Justin Sledge (Esoterica) Conversation with Wouter Hanegraaff about Entheogens in Western Esotericism

Michael Hoffman, theory of psychedelic eternalism

As said at start, demons are swinging the audio level all over the place.

Contents:

Intro
The Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Hyper-Eternalism
Egodeath Theory Emphasizing Qualified Possibilism Instead of Eternalism: “Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Hyper-Eternalism“
Beginner Possibilism Guy; Beginner Eternalism Guy; Advanced Hyper-Eternalism Guy
1997 Psyche Level (Soul Level) version of the Egodeath theory = 2-level; end-state = brute eternalism; You must agree with me that no-free-will is the case; you must conduct all your thinking in a no-free-will way
2025 Pneuma/Spirit version of the Egodeath theory = 3-level; end-state = hyper-eternalism; You must agree with me that no-free-will is the case merely at the underlying level and must be affirmed/ relied on in the altered state but, in practice, you always conduct all your thinking in a free-will looking way; experience power of steering in branching tree, as if {king steering in a tree} even though you know that underlying reality is {snake frozen in rock}
Does Middle Platonism have an aspect of hyper-heimarmene? todo: confirm
Confirmed Astral Ascent Mysticism per Egodeath Theory: Name of hyper-eternalism sphere (beyond eternalism) is Pleroma, = precession of the equinoxes
Sledge Video “What is the Demiurge? Pt 4 Why the Demiurge is Necessary for Salvation”
“Pneumatic”, “Spiritual”, Hyper-Transcendent Version of Egodeath Theory = Accurate Useful Description of Actual Resulting Mental Model = Qualified Possibilism, More than Brute/ Simple Eternalism
Search Web: pleroma cosmic heimarmene
The Egodeath Theory Had Religious Re-Marketing Rebirth During March 2025 Due to Prepping to Communicate it to my Psychedelic Church
Factors that caused me to shift emphasis/ framing of the Egodeath theory from “You end up with Eternalism” to “You end up with Qualified Possibilism” in March 2025; Well-Formed Transcendent “Compatibilism“
Valentinus: Unsheathed Sword of Intelligence (Litwa, Feb. 2025)
h3 “On Self-control” fragment, Now Known to be by Valentinus. Litwa: Valentinus Unsheathed “On Self-control” book
It Was DMT. 😑
Bullsh!t Is Bullsh!t: False Tepidness Is Hardly Truer than False Denial of Entheogens
“We Figured Out How Hermetists Had Intense Altered States: Through Entheogenic Practices in the Wide Sense! ” – Wouter Hanegraaff & Justin Sledge, Posturing Academics
“We Figured Out How Hermetists Had Intense Altered States: Through Non-Drug Entheogens! ” – Wouter Hanegraaff & Justin Sledge, Posturing Academics
From Total Denial to Insistent Assertion Along with Strenuous Minimizing of Entheogens: “I boldly insist that ancients definitely used entheogenic practices (but it was almost always non-drug entheogenic practices)” – Countersignal Yourself Harder
Desc from Video
Featured places
Embassy of the Free Mind
Museum
Quick paste from idea development page 26: Related Comments
My Wussy Half-Truth in 1997 like the traditional methods of the mystics are non-drug entheogens
“Dizzy Doesn’t Count”
keyboard shortcut for my 2004 “Entheogenic Esotericism” post
When You Think of Psychedelics Extremism, Think Egodeath theory
🍄👑 King of the Ardent Advocates
Transcription (with timestamps)
Transcription without Timestamps

Intro

Find: DMT, psychotropic, altered, psychedelic, substance, ayahuasca, ecstatic, consciousness, bias, Muraresku, evidence, balance, entheogen.

Video Thumbnail: He’s holding no-free-will/ heimarmene/ Fatedness/ eternalism in his hand and looking at it from outside of it, seeing the uncontrollable source of control-thoughts, from the mature {immortal} POV; hyper-eternalism aka qualified possibilism-thinking.

— Michael Hoffman, the theory of psychedelic eternalism

what was that –^

The Name of the Theory, and the descriptive elaborative sentence to disambig it

theory of psychedelic eternalism

means theory of psychedelic hyper-eternalism ; qualified possibilism-thinking; virtual freewill;
knowing that at the underlying level = eternalism
though the shape of experience and personal control system is always:

literalist ordinary-state possibilism with autonomous control
lopac

The mind learns to differentiate child vs adult thinking, and rely on adult thinking, not rely on child thinking. We have then two minds: higher rider mind, lower donkey mind.

The lower, personal mind thinks as if it’s a monolithic, autonomous control agent

The higher, transpersonal mind knows that the lower mind is actually put forth from the uncontrollable source of control-thoughts, frozen in future 4D block time

4D block spacetime
fbs

Which Came First: Infinitely better than “CybTrans.com” domain name Egodeath.com, or, calling it “Egodeath theory” eg 1996/1997? when did I first write “Egodeath theory”? Ans: Not in 1997; by 2001 June.

Apparently Erik Davis asked me in 2001 about the theory. News to me.

next, check Egodeath Yahoo Group: first occur of “Egodeath theory”?? __ ans: https://egodeathyahoogroup.wordpress.com/2021/01/09/egodeath-yahoo-group-digest-1/#message23 – super interesting. shows other verbose name; says “Egodeath theory” is short brand name; long brand name is what I wrote late 1988: c t e t ; CTET to The Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence

“The Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence” [descriptive, except missing ‘eternalism’ & ‘psychedelic’] (1988) =
“the Egodeath theory” (2001?)

the [Cybernetic + Psychedelic + Eternalism] Theory of Ego Transcendence

the [Analogy + Cybernetic + Psychedelic + Eternalism] Theory of X

the [Analogy Psychedelic Eternalism Cybernetic] Theory of X

the [Analogy Psychedelic Eternalism Cybernetic] Theory

The Analogy Psychedelic Eternalism Cybernetics Theory

– LAST WORD TO DELETE = ? DELETE 1 WORD:

Sort 4 key words in order , most important first:

Analogy – not important for Core, only for periph application & history & myth.
Psychedelic – crucial to emphasize; nothing w/o this; everyone tries to shut out, do not allow.
Cybernetic – it’s a given, since we are control agents
Eternalism – CRUCIALLY DISTINCITVE

