainly seems that I am
a creature that moves
in determinate grooves,
I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram”

The rails don’t branch; you have no alternative routes to go on, you just have to follow the rail of your life going forward.

Marketing vs. Ego Death

That is this great, powerful, amazing, permanently mind-changing experience, which is called ego death.

It’s very unfortunate that the Pop Sike world, and the pop spirituality world, has distorted the term “ego death” to the point of absurdity.

It’s basically impossible to ascertain an accurate meaningful definition of what “ego death” is, from any of the published literature; it just doesn’t exist.

You won’t read anywhere in a work of published literature which refers to ego death, and there are many such books.

But you won’t see in any of them that it’s the feeling of dying or discovering fatedness or reaching the end of time, or anything like that.

They stick to this vague wishy-washy language of “your sense of self is dissolved”, and things like that.

The name Martin [“Energy”] Ball is really flashing in my head right now as I say this; he’s a major source of this kind of confusion about what ego death is.

First of all, they’re hesitant to use the word ‘death’, and they try to fudge that, muddle over that, and call it “ego loss”, whereas Cybermonk was very adamant that the correct word is ‘death’, and that’s so ultimately prominent in his writing, because he calls his theory “the Egodeath theory”, and he calls his website Egodeath.com.

You know he took that URL for a reason, and he stuck with it, as well as the EgodeathTheory site.

‘Death’ is a powerful word, and it’s right, correct, and appropriate to use such a powerful word to describe this experience, because it does actually feel like death.

It’s important to refer to podcast guest Strange Loop here, because in terms of his own mystic-state experiencing, he really wants to have that experience.

He knows that it’s unpleasant; he knows that it’s bad, but he has a strong motivation to have that ego death experience, so he’s really doing some quite hardcore psychonautic exploring.

The ego death experience isn’t inevitable from just taking visionary plants; it demands something a bit more than just sheer use of visionary plants.

It’s certainly possible to take visionary plants many, many times, and have many experiences but never have this extreme experience that we’re talking about.

Let’s be under no illusion about how extreme it is. That’s that’s one of the central motivations of the Egodeath theory, and Cybermonk says this is the most profound and intense experience that the mind can undergo, and it leaves a permanent effect on the way that thinking is organized.

Going forth from then for the rest of life, you can’t forget ego death; it permanently changes the way that you understand yourself and the world.

To continue on the meta- or discourse level, there’s an important point: part of why our project is so valuable in deconstructing those pop psych narratives is that, people who have experienced something like the ego death experience described the way that Cybermonk often has described is, expressed as a theory.

They don’t necessarily have the vocabulary, or they don’t like the vocabulary of ‘death’.

People try to shy away from using that term.

There are people who have experienced a full intense extreme ego death, but don’t like to talk about it that way.

They want to conceive of it as something, not a death.

There’s lots of marketing influence.

Especially in the kind of official narratives about visionary plants coming out of therapists and universities and funding agencies, there’s a lot of advertising; it’s got to be a nice, positive experience for everybody to have.

You can see that in a lot of the material.

Our work deconstructing that, listening to James Kent’s podcasts, the “final 10 episodes series on the dark side”, he was very keen to point out the amount of positive marketing spin that goes into talking about visionary plants these days.

We’re trying to champion a way of talking that’s much more no-nonsense and not connected to any marketing agenda.

We’re not trying to sell anyone anything, about taking visionary plants to have a nice pleasant time.

Really we’re after describing what goes on in that state when you want to mess around with ego death, it’s not necessarily pleasant.

There are more people who have experienced ego death, but they do not want to talk about it that way, or they go in expecting to have just a nice pleasant experience, and they’re kind of primed to just talk about it that way, and only focus on that part of it, and shy away from the “shadow” side of the experience.

Martin Ball, for example, is a good example of trying to, a lot of his discourse about visionary plants tries to shy away from what he calls the “shadow side” of things.

Even James Kent, who wants to point out the marketing, the positive happy marketing of visionary plants, the whole aim of that “final 10 project” was to highlight the dark side, in order to have people protect themselves from having a dark experience with visionary plants, despite the fact that it was precisely a dark horrible depressing experience which James Kent had, which led him to embark on his entire mystic career – so I sense a contradiction there.

There are people who have had this difficult, unpleasant experience, but then are reticent to talk about it in those terms, because they sense the taboo, and they don’t want to discredit visionary plants, so they focus on the positive side.

There also may be people who haven’t experienced this phenomenon that we’re talking about, but they want to say they have, or they want to think they have, so they’ll talk about ego death, to refer to things that are not really ego death, to refer to the the lighter, happier side of mystic-state experiencing.

There is certainly a huge amount of mystic-state experiencing that’s very positive and enriching and psychotherapeutic, so there’s two sides to that coin.

The term “no separate self” is thrown around a lot, that kind of pleasant feeling of blending into the environment.

That can be a very pleasant feeling, as people report. Often that’s what people are referring to when they try to use the much more serious term ‘ego death’.

These kinds of Pop Sike narratives, and people talking about that, in many cases, people haven’t experienced ego death, but it’s a tricky term; there’s a certain cultural cachet around it as well.

People praise ego death as something that’s good for people; people want to have what they think ‘ego death’ is.

We have to critique Pop Sike and Pop Spirituality.

We need to contrast the the vision put forward by the Egodeath theory compared to the the confused mess of contradictions that the Pop Sike and Pop Spirituality worlds are trying to project.

I wanted to use the expression “elephant in the room”. That’s the true position that ego death, that ego death experiencing has in the world of pop spirituality and pop mysticism.

The ego death experience is a hot potato, and people in the worlds of pop spirituality and pop mysticism don’t really know how to handle the ego death experience.

Pop spirituality and pop mysticism kind of want to deny the ego death experience, but they also kind of want to praise it, and they don’t want to squarely acknowledge that ego death is a bad, unpleasant experience and involves psychosis and psychotic thinking.

That would be too discrediting.

I also wanted to bring in the example of podcast guest Kafei because he very clearly fits into the mold, of people who have a bad experience and ego death, but then they don’t want to talk about the bad side of it.

I don’t think Kafei recognizes that the experience he had, that the first time he ever used visionary plants is essentially ego death, and the ultimate mystical experience.

Instead, he wants to try to bring in all these spiritualist writers who talk about nothing but blissful peace and love, light, and that kind of thing; and then he doesn’t integrate the sheer importance of his own bad experience into that pop spiritualist narrative.

Time Slices

Let’s talk about time slices: what’s that about, and what’s that like.

We’ve talked about the rail of the past moving into the future, as being revealed as just being more like a single path that one moves along, rather than a set of branching roads.

That’s a horizontal metaphor. What’s the vertical metaphor of time slices, and what is that like?

Time slices is a different way of modeling time.

This cognitive modeling is kind of complex and kind of difficult to really see the true picture of, in terms of how it relates to the perceptual phenomena, the experiential phenomena.

The ‘Cartoon’ Analogy

Instead, it’s better to use analogy to illustrate what we’re talking about.

You commonly see in people’s reports where they describe their mystic-state experiences, they might say something like “the world seem like a cartoon”.

“Cartoon” by definition is not real, not external, not solid, and it’s more like a mental, mentally projected image, where the cartoonist is your mind.

Another interesting way of analyzing the concept of a cartoon fits into the time slice analysis, because if you think about what a cartoon consists of, it’s a series of still frames that are played very quickly in sequence, to create the illusion of movement.

You have one frame which is one solid, still image, and then another image next to that first image, which is just ever so slightly different, and then another image which is again ever so slightly different.

Stop-motion animation is another obvious use of this kind of idea, or a flip book where you draw a picture in the corner of a book, and then you draw another picture on the next page that’s slightly different from the first one, and then keep doing that.

Then, if you flip through the book, you can create the illusion of movement, and continuous identity as well, sameness across time, which is exactly what a cartoon is.