THAT’S Wouter Hanegraaff They

That’s why recently I selttled on short form “theory of psychedelic eternalism”.

it is a theory.
this is the brand name of a theory.
the last descriptors to delete, the very most distcintive precious crucial differentiattors, are not ‘analogy’ or ‘cybernetics’, but: eternalism + psychedelics. thus:

theory of psychedelic eternalism

so:

Egodeath theory = theory of psychedelic eternalism

thus

Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism

that is brand name + 2 crutical key word descriptors. it’s more like a Foo Bar theory OF ego death. ie:

the possibilism experiential mode

the Psychedelic Eternalism Theory of Egodeath <– order interesting
=
the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism

the theory that egodeath is really about psychedelic eternalism

psychedelic eternalism
pe

Psilocybin esotericism
p-e

p-e Psilocybin esotericism Psychedelic Eternalism Theory of Myth

damn it what is keyboard shortcut for “psychedelic eternamlism”??

next, standard order:

X = Ego Transcendence

Self-control Cybernetics, Dissociative Cognition, & Mystic Ego Death (1997 core theory spec) (Hoffman, 1997) https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2020/11/30/self-control-cybernetics-dissociative-cognition-mystic-ego-death/

I know I have a handy link somewhere here, around 1997 article’s notes

Archive.org link: cybtrans.com
https://egodeaththeory.org/2021/01/08/announcement-the-cybernetic-theory-of-ego-transcendence/#CybTrans-com — has link:
https://web.archive.org/web/19970214094018/http://www.cybtrans.com/philosph/postings.htm —
Does that page say like “Egodeath theory”? no, says “origin of this theory” … title of site: Ego Death and Self-Control Cybernetics

but it doesn’t NAME the theory! “This is a philosophy or theory of [insert: of what?]

the psychological phenomenon of mystic ego death“

verbose description, good. but, no named theory. POOR BRANDING. DAMN IT, IT NEVER NAMES THE THEORY!!

IT DOESN’T NAME THE TWO HALVES, IT SIMPLY REJECTS THE HISTORY/ENTH / the Mytheme theory HALF, SAYING THE CORE WOULD be too big if the history/ entheogens/ the Mytheme theory content were included in the core. stupid. should have said:

The Foo Bar Theory, including:

Core theory cybernetics yada
history/ myth / the Mytheme theory / ahistoricity / entheogens hsitory yada theory

“Importing foreign and historical elements into the core of this Theory would cause the misguidedness of those elements to be inherited as well, making the core overly complex. This new core theory of enlightenment is not a history of ideas about enlightenment, but an essential framework for a mental model of spacetime and self-control. It is a type of metaphysical system, with special emphasis on self-control cybernetics.” — https://web.archive.org/web/19970214094113/http://www.cybtrans.com/philosph/p173.htm

Several problems that I didn’t perceive or clearly think about in 1997:

the brand name of the whole theory;
the name of the core theory portion;
” periph “.

monolithic, autonomous control agent
maca

literalist ordinary-state possibilism with monolithic, autonomous control
lopmac

analogical psychedelic eternalism

ape2c

analogical psychedelic eternalism dependence
aped

analogical psychedelic eternalism with 2-level, dependent control
ape2dc

2-level, dependent control
2ldc

analogical psychedelic eternalism
ape

analogical psychedelic eternalism with 2-level control
ape2

from {Amanita, Christianity, surface form, low esotericism} to {Psilocybin, Greek + Christian, cognitive effects, high esotericism}
ap

The Theory of Psychedelic Hyper-Eternalism

The Theory of Psychedelic (Hyper-) Eternalism

what do I want to highlight at lowest level of detail; ie at max zoom out level?

what then is the very next thing? In concept-label or theory-brand label… is it a trademark name of a theory, or, a description specifier characterization?

theory of psychedelic eternalism
tope

theory of psychedelic (hyper-)eternalism

theory of psychedelic hyper-eternalism
tph <–
tphe
tophe

Psychedelic Hyper-Eternalism

The Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Eternalism

(winner 🏆 b/c clarity at this concise level) [EDTPE]

analogical psychedelic eternalism with 2-level, dependent control
ape2dc

analogical psychedelic eternalism with 2-level control
ape2

analogical psychedelic eternalism dependence
aped
This is a 4-term descriptor from which it is possible to construct the entire Egodeath theory.

the complem term is:

literalist ordinary-state possibilism with autonomous control –>
literalist ordinary-state possibilism autonomomy
lopa
literalist ordinary-state possibilism autonomomy

thus “aped vs. lopa“.

“analogical psychedelic eternalism dependence” vs. “literalist ordinary-state possibilism autonomomy”
avl
“analogical psychedelic eternalism dependence” vs. “literalist ordinary-state possibilism autonomomy”

You can construct the entire theory from just the most key terms:
theory of psychedelic eternalism
tope

theory of what? of the “psychedelic eternalism” theory of myth
petm

a theory of:
“psychedelic eternalism” theory of myth
the “psychedelic eternalism” theory of myth

qualified freewill thinking

The Theory of Psychedelic Eternalism

(winner 🏆🏆 b/c clarity at this concise level) [TOPE]

theory of psychedelic eternalism
tope

It is clarifying to say:

Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism — succinct, emphasize the simple thing.

Do not — in short name — emph the complex thing, “qualified possibilism-thinking” – too indirect, roundabout.

The Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Hyper-Eternalism

The Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Eternalism (which is Hyper-Eternalism, ie Qualified Possibilism)

The Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Possibilism
[too much marketing lie??]