In a cartoon, there’s no real movement in a cartoon because movement would imply an infinite number of slices rather than a finite number of slices, but if you play them quick enough, and if the difference between one still frame and the next still frame is sufficiently small, when they’re played quickly, the mind can’t see that, can’t see the the jump between the two, then you get the illusion of fluid movement.

Time slices implies that each individual slice is frozen solid in the same way, that a still image that makes up one frame of a cartoon reel is a frozen, still image, and that frozenness is precisely the outcome, or the inevitable conclusion of the Eternalism way of modeling time, that there’s no movement, there’s no way of changing the possibility course; there’s just one solid way that things can go.

The ‘Book’ Analogy

Another possible analogy there is a book.

A book is such a wonderful form for analogy, as in a work of fiction.

A storybook is a wonderful analogy for the Eternalism model of time, because you’ve got a series of pages, and each page is analogically similar to a solid frame in a cartoon reel.

But then if you take the whole book, then you’ve got the full story of, say, a person’s life is is told in the storyline of the book.

From the external point of view, you can see that the whole book exists all at once, all in one go – that’s the block universe.

But on the inside, if you’re a character in the book, and you’ve lived your life up to say page 30, then in your perception of things, from your point of view, it’s more like the ordinary state experience of flowing life.

Time slices are analogically comparable to frames in a cartoon, or pages in a book.

To bring it into the realm of our experiencing: in our phenomenological experiencing in the loose cognitive state, our mental representation of time and the passing of time splits.

This is the relation between the loosening of cognitive associations, and loose cognitive binding, and loosening of perceptions with the sense of time becoming broken down, as well reaching the end of time.

It’s a different way of perceiving time.

Loose cognition gives us a different way of perceiving in general, but then more specifically – and moving towards the specific theory-domain of the Egodeath theory – it’s about a different way of perceiving time.

The way the mind models the world: the mind models time and control at the same time.

The mind’s model of control and the mind’s model of time are inextricably linked with each other.

In loose cognition, you’ve got this different way of perceiving time, and the time slice concept fits in with that different way of perceiving time, which is Eternalism.

You’re perceiving time as if it were a solid book that’s already been written, or a cartoon, but instead of watching the cartoon and seeing it from beginning to end, you can just see the whole reel, or say the video cassette that it’s on, or DVD or whatever medium that the cartoon is on.

It reminds me of in my very early days of visionary exploration, like the first few experiences when I was totally naive to all of this theorizing and all this talk of the history of the mystic state.

I was just a young, naive person studying plants basically for fun and for exploration. I remember very clearly that I got quite excited about looking in a mirror, and I can remember so clearly what that looks like.

I had the experience reproducibly multiple times.

There’s not very much that is reproducible and controllable about mystic-state experiencing, but this was a remarkably familiar experience which I experimented with over multiple different mystical experiences with different plants.

Looking in a mirror, instead of just seeing this solid face that I’m so used to seeing, suddenly if I stare at my reflection in a mirror, it looks like I’m being presented with a very rapid cycling of different faces, like a thousand different faces.

That’s one reason why I made a point of reading Joseph Campbell’s book, because it’s called “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, and I thought that resonated with my mystic-state experience.

I thought there must be something relevant about this book, because that title just sounds so relevant, this thousand faces.

At the time, I had no conceptual framework to fit it into.

But then later on down the line, a couple of years later, when I learned the Egodeath theory, and I learned about time slices, I thought “Oh yes, that makes so much sense of that particular phenomenon that I encountered in those early visionary sessions, of seeing a flutter, like a fluttering of different individual faces instead of the same continuous face that I’m used to when I look in a mirror.

Time slices is the same concept: you learn this whole theory, and then you can then look at experience reports, and you can see isolated elements of people’s reports that fit into the theory.

Similarly, you can see isolated elements of mythological and religious stories that fit into the Egodeath theory.

That was an important connection that I made, which for me, validated the Egodeath theory.

The Egodeath theory also taught me this technique of interpreting experience reports, and also religious and mythological stories, in terms of the Egodeath theory.

Time slices is a way of conceptualizing how time is structured; it’s what Eternalism means for how time is structured.

The term ‘time slice’ is a way of capturing or modeling what the experience of time is like in the altered state, as a series of moments.

The sense of a flow of time that is characteristic of the ordinary state, is changed to a set of a series of moments, with changes between those moments.

Each moment is arranged into a different position, but not with any flow between the moments.

That’s a key step in leading towards the killing of the ego, because the ego – you have to make the connection that, one is normally expecting to be able to oneself alter the arrangement in each time slice.

One normally conceives of one’s decision making as altering the next time slice, or some future time slice.

But in fact one doesn’t have the opportunity to do that, when one’s sense of movement and thoughts are kept out of doing that; the changes simply happen.

So the time slice is like a key.

The combination of “time slice” with the “ego”, or the sense of being an agent making decisions, that’s the killing stroke on the ego.

The killing stroke is when you connect that concept of time slices up to the concept of control, because you in one time slice can’t control the next time slice.

What you have, the situation that you get when it becomes really dramatic in ego death experiencing, is that one time slice tries to control the next one, and becomes increasingly anxious about exerting that control across time, and finding out that it’s not able to.

Perhaps it’s not the killing stroke, but it sets off a chain reaction.

The ego tries to, that control system tries to apply itself to changing time slices, and finds that it can’t.

To complete the picture with time slices, you have to specify if it appears as time slices in the altered state.

What is the corresponding appearance of time in the ordinary state?

In the ordinary state, if it’s not slices, then what is it? Just a continuous line, as opposed to a line that is divided up into slices.

In the ordinary state, it doesn’t feel like time is a series of individual isolated moments; it feels like there’s an absolute continuity between the moments.

It’s the difference between discreteness and continuity.

The time slices are discrete, and that discreteness implies a lack of control and inability to control the next time slice.

Another analogy from Cybermonk is statues. I found that analogy enlightening when I first came across that.

It’s the same thing as stop-motion animation: you have a series of statues that are very subtly different from each other, in the way that an animation is.

Those statues are lined up along the time axis, and they are entirely independent from each other. The point of view that swings into the mind during intense loose cognition is being isolated in your time slice.

But it’s like that all the time anyway, and this is something that the self-help guru Eckhart Tolle really capitalized on in pointing out, that even in the ordinary state, you’re always just in the present, and you can never go backwards or forwards, really.

The way Eckhart Tolle puts it is that the present moment is the only thing that’s actually real, which is the philosophy of Presentism.

But that’s not what the Egodeath theory is saying; it doesn’t say that the past and future are “not real”, but that the cybernetic continuity between the past, present, and future time slices is unreal, and that there is actually no way of controlling your future self, in the same way that your past self doesn’t control you.

You can do something in the present that is completely independent of what you wanted to do five minutes ago, and then following from that, your future self can do something which is completely independent of you, even completely unwanted.

We need to talk about here, your overall set of intentions.

In general, there the way that the human being is hardwired, and this harks to the philosophy of Schopenhauer, which I would like to cover at some point in a podcast, because he really spelled this out.

Schopenhauer said that the fundamental property of everything, every real thing, every object, is to carry on existing.

He said that everything from a stone on the beach to a human being has that fundamental will to carry on existing, and human beings are no different.

It’s why human beings instinctively avoid death.

So if you’re in the ordinary state, and suddenly you’re faced with a mortal danger, something like someone holds a gun to your head, or a lion walks into the room looking really hungry, your instinct is going to be mortal panic and fear and a desperation to protect your life, so you will hand over your money to the person who is holding a gun to your head.

You know it’s a typical thing, a cliche, that robbers will say “your money or your life”, because the robber knows that if you’re faced with that decision, you’re going to pick your life, because that’s the most fundamental thing that you have, and you desire to to continue it, to maintain it.

That is sharply contrasted with the situation that you find yourself in in the intense mystic-state experiencing when it turns nasty and it turns psychotic and unwanted, when it turns un-recreational, and it ceases to be about having fun.

You start to worry about what your future self might do, and you start to project motivations onto your future self, such as the thought that you’re about to try to commit suicide.