Despite my analysis, the best title feels:

Egodeath Theory Emphasizing Qualified Possibilism Instead of Eternalism: “Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Hyper-Eternalism“

Beginner Possibilism Guy; Beginner Eternalism Guy; Advanced Hyper-Eternalism Guy

picture of the week

Difficulty 1 of 10:
L leg = naive possibilism-thinking;
R leg = brute eternalism-thinking

That’s nice. You got that. Ok, next, explain:

Difficulty 10 of 10:
no leg indicated = hyper-eternalism

1997 Psyche Level (Soul Level) version of the Egodeath theory = 2-level; end-state = brute eternalism; You must agree with me that no-free-will is the case; you must conduct all your thinking in a no-free-will way

2025 Pneuma/Spirit version of the Egodeath theory = 3-level; end-state = hyper-eternalism; You must agree with me that no-free-will is the case merely at the underlying level and must be affirmed/ relied on in the altered state but, in practice, you always conduct all your thinking in a free-will looking way; experience power of steering in branching tree, as if {king steering in a tree} even though you know that underlying reality is {snake frozen in rock}

I really feel that March 2025, the Egodeath theory matured in its Marketing framing positioning: from brute emphasis on “eternalism is the case”,

Certainly, I have been developing 3-phase model since 2000 when Coraxo pointed out that my 1997 2-level model (etrmin terminating in heimarmene) is incapable of discussing Gnosticism. I immediately recognized that a as a widespread problem characteristic of Late Antiquity.

Does Middle Platonism have an aspect of hyper-heimarmene? todo: confirm

{king steering in a tree}
kst

Advanced the Egodeath theory : you always use egoic personal control system (so, possibilism); you’re always in the tightcog ordinary state (so, possibilism). gestures to the advanced puzzle: row 1, Eadwine’s leg-hanging mushroom tree image in the Great Canterbury Psalter: evaluate upside down

Confirmed Astral Ascent Mysticism per Egodeath Theory: Name of hyper-eternalism sphere (beyond eternalism) is Pleroma, = precession of the equinoxes

Sledge new Demiurge 4 vid says Pleroma is a hermetic name of the 9th cosmic sphere; the Ennead, above eternalism sphere 8 (sphere of the fixed stars).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq-CoIFf8l0 —

Vid name: “What is the Demiurge? Pt 4 Why the Demiurge is Necessary for Salvation”
March 28, 2025
YouTube channel: ESOTERICA – Dr. Justin Sledge
836K subscribers
47,798 views

“Gnosticism is often thought to teach that the creator of the cosmos is a demonic entity known as the Demiurge. However, this sharply dualistic teaching isn’t the only Gnostic voice. Valentinus taught that the Demiurge, while ignorant, was a necessary aspect of salvation. Indeed, even the Demiurge would achieve psychic redemption according to this school of Gnosticism. Let’s explore the Valentinian conception of the Demiurge, one that upends both ancient and contemporary stereotypes about Gnosticism.

Consider Supporting Esoterica! Patreon – / esotericachannel One Time Donation Support – Paypal Donation – https://www.paypal.me/esotericachannel Merch – / @theesotericachannel New to Studying Esotericism? Check out my Reading Guide here – https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c… Rare Occult Books – https://www.esotericaoccultbooks.com/

Episode 1 – • What is the Demiurge – Pt 1 – How the…

Episode 2 – • What is the Demiurge – Pt 2 – The Evi…

Episode 3 – • What is the Demiurge – Pt 3 – Simon M…

Archons – • Who are the Archons – The Rulers of t…

Sledge Video “What is the Demiurge? Pt 4 Why the Demiurge is Necessary for Salvation”

Sledge said in the new video:

the 7 planetary archons rulers governors (controllers) = fate = cosmos sphere 1-7. [the body?]
the demiurge (Yaldabaoth) = Fate = sphere 8. The soul; the psyche rises to this level, max. Highest sphere of the cosmos.
the aeons? nous? the Pleroma = sphere 9, above Fate. The pneuma; the spirit, rises to this level. Hyper-eternalism. hyper-cosmic. Hyper-heimarmene. Above/outside the 4D spacetime block. outside 4D spacetime; outside/above 4D spacetime eternalism.

4D spacetime block
fdsb

4D spacetime eternalism
fdse

outside/above the 4D spacetime rock

The Spiritual Egodeath Theory edtpem etpem etpem psychedelic eternalism transformation from possibilism to eternalismm Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism e t p e

the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism
etpe
the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism

the spiritual egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism

the egodeath theory of spiritual psychedelic eternalism

but “spiritual” is no good, you have to know the ancient 3-tier system body/ soul or psyche / spirit or pneuma — which I wrote up in 2001 per E Pagels book reviews.

2000, I realized you can express “transcend eternalism” ie 3-phase model — yet, I continued emph’g “terminate at eternalism” like {red guy} during 2000-2024.

While I DEVELOPED the model to explain {sage} on right during 2000-2024, I still marketed “Egodeath theory terminates in eternalism; eternalism is the case”.

Recent studying mushroom inspired me that in fact I always remain emphatically qualified possibilism-thinking even during peak window.

I held that at arms’ length, twice, recently.

You KEEP egoic personal control system , but you SEE it and STEP OUTSIDE IT in awareness.

It’s “that thing”. “that system over there”.

“I see my egoic personal control system down there.”

“I am watching my egoic personal control system over there.”

“Pneumatic”, “Spiritual”, Hyper-Transcendent Version of Egodeath Theory = Accurate Useful Description of Actual Resulting Mental Model = Qualified Possibilism, More than Brute/ Simple Eternalism

Aim to Look Very Like the Pre/Trans Fallacy; Chop Wood Carry Water, but Modified Foundation Can Endure Psilocybin Loose Cognitive Hyper-Awareness/ Transcendent Awareness Perception Capability Endurant

Search Web: pleroma cosmic heimarmene

I then confirmed by searching: pleroma cosmic heimarmene
https://www.google.com/search?q=pleroma+cosmic+heimarmene

“Gnosticism” article at Thelemistas.org
https://www.thelemistas.org/en/MSS/Wetzel/Gnosticism – page confirms astral ascent mysticism, pleroma, what Sledge said.

“divine perfection known as the Pleroma, a realm of heavenly beings or aeons“

“he Gnostic insistence that a species of esoteric knowledge and self-control are the keys to transcending the flawed [= eternalism] creation of the demiourgos.

“The first, pre-cosmic creations of the demiourgos are the archons (“rulers”), which are spirits typically associated with the seven Ptolemaic planets and the sphere of fixed stars.

[only demiurge directly = fixed stars — demiurge & archons are subsets within fatedness / eternalism]

“The rule [external control over your thoughts] of the demiourgos [sphere 8 fixed stars] and the archons [sphere 1-7 planets] is frequently called by the Gnostics heimarmene (“fate“)”

“and is often conceived of as cruel, tyrannical and oppressive in the extreme.