That’s something that I was very struck by when I gave my report, the big massive freak out experience that I had, and then Kafei described his: he said that exact same thing, that it was about wanting to commit suicide, and wanting to try to clear out his system, and that’s exactly I had.

I had the same thought when I was going through that experience, that if I could only make myself throw up, I would be able to get my control back.

Normally, it would be completely unthinkable to think that you suddenly might want to commit suicide in five minutes, and that there’s no way that you can control your future self to stop them from doing that, to preserve your life, according to this basic fundamental will to carry on existing.

But then when you’re in the intense mystic state, suddenly, unexpectedly that possibility swings into view, in a truly horrifying way: that actually you might want to kill yourself, that you might kill yourself in a few minutes, and that there’s nothing you can do to stop your future self from doing that, because you at the present moment are cybernetically independent of your future self.

Cybernetic independence is something that characterizes the altered state, whereas the ordinary state is more like cybernetic dependence, and your actions flow smoothly from each other, continuously with each other as time progresses.

That feeling breaks down in the altered state, which leads to panic, fear of your own near-future action possibly ending your own existence, because you can’t – that thought appears in your head, because you can’t stop yourself in the future.

You don’t know, so there’s increasing panic, and the increase just gets more and more.

Cybermonk characterized that as like a tightening noose [or {hunting net}]: if you have a noose around your neck and you’re dangling, you might instinctively try to struggle to get out of it, but that’s not rational, because by struggling, when you’ve got a noose around your neck, you’re only making your problem worse, because you’re making the the noose get tighter.

It’s that kind of a dynamic, where anything that you do to try to get out of the situation, ends up making the situation worse.

That’s our moment we could say when the mind’s “savior” potential kicks in, or the mind’s rescuing potential, or transformation potential, to move away from metaphors with rescue and savior.

The only way out of that is to switch your sense of that, get rid of that control agency, or qualify your initial thoughts about your own agency over your own thoughts.

Leading people to model some sort of, come up with, or model or realize some sort of hidden control source, some sort of source of thoughts that is not coming from oneself one’s local sense, or that initial sense of control, and that that had been that – whatever that other source is, had always been in control of your thoughts, and always been steering you.

Thus leading to this, a sense of a dependent control.

Whatever sense of control you have as independent is dependent on that other source, because you’ve learned, you’ve seen in the altered state, that it can’t be that initial source that was predicated upon an open future and control across time.

That only leads to a further problem, because if you are just relying on your personal egoic domain of control, at least you know that the thought of killing yourself or going insane is a bad thing, something to be avoided.

But if you’re then pushed into a position where you have to postulate higher control to rescue you from this dire situation you’re in, the higher control has to be compassionate, but it might not be; the universe might just want you to dissolve at this particular moment in time, this night.

So one thing that you have to postulate is higher control; something that was in charge all along, the whole time. But it has to be beneficial; it has to care about you enough to care about your worrying about your future integrity, but it might not.

So there’s always the risk, because this higher control is not human. That’s a really important point about this higher control source, this Controller X that has to be postulated in this desperate situation, is that it’s not just another person like you; it’s not like you’re talking to a personal friend or a parent or something.

What that ultimate control source is is actually utterly alien and mysterious.

It’s not directly accessible to you like your local source.

In some Christian artworks, they just depict a hand coming out of a cloud, and you only see the hand; you don’t see the rest of the body, so you don’t know what the motivation behind that control is; you only know that your own motivation is to preserve your own life in the Schopenhauerian sense.

There’s another great German thinker called Friedrichs Schleiermacher, and he was a German theologian, and he characterized the relation between God and the individual as the other way around: the individual and God as a relation of helpless dependence, that the egoic control, the personal self is helplessly dependent on what that – on the higher self, and what it wants to do.

Prayer is an important point here. It’s not just merely postulating higher control that rescues you; it’s praying with an attitude of like Schleiermacher said: helpless dependence.

You have to acknowledge your dependence on that higher control to rescue you, knowing that you have no personal control, that the higher control is the one that is holding all of the cards, and has all of the power in that situation.

So it’s a self-supplication, it’s admitting to yourself and to God that you are nothing, and you have no control, so “please rescue me, whatever it is that does have control”, with the hoped-for result being a two-level model of control, once one has repudiated or given up or acknowledged one’s total helpless dependence, total dependence on that hidden source.

How exactly is that supposed to happen?

I think about my own experience: I got right to the end of that bad experience without ever postulating higher control; that took quite a long time afterwards before i figured out about what ‘God’ means, in the context of a person having a bad experience from visionary plants.

But at the time i didn’t have that; that was actually an important distinction between my experience of ego death which I described in episode 2 of this podcast and yours which you described in episode 1, is that when you had your formative experience, you already knew about the Egodeath theory, and you said to yourself in the middle of the experience “No, I know about this; I know what I’m supposed to do: I’m supposed to pray.”

But i didn’t have that. I didn’t know about the Egodeath theory, so I just caved into despair, and then I spent the entire session cowering in terror.

And then afterwards, I was traumatized.

Even when I got back to the normal world, I was traumatized and I had to do all this philosophical work of revising my assumptions.

When is that postulation of higher control supposed to happen? Does that happen when you’re still in the loose cognitive state, or is that the transition out of the difficult loose-cog experience back into tight cognition.

Maybe it’s different for different people in terms of the shape of mystical initiation.

What I described in episode 1, to speak to the timing that happened while still in the midst of the loose cognition session: I was primed for that, and I made use of the Egotheory as a guidebook or technology, in what to do and how to do that.

I had to get through that experience or how to deliberately postulate that and then watch and then follow through on that supplication

What was that like, how did the loosecog session change when you made that particular mental move: did it suddenly lighten, or how did it feel when you actually made that move?

Before, during, and afterwards, I made that move, and the sense of being out of control and fearful of what I would do in the future, as well as the feeling that my perceptions were overwhelming me.

I’m on a more superficial level that I was being lost in some sort of whirlpool of my own perceptions that faded so this maybe brings us to the timing of a loose cognition session.

It’s possible that that was happening towards the end of that. I wasn’t timing it that way.

I recall a change in the after giving doing that supplication that prayerful supplication and repudiation; I recall the loose-cognition experience changing a bit, and taking a a more feeling as though I could relax a bit, that I
could let myself – the feeling of struggle changed, and I could let myself be moved, and observe the thoughts that came along, and less that I was struggling to have my say in them.

That sense of struggle went away.

You made a really interesting point there: you said it was as if you were deliberately going through this thought process, and that made the experience feel less intense, and you could relax a bit.

But you also said it might have just been that you were coming towards the end of the session anyway, so you could almost maybe say that there are two ways of explaining it: that on the one hand, this whole process of postulating higher control and then praying to higher control for rescue is a deliberate process of thoughts.

But on the other hand, it could just be something that you’re thinking is basically forced to do simply by the chemical metabolism what’s going on in the the way the intensity rises and falls as purely a neurochemical process.

This experience happened during a kind of regular series of loose cognition sessions that I was undergoing and or putting myself through, about every week.

It was a regular series and subsequent sessions of a similar dosage of the cognitive loosener I didn’t so in those in the subsequent sessions the bit of data i want to bring up is that:

I didn’t experience the same sense of struggle at all, despite a similar intensity of really a lot of intensity.

Despite a similar dosage level of the cognitive loosener, I felt that the there was something different about those subsequent sessions – the experience was not, I didn’t have to go through that struggle in the same way, having gone through it to such an extent and gone through the supplication, so that that was a marked difference.

I felt a certain acceptance of the dependent control and dependent nature of of thinking in the experience, in subsequent experiences, so that – and that would persist throughout the entirety of it now.

I’ve had to remind myself about the dynamics of prayer or supplication or repentance, but nothing with the same intensity as that that one time.

It’s almost like a familiar pattern or familiar move to make.

There’s a possible connection between the timing of the session and the thoughts regarding the self-control cybernetics.

It certainly seems to track on to a certain- one could imagine there being a track of beginning to notice perceptual changes to them, noticing one’s sense of self becoming loosened, to then the issues with time, and the thought that those provoke.