“This is so because these archons are the creations of a fallen, ignorant and lesser “god,” whose creation is merely a flawed shadow copy of the Pleroma [sphere 9: precession of equinoxes; above fate-sphere of fixed stars]:”

The Egodeath Theory Had Religious Re-Marketing Rebirth During March 2025 Due to Prepping to Communicate it to my Psychedelic Church

A stunted tale is “end up at eternalism, the end.”

True characterization of what you end up with: qualified possibilism-thinking.

Also a key influence (forcing a change of thinking) while studying mushrooms Jan-Feb 2025: I had unclean lips, there is no way to say “here is how YOU SHOULD think”, w/o impliying egoic mental model.

I made progress in Jan/Mar 2025 re: mytheme decoding {donkey w/ rider on path} incl Entry Jeru.

Factors that caused me to shift emphasis/ framing of the Egodeath theory from “You end up with Eternalism” to “You end up with Qualified Possibilism” in March 2025; Well-Formed Transcendent “Compatibilism“

The Egodeath theory doesn’t give you eternalism (unless you alter def’n of that word).

The Egodeath theory gives you transcendence of eternalism. Or “transcendent eternalism” or “hyper-eternalism”.

The Egodeath theory does NOT give you naive possibilism.

I’m a believer in eternalism b/c that is required to have stable control in loose cognition.

Relational eternalism.

Similar to the higher god, vs. the demiurge.

Not sure ATM how map this section to that gnostic contrast…. demiurge ~= false egoic personal control system.

The Egodeath theory removes naive possibilism.

Egodeath theory replaces naive possibilism by qualified possibilism (including knowing that the underlying level = eternalism).

A better rep’n is “end up w/ best type of , ultimate type of Compatibilism”

Red Youth 1997: eternalism is the case!

Coraxo 2000: your model can’t describe Gnosticism.

I developed the 3-phase model 2003-Feb 2025.

Feb 2023, when invited to present the Egodeath theory, realized it will not fly, to describe Transcendent Knowledge = terminate at eternalism. that is not an accuate characterization, unless you redefine ‘eternalism’ to emphasize re-formed possibilism-thinking; qualified possibilism-thinking.

You end up MORE with qualified possibilism-thinking, than with eternalism-thinking or “qualified eternalism-thinking”.

You end up w/ ability to stable personal control system during Psilocybin loose cognition.

Justin Sledge influenced me in March hearing him argue that Transcendent Knowledge isn’t worth the trouble b/c chop wood carry water;

“Transcendent Knowledge DOESN’T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE” —

except, the personal control system gains the ability to endure the Psilocybin, loose cognitive state.

Valentinus: Unsheathed Sword of Intelligence (Litwa, Feb. 2025)

“On Self-control” fragment, Now Known to be by Valentinus. Litwa: Valentinus Unsheathed “On Self-control” book

{unsheathing blade} if L finger closer to the ground. unstable control. unstable control. possibilism-thinking.
{sheathing blade} if R finger closer to the ground. stable control. eternalism-thinking.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DW9172HN/ —

Valentinus: Unsheathed Sword of Intelligence
M. David Litwa, February 5, 2025

Blurb:

“This book studies the life and thought of Valentinus using his genuine fragments.

“After translating the fragments and introducing Valentinus’ life, it reorders the fragments and segues into a line-by-line spiritual and historical commentary:”

Valentinus Sees a Vision (Fragment 7)
Summer Harvest (Fragment 8)
Evil Angels and the God Human (Fragment 1)
The Image and the Name (Fragment 5)
You Are Deathless! (Fragment 4) {immortal} = mature.
The Pure in Heart (Fragment 2)
On Self-control (Containing Fragment 3)
The Truth is Everywhere (Fragment 6)

“This volume is the first to integrate the discovery that Valentinus wrote the letter On Self-control (formerly attributed to Basil of Caesarea).

“It closes with an argument that Valentinus wrote the Gospel of Truth.”

Litwa’s new book on Valentinus fragments, the first time “On Self-control” was included & attributed.

It Was DMT. 😑

Sledge at 1:20:00:

“every episode i do, i get comments “It was DMT. 😑”

Sledge’s commenters are correct: IT WAS DMT.

I am not tired of scholars denying entheogens altogether; I am tired of scholars making a false call for “balance”, as if heavy breathing is sufficient for mental model transformation from possibilism to eternalism.

The maximal entheogen theory of religion (Michael Hoffman 2002 & 2003, the Egodeath Yahoo Group) sees entheogens everywhere because:

They were everywhere.
No method other than entheogens is sufficient for mental model transformation from possibilism to eternalism.

I equate the false call for “balance” and “middle position avoiding extremes” with Browns’ betting everything on Walburga not being Amanita, and then botching the negative interp. Compounded by displaying the art so as to assert Amanita, while wording in roundabout way to assert not Amanita. Posturing to other scholars, “we are in the club of moderates.”

The Egodeath theory is NOT in that club and REJECTS that club.

Ardent Advocates 1, False Moderates 0

4-error penalty b/c two authors, two publications, repeating same elementary false interp.

I reject and hate the Moderate aka Minimal entheogen theory of religion.

The plague of 2000: “never entheogens in our religion history.”

The plague of 2025: “above all, we must avoid overstating how much entheogens in our religion history.” F that! It was nothing but entheogens. Any religion lacking entheogens isn’t real religion. Real religion is none other than entheogens.

take my keyboard shortcut a e e e for test drive:

“Authentic esotericism is entheogenic esotericism. Entheogens are the key to esotericism. This is the simplest possible theory of esotericism, and the most natural, the least contrived and strained. Theories of esotericism that are not based on entheogens suffer from the problem of grandiose verbiage, unmet promises and claims, chronic vagueness, excuses for lack of potent and prompt efficacy, and no ability to deliver the experiences which are talked about. Drug-free esotericism doesn’t work; it is not effectively ergonomic.” – Michael Hoffman, Egodeath Yahoo Group, June 12, 2004

Wouter Hanegraaff is now known to definitely have read my 2004 title/posting “Entheogenic Esotericism” written 8 years before his 2012 keynote of same name.

His email reply yesterdayish said re that point and one other: thank you for the info”

I also pointed him to my good new page explaining why he MUST be wrong writing “the Ogdoad above heimarmene”.

Hanegraaff’s Inability to Place Fixed Stars in Sphere 8 Proves Rebirth above Saturn Is into Fate, before Freedom
The Note 114/ p 294 quote is in section:
https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/03/18/hanegraaffs-inability-to-place-fixed-stars-in-sphere-7-or-8-proves-rebirth-is-into-fate-not-freedom/#p294

“Whether the fixed stars should be included [with Saturn, sphere 7] or should rather be associated with the Ogdoad [sphere 8] remains an open question for me.” – p. 294, footnote 114, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity, by Wouter Hanegraaff, 2022
114

My victory & credibility-boost re: placing fixed stars in sphere 8 (highest Fate level, reborn into from Saturn sphere 7) bolsters my bold claim & sound argument that non-drug entheogens = academic bullsh!t. that’s just a retreating form – they’re losing ground – of sheer denial.

Wouter Hanegraaff says: academics were wrong to say zero entheogens. Academics ought to say “Only a tiny bit of entheogens; but usually heavy breathing and the traditional methods of the mystics, instead.”

SO BOLD – SO BRAVE – SLEDGE AND Hanegraaff

NOTICE the deniers’ TRAJECTORY of retraction:

How long before they admit that I am right?

Intense mystic altered state without psychedelics MAKES NO SENSE – that is the evidence.

mystics’ history: Either they didn’t actually have the intense mystic altered state that they claimed to have, or, they had it, through psychedelics. The evidence is that only psychedelics have enough efficacy to cause that change/ that intense mystic altered state.

Letcher 2006, same: “Ok, we admit our total denial was wrong. But there were only a LITTLE Psilocybin mushrooms in England before 1970.”

The deniers are retreating in my direction. Stop dilly dallying and admit I’m 100% right, immediately.

What happened to Thomas Hatsis promised book that will prove no mushroom imagery in Christian art? Videos at YouTube announce that book – we’re waiting. ie, Thomas Hatsis is retreating in my direction.

new type of keyboard shortcut: fav quotes:

“Amanita muscaria is the most famous entheogen in the world that nobody uses. It is the supreme symbol of all entheogenic religion: of secret cults and societies of initiates and whispered lost knowledge.” – Dale Pendell, Pharmako Gnosis, first sentence of Amanita chapter
nouse
dpam

“Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city.” – Revelation 22:14 (the last page of the Bible), NIV
rev2214

Bullsh!t Is Bullsh!t: False Tepidness Is Hardly Truer than False Denial of Entheogens

“We Figured Out How Hermetists Had Intense Altered States: Through Entheogenic Practices in the Wide Sense! 🏆” – Wouter Hanegraaff & Justin Sledge, Posturing Academics

“We Figured Out How Hermetists Had Intense Altered States: Through Non-Drug Entheogens! 🏆” – Wouter Hanegraaff & Justin Sledge, Posturing Academics

From Total Denial to Insistent Assertion Along with Strenuous Minimizing of Entheogens: “I boldly insist that ancients definitely used entheogenic practices (but it was almost always non-drug entheogenic practices)” – Countersignal Yourself Harder

Hanegraaff says reject bullsh!t 1, and instead, assert bullsh!t 2 instead, which slightly eases back from bullsh!t 1. but bullsh!t is bullsh!t.

the other whopper: https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/03/18/hanegraaffs-inability-to-place-fixed-stars-in-sphere-7-or-8-proves-rebirth-is-into-fate-not-freedom/#p258a —

“the Ogdoad above the heimarmene” – p. 258, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity, by Wouter Hanegraaff, 2022
oah

Desc from Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgzuj1joXX0 —

Video title:
“What is Hermeticism – Then & Now Conversation ‪@EmbassyoftheFreeMind‬ w/prof. Hanegraaff”
Dec 12, 2023
80,296 views
ESOTERICA YouTube channel
835K subscribers

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“A roundtable conversation hosted by the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam moderated by Dr. Lucinda Martin, between dr. Justin Sledge of Esoterica and Prof. Dr. Wouter Hanegraaff on the topic:
Hermes and Hermeticism, Then and Today.”

https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/ <- for wusses
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Transcript
Follow along using the transcript. [below]
You can toggle timestamps at YouTube.

Quick paste from idea development page 26: Related Comments

Added machine transcription below.

At 1:20:00, Sledge rejects both errors (just like Brown positions themself as centrist by rejecting mushroom imagery in Christian art (St. Walburga tapestry, definitely not Amanita) and affirming it by also at the same time displaying that same art in beautiful gallery of awesome instances of definite Amanita imagery in Christian art):

Avoid psychedelics eliminativism – I agree, that is baloney.
Avoid DMT reductionism (“it’s always DMT”).

Sledge means: Avoid entheogenic reductionism; avoid saying that the way esotericists accessed the altered state of consciousness was always psychedelics.

Sledge is wrong. This is false centrism.

In fact, the way ppl had the altered state of consciousness sufficient for mental model transformation is always, exclusively psychedelics, no other method.

That’s my official firm position.

Photo: Michael Hoffman, Egodeath Mystery Show

My Wussy Half-Truth in 1997 like the traditional methods of the mystics are non-drug entheogens

“There are multiple triggers for the dissociative cognitive state, including psychedelics, meditation, schizophrenia, sensory deprivation, hyperventilation, temporal-lobe epilepsy, UFO abduction, and near-death experiences.” – Michael Hoffman 1997

“the” dissociative state? maybe, but that is BS, in that it is not sufficient to cause mental model transformation from possibilism to eternalism. “DIZZY DOESN’T COUNT” – Michael Hoffman slogan.

“Dizzy Doesn’t Count”

{balance scale} = B.S. 🚫⚖️

Crop by Michael Hoffman. Great Canterbury Psalter f11, Day 1 & 4 of Creation, Panaeolus points to pan of {balance scale}; an {open book}.

I give NO credit to claims of “the traditional methods of the mystics” that are allegedly non-drug.

Non-drug entheogens is academic balony, with ZERO substantiation. It is pure doctrinal positioning, a circle of academics pleasing each other, not reality.