Imagine an ideal session in which one person goes from zero to ego death in a single session, which is a hypothetical scenario we’ve talked about.

The Egodeath theory talks about a series of sessions.

There’s an implication there that part of the process is also what happens between the sessions, and the thinking and the reading that you do when you’re not within your down time in preparation for the next one, because you build on the thoughts and the understandings that you have over the course of multiple sessions.

That ties into our point about what kind of language we’re using to talk about the loose cognition state.

The Pop Sike crew have one way of doing it; we have a different way of doing it.

The language certainly matters; what you’re studying before, during, and after matters.

There’s two parallel processes which are kind of separate but also kind of intertwined: on the one hand, you’ve got the chemical process, of chemicals going through your system, through your brain, and causing certain perceptual effects, which then stop, and go back to normal.

Parallel to that, you’ve got the process of your thinking, and the development of your understanding as the chemicals are coming and going.

There are those two parallel processes, but the outcome is the same; the outcome is that you get a modified and enhanced mental world model, or you get the addition of a new mental world model, so that you now have two separate world models, two mental world models coexisting in the same mind.

That’s an enlightened mind, that’s a mind that has successfully been through ego death and then integrated it and come out the other side and understood it and made peace with it, and is then as Cybermonk said, is then able to be in the loose cognitive state after that without fearing the total conflagration and transformation that only happens once, that doesn’t just keep happening.

You can keep climaxing, have multiple ego death type experiences, but it doesn’t keep on transforming your mind again and again.

Once the basic transformation has happened, that then stays with you for the rest of your life.

There are the two interacting fields: the field of experience, and then our knowledge about the experience, the way we conceive of the experience.

I often wonder about that with my own set of experiences. My experiences have all happened in the context of knowing generally about the Egodeath theory.

I became interested in visionary plants and cognitive looseners, and after reading about the claims made in the Egodeath theory about what they do, and wanting to, I was relatively unfamiliar with visionary plants in there, besides just general cultural awareness of them.

I was relatively not – I hadn’t read anyone else’s writing about visionary plants; those are things out in the world. I’d heard something vague, some sort of vague messaging about them.

This gets us to this tricky question of the extent of of how our experiences are shaped by the discourse that we encounter and read, and to what extent they’re not shaped by that, and that there’s something of an intractable question there.

[People aren’t shaped by the literature as much as scholars assume. The default is ignorance, not reading stacks of books on the topic. -mh]

That is bringing to mind a very important distinction that Ken Wilber made: he said states vs. stages, and in his model there was a very large number of states, in a very large number of stages.

But what Cybermonk’s model does, it uses that same basic terminology, of this distinction between states and stages.

But instead of this zillion states & zillion stage model of Ken Wilber, Cybermonk is saying that there are only two states and two stages; which is to say, you’re in the ordinary state, and you’re in the mystic state: those are the two stages.

You’ve got the stage where you are unaware of this whole thing, the whole enterprise of deterministic thinking and metaphor.

Then you’ve got the subsequent stage where you are fully initiated and you have both world models, and you understand how metaphor works.

So there’s the Egoic stage, and then the Transcendent stage follow on the heels of the ordinary state and the altered state.

Would I have had the same set of experiences if I’d never heard of the Egodeath theory?

The Egodeath theory would say “Yes”, because the Egodeath theory claims to be describing what happens in the altered state.

The Egodeath theory describes what’s the typical “movement” in the altered state, in the loose cognition state, between the two mental world models.

Cybermonk:

The Egodeath theory describes what’s involved in the movement from the Egoic, Possibilism mental model to the Transcendent, Eternalism mental model.

How fast, complete, & reliable transformation is, depends on and is a function of structured efficient training; the speed, thoroughness, and ease of the transformation is conditional on that: a completed initiate accelerating later initiates.

max or cyb:

Would I have been able to describe it that way, or would I have conceived of it that way, during the transformation of those mental world models?

Would I have made all the same moves that I did?

These are counterfactual questions that have no answer, because that’s what did happen.

Do you think that maybe you can hasten the process by knowing about the Egodeath theory?