I wimped and caved, in:

BEING SLIGHTLY DIZZY PROVES MY POINT:

Heavy breathing makes you dizzy – it does not cause mental model transformation, mental model transformation from possibilism to eternalism. which is the only thing that’s relevant for this debate.

My authority: My leading-edge father in 1980 led me in Grof BS Breathing. It is way way way too weak. weak!

keyboard shortcut for my 2004 “Entheogenic Esotericism” post

Made a keyboard shortcut for my 2004 “Entheogenic Esotericism” post at the Egodeath Yahoo Group
https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/03/18/hanegraaffs-inability-to-place-fixed-stars-in-sphere-7-or-8-proves-rebirth-is-into-fate-not-freedom/#Email-to-Hanegraaff-March-18-2025 links to:
https://egodeathyahoogroup.wordpress.com/2021/01/09/egodeath-yahoo-group-digest-66/#message3335 —

[aeee]

that lacks definition: “sufficient for mental model transformation from possibilism to eternalism” – note also: hyper-eternalism

When You Think of Psychedelics Extremism, Think Egodeath theory

🍄👑 King of the Ardent Advocates

I agree, Justin Sledge, it is always Psilocybin, never DMT. Do not say it’s always DMT. It is always Psilocybin. (It is never Wouter Hanegraaff’s non-drug entheogens.)

Per hardline Egodeath theory:

No one ever had mystic experiernc any way other than Psilocybin.
Academics lie when they emphatically proclaim their DOCTRINAL STATEMENT OF FAITH that “there are many ways to produce same effect as Psilocybin” – LIARS CLUB. Fabricicated alt methods do not work, defined as: they do not produce sufficient effect. re strength or reliablility. note however, Cuebensis is not as reliable or ergonomic as blotter. Cubensis is hard to worrk with, for Psilocybin transformation.

Transcription (with timestamps)

Easy to get w/o timestamps, also. todo??

0:09[Music]

0:22a lesson that I’ve learned in my short life thus far is that if we let others Define what success is for us we never

0:30achieve it however if we Define what success means to us and for us regardless of social political or

0:37economic expectations then we might have a chance

0:43this summer I got to experience a real bit of success what it feels like for me

0:50for this channel for the project of esotera I got to join in a roundt

0:56discussion with a personal hero of mine professor professor vouter hanrath at an

1:02institution I also deeply admire and Revere the embassy of the free mind also

1:08known as the Ritman library to discuss a topic that has long fascinated me the

1:15philosophy and spirituality of hermeticism of course Professor hanuka’s

1:21work has transformed the field of the study of wosa terorism and frankly it speaks for itself though I remember

1:29being young person in my late teens probably and finding his work in the late 1990s and think to myself my God

1:38you can study all this cool esotericism stuff with rigor with scientific

1:44academic rigor and that that still motivates me down to this day further

1:51when I discovered there was an entire vast Library where esoteric wisdom was

1:56collected in the very antiquarian volumes and manuscripts that first brought that light to this world I

2:04resolved I resolved that I would go there and I would study that material

2:09come what may among the same canals that dayart and Spinosa once tried so on a

2:16very very warm evening I got to experience a bit of what success is for me to speak on a topic dear to me with a

2:23personal hero in a space I hold with reverence among a crowd of absolutely

2:30wonderful like-minded people and some of the most wonderful dear friends I’ve met in the recent years so I want to

2:37introduce you to this conversation by encouraging you to head over to the Embassy of the free Minds YouTube

2:42channel and their website and subscribe subscribe to their content you can find the links below and in the

2:49description if you like the content we put forward here at esoterica you’ll enjoy their content immensely indeed we

2:57share a common goal making as a teric wisdom accessible with scholarly rigor secondly

3:05I’d encourage you to support their work by picking up some of the items from their web shop for instance this two

3:12volume Christ Plato Hermes Tris magistus volume is one of my absolute favorite

3:17books it is a veritable catalog of hermetic and mystical wisdom documenting

3:23the first 50 years of printing it’s like having a portable

3:28Museum but for topics that esoterica specializes in it’s well worth picking

3:34up I think you can get a copy of this two volume hardback really really amazingly bound and printed document for

3:40like 50 bucks now we recorded a lot of material at the Ritman Library so I’ll be rolling out some of that soon as well

3:46so if you like esoteric spirituality really really beautiful old books and a 17th century Dutch mansion

3:55on the canals of Amsterdam stay tuned but with special thanks to everyone at

4:01the embassy of the free m especially Dr lenda Martin here is my conversation

4:07with Professor hanra on hermeticism then and

4:14[Music]

4:27now okay okay sorry about the technical difficulties we’ve uh We’ve consulted and determined

4:34it was the Hermetic dionis who were infiltrating our sound system let me

4:39start over uh for those at home I’m Lucinda Martin I’m the director of the Ritman Research Institute and the bibla

4:46philosophica hermetica the library of hermetic philosophy and this evening we

4:51have a round table which we’re calling Hermes yesterday and today now as I said before our library

4:59used to be one of the few places to study hermetic discourses and traditions these things were long viewed as

5:05Superstitious by Academia and by mainstream churches and thus seen as Unworthy of of attention in the meantime

5:13Scholars have begun to realize the contributions of hermetic streams of thought to the cultural history of

5:20humanity and last November our library was added to the UNESCO memory of the world register because of the

5:27contributions some of our authors have made to the development of modern human

5:32rights in 2017 the Ritman family established a museum the embassy of the

5:38free mind which is where we are this evening to teach the general public about the content of the library we

5:45present exhibitions and we offer lectures and seminars and even a Children’s Program you might therefore

5:51say that the kind of event that we’re hosting tonight is in our DNA it brings together two of the most

5:58prominent voices about hermetic traditions and discourses one operating in Academia and one specialized in

6:06communicating to the public and those are also our two concerns Val Jan is Professor of the

6:14history of hermetic philosophy and related streams of thought at the University of

6:19Amsterdam he has many scholarly Publications including his most recent book hermetic spirituality and the

6:26historic imagination just Sledge is the creator of the YouTube channel esoterica which

6:33has more than 300,000 followers this evening we want to explore the past present and future of

6:41hermetic streams of thought and their study what role they’ve played in history what they mean to people today

6:49and what questions are open that still need to be answered about this subject

6:54each of our speakers will give a short presentation and then we want to open the discussion to as many questions as

7:01possible both from our live and our remote audience in this way we hope to

7:06include the perspectives of academics practitioners and anyone interested in

7:11this fascinating subject with that please join me in welcoming vouter and

7:18[Applause]

7:26Justin start okay well thank you very much for the nice

7:32introduction uh first of all and it’s very nice to be here again in the riton library a place where uh I’ve been

7:39coming uh since uh the end of the 80s the 1980s and um which is really the place

7:47uh where you can study the Hermetic literature uh there’s no better place no other place in the world which is as um

7:53as Central to this kind of research as this place here so this is so I’m very happy to be here again um what I would

8:00like to do just in 15 minutes is uh just give an very short uh introduction to

8:06what our hertica are all about for somewhat larger audience many people in the audience here might already know

8:12what it’s all about more or less but maybe the larger audience doesn’t so um

8:17what are Thea all about I’d like to uh tell a little bit about this um by while

8:23at the same time also telling you about my my personal interest and my own own development in my uh encounters my

8:31encounters with th greatest herish herish Trish magistus the um the

8:37legendary author of the Hermetic writings uh I encountered the carpus hermeticum the most Central text of

8:44hermetic writings uh by the end of the 1980s uh in a Dutch translation which

8:49was made possible by the biblo of philosophic hertica here in Amsterdam and the translation of the carpatica

8:56made by uh um rulof Brook and K whel which was uh of great importance for uh

9:03you know calling attention to the hertica in in the Dutch context I got fascinated I read these texts I was

9:10wondering what is it all about I couldn’t really make out entirely what they were all about there were many

9:15things that puzzled me about him but I got fascinated and hooked about this text um and um what is clear in any case

9:24these are texts that are attributed to an legendary author Hermes mesus or in

9:30which this legendary author or wisdom teachers plays a central role uh they

9:35were written in the second third centuries of the Common Era more or less uh in Greek and um um but they were

9:43written in Egypt and this combination of Egypt and Greek is interesting and and important for understanding what arar

9:50are all about because uh when you think of Greece then you think usually about

9:56Greece Greek culture as the origin of Greek rationalism Greek philosophy Etc

10:01and many people think that the whole of Western civilization began in Greece right so Greece has this kind of iconic

10:08status of the or as the origin of Western philosophy uh and rationalism

10:13but then these these texts were written in Egypt and Egypt is often seen as the counterpart in that respect Egypt is

10:21often perceived as the home of everything that’s not rational and not

10:26philosophical but uh that has to do with magic and Superstition and all kind of

10:32things that were seen as the counterpart of rationality and so the fact that her hetic writings were written precisely in

10:38Egypt but in Greek and in Greek which uses a lot of philosophical language is

10:44fascinating so you have these these two countries Egypt and Greece together so

10:49to speak in uh one carpus of text hertica these Texs are attributed to

10:54this legendary teacher um and uh they are all about the search for gnosis

11:00ultimate knowledge knowledge about the true nature of reality the true nature of God and the true nature of ourselves

11:08and um to already you know give you very shortly the answer of um what the quest

11:14prognosis is all about the ultimate um um answer that our hermetic uh authors

11:21gave to the question what is reality is all about what is the true nature of reality was that they said everything is

11:28light there is only one reality spiritual light which is universal and

11:33um God is light reality is light and the human being is light the only thing that

11:38really exists is light Universal light and they call that the Noose with a Greek word um now of course when we’re sitting

11:46here do you look at each other and we are looking we standing in a room here and you see people you see beautiful

11:52pictures at the walls Etc you’re not seeing light uh you’re you’re seeing all kind of objects and people

11:59um why is that well that is because according to the hertica uh we are not

12:05actually perceiving reality as it really is we are diluted so our state of consciousness in which we find ourselves

12:11is a diluted State a state of state of hallucination and this is these are really appropriate terms uh a state of

12:18hallucination in which we see things that seem very real but are not ultimately real because the only thing

12:24that’s really real is universal light that’s also a kind of core uh belief of the htic authors um so the question is

12:32how do we uh uh wake up from the state of delusion and illusion in which we

12:37find ourselves in which we think this is reality and how do we find our way towards a true perception of the true

12:44nature of reality which is universal light that was really what the way of Hermes was all about and that is what

12:50you find in the Hermetic literature so in the Hermetic literature you find the

12:55description of what uh is often described as the path of Hermes or the way of Hermes in which um the authors

13:03and practitioners who wrote these texts where describing how you can uh Free

13:11Yourself liberate yourself from delusionary perceptions of reality and

13:16find your way to gnosis of reality as it really is that’s a kind of a core

13:22summary of what oura are all about these are unique profound very fascinating

13:27text I have been studying them for decades now and this is in Corpus of text that you can keep reading there are

13:33many text that you might come across when you read them a couple of times you know what they’re all about these are

13:39text that you can keep reading because they always keep surprising you I’ve uh written a pretty thick book about him um

13:46and been doing little else then studying the herar for five or six years I’m absolutely sure if I uh start reading

13:54the text the text again I will again discover new things that I didn’t see before uh because this is how

14:01fascinating and multi levs levels leveled their hetic text are so these

14:06are Classics these are Classics um to say something else also about the

14:12reception of the Hy because these a Tex from the second third Century late Antiquity uh Egypt and the Roman Empire

14:20very long time ago uh many things happened with armatic writings over the centuries they got translated they got

14:28copied by scribes Etc a lot can be said about it but an highlight of the Revival

14:33of the Hermetic uh literature came in the 15th century when the Greek texts uh

14:40especially the text that is known as the Corpus hermeticum uh got translated into Latin by one of the great humanists in

14:47the uh of the Renaissance marcelio ficino and this famous translation came

14:52out in 1471 uh known as the Pander uh the book on the wisdom and uh

15:00power of God the famous translation of the carum now I got fascinated by uh the

15:08reception and the translation of the hertica in the Renaissance in the spirit uh in 1997 and that’s maybe a nice small

15:17story to tell of how very small things that happen in your life can totally change your life forever and because I

15:23was living in Paris at that time uh I was one evening I was visiting a friend of mine famous scholar of the study of