It sounds like you might have done that in your experience.

I think so, yes I think so; I used the Egodeath theory as a kind of guidebook to that phenomenology, that set of experiences and that sort of thoughts and philosophical problems (a loaded term), cognitive problems.

Using the Egodeath theory as a guidebook.

This is now bringing us over towards what Cybermonk has called his Phase Two area (metaphor & history of religion), and I’m cognizant of time, and so we probably have to save that for later on; but the topic of metaphor, and cultural initiation systems.

In the past, or different cultural systems, one would have made use of that technology, say Christianity or Buddhism or whatever form, whatever religion or cultural system, or you know even in the 20th Century something like Rock clubs and Rock music, or something like Raves.

I use Egodeath theory as a guidebook. In the past, we’d say people used, or in other cultural systems, people use their cultural system as a guidebook.

Part of the Egodeath theory’s relation with those, relationship or stance on those other systems, is that they’re vague, not a theory, and that it explains those other systems better than or more clearly than those systems themselves can explain themselves, because the other systems use a lot of cells[?] in their sentences.

I was going to say the other systems are designed to accommodate the egoic states; they’re not meant to enlighten the ego; they’re meant to – they can actually keep the ego as it is.

So in other words, you can be – you can have the egoic mental configuration and fully get Christianity on that level.

Christianity works on the egoic level and it works on the transcendent level; whereas the Egodeath theory doesn’t work on the egoic level; it’s just pushing towards enlightenment and transcendence; Transcendent Knowledge.

Its very topic is the transcendent level, because it always pushes you in that direction.

That’s a nice way to put it, and actually this is making me wonder:

We’re talking about how the Egodeath theory contributed to your experience of mystical initiation, and then how the lack of the Egodeath theory contributed to my experience of mystical initiation.

It puzzles me in light of this conversation why exactly the podcast guest Strange Loop is reporting that he is struggling to attain the high experiences, because he’s got the Egodeath theory; he gets it; he knows about transcendent control, and Eternalism, and that kind of thing – and although he’s repeatedly immersing in loose cognition, he’s got this lingering frustration that he hasn’t had the full hallowed experiences that that we talk about, of extreme control loss and control transformation.

So I wonder what’s going on in in his mind that’s causing that kind of a dynamic.

About pushing towards Phase Two (metaphor mapping & religious history, rather than basic core Egodeath theory) and talking about Phase Two: given the timing of this podcast and everything, we should return to that, because that’s a whole massive 50% of the theory, really that we’ve hardly touched on in this first recording.

So we should have a follow-up to this, and move into the phase two side of the theory, which is metaphor, religion, mythology, and then spell that out.

Timeline

Kafei/ Mystics, Canterbury/ Metaphor breakthrough, Basics of Egodeath podcast, Immortality Key, Hatsis vs. Brown, 75 Mushroom Trees inventory, expertise/ authority

Timeline by Cybermonk March 17, 2022

Metaphor was the focus of the creation of the EgodeathTheory site October 2020-March 2021, just before this podcast about Basics of Egodeath theory. After this podcast, followed the era of The Immortality Key book, with forward by Graham Hancock, then the Hatsis vs. Brown letters at the Hancock site, folllowed immediately by the March 13, 2022 page, The 75 Mushroom Trees of the Canterbury Psalter.

  1. Kafei & Strange Loop episodes
  2. Metaphor was the focus of the creation of the EgodeathTheory site October 2020-March 2021; critique of Brown’s article, writing article for Brown on Criteria of Proof, discovering Canterbury breakthrough.
  3. Present podcast on Basics of Egodeath theory.
  4. The influential popular book The Immortality Key was published. Forward by Graham Hancock. Critique by Cyb.
  5. Hatsis’ attack letter at Hancock site.
  6. Brown’s defense letter at Hancock site.
  7. At EgodeathTheory site, finished the Canterbury mushrooms inventory and the spinoff 75 Mushroom Trees article.
  8. Then the page about experts, expertise, authority, and who is best positioned to judge and interpret mushrooms in religious art.