15:30esotericism antoan f uh who’s an pioneering St scholar in our field I was

15:37having a nice evening at home with him and I was looking um at a little glass case that he had in his room which had a

15:45collection of very old books uh very valuable old books the kind of books that you find here in the Ritman library

15:51and one of them caught my interest for some reason I took it out it turned out to be in French translation from from

15:58the 16th century of hermetic literature and um and somehow something

16:06tickled my interest and I still think if I hadn’t taken that book out my life would have changed completely would have

16:11been and I would not have done most of the things that I actually have done I asked Onan fa can I borrow this book

16:19well it’s a valuable 16th century text with he amazingly uh you know allowed me

16:25to take it home or with me to my room uh that I had in Paris and I took it with me and I was reading it uh in reading it

16:32in b i very well remember this I couldn’t make out most of it it was written in 16th century French very

16:39difficult uh I didn’t understand most of it but I understand some of it and I noticed there’s something about this

16:46text there’s something fascinating about it it’s a kind of an intuition that you can have sometimes I want to know more

16:51about this two weeks later I went to Amsterdam and I went to the bi of philosophic hertica here and I met an a

16:59neolatin translator who happened to be sitting there with born uh who was translating hermatic text into Dutch and

17:06I asked what are you what what are you doing and he said uh well I’m translating a text by looo lelli and

17:14then a little bell went off my head because I had been reading this French text and this had been written by La

17:20lazel that is the French the frenchification so to speak of lovic larell and so this was a coincidence I

17:28thought I want to know more about loo latari I started working with with born and we ended up translating all the

17:34works by latari uh from Latin into English wrote a large introduction about

17:40it and published a book about this and why was this so important well uh why was this so fascinating uh to me and why

17:48do I think it is important to say something about about larell well there is the famous there’s a famous narrative

17:55that has been told about their htic Traditions by and the Hermetic tradition by Francis Yates an great scholar uh who

18:03published an Masterpiece in 1964 jordano Bruno and the hetic

18:09tradition in which she argued that the htic that the translation of the hertica in the 15th century um was a momentous

18:17event in cultural history uh the translation that fito made of the Corpus

18:23ticum changed the nature of the Renaissance it introduced Magic uh and

18:29learned discourse about magic into the intellectual culture and it had a huge

18:34impacts on the entire early modern periods and gave um the starting point

18:40in many ways according to Francis Yates to the Scientific Revolution which for finally led to the modern world so she

18:46created she made this beautiful large Grand narrative about the enormous

18:51impact of the Hermetic literature the Hermetic tradition which um all started

18:57with the Trans translation of the scorpus herum in 14 1471 now I was reading this L larel this

19:05L larell and I was looking him up in Franc Jade’s famous book and I could

19:11hardly find him he was mentioned here and there in a few foot notes but what I discovered was that this unknown guy

19:19lelli had been the second translator of the carpus ticum next to uh to ficino he

19:26had written some treatises that had not been included by ficino so it was not

19:32just ficino who translated the carpus it was also lelli um so I wanted to know more about

19:38lelli and to cut a very long story short short because I just have a few more minutes um it’s basically turned out

19:46that by looking at one forgotten figure that’s already in this case when you actually start studying him and

19:53contextualize him and learn about him and learn about his work you discover

19:58that the basic normative standard narrative that had so impressed

20:04countless people The Narrative by Francis Yates had to be revised and her whole story well turned out to be very

20:13different from reality so uh basically on the basis of lell I came to the what

20:20I discovered at that occasion was how strongly Scholars with their interpretation of ancient text can

20:27determine the way that we look at history and sometimes their interpretations are

20:32wrong and have to be revised and then suddenly the whole picture changes that uh that Discovery has always always

20:39stayed with me um the whole story of the Hermetic tradition that Francis Jades

20:44was telling had had to be revised on the basis of new discoveries of an unknown

20:50hermatic author L lelli uh much more recently beginning in 2015 more or less

20:56I decided to finally go back to this mysterious uh hermetic text themselves

21:02the text that were written in the second and the third century and really studied them very very very carefully going back

21:08to the Greek the Greek Originals looking at all the translations the footnotes the commentaries and whatever is there

21:14reading all the secondary literature and again I found that um if you uh if you

21:21delve deep into this text then you find that they are very profound they’re very deep there’s you you keep discovering

21:28do things about them but what struck me most is that again the way that we look

21:34at this text uh is often determined by the narratives that in this case 20th

21:40century Scholars have put on these text and often these narratives are wrong and again in this case I have been arguing

21:48and maybe we can talk a bit more about it later that uh we have to look at this whole whole hermatic literature of for

21:54Antiquity in a radically different way from how we used to the text and that is my final part of my little talk these

22:01text have often been described as the philosophical hertica so this which

22:06which suggest these are philosophical texts um I’ve come to the conclusion that these are actually not

22:12philosophical texts they use philosophical language Greek philosophy

22:17they use elements from the from Plato and and platonic philosophy but they are

22:23not interested in resolving philosophical questions in a way that standard philosophers are usually doing

22:30they’re interested in something else they’re using philosophy in order to find uh answers to the question of what

22:37is the ultimate nature of reality but most of all to find answers to how can we heal ourselves from our deluded

22:44Consciousness and how can we find the way back to a direct perception of reality as it really is so I’ve proposed

22:52to refer to this uh Corpus of philosophical hertica as spiritual

22:58hertica this is not these are not philosophical text these are what I call spiritual text which uh are uh centrally

23:07uh devoted to uh trying to transform our

23:12interior Constitution to transform ourselves to transform our minds and our whole Consciousness in such a way that

23:20we uh get liberated from deluded perceptions of the world and actually

23:25discover how reality really is that is uh that is what these texts in my view

23:30are all about final thing I want to say is that um so the Ultimate Reality that

23:37you discover by means of gnosis that is the central method of Thea is that

23:43there’s only one reality and that is light Universal light at the same time uh very often

23:50Scholars have have suggested that this means that human beings according to Thea have to liberate ourselves from

23:57matter from the material world from the body and find our way back to an non-material and other worlds of pure

24:04spirituality but I found that this is actually not what texts say they’re actually about embodiment they’re not

24:10about escaping from the world towards other spiritual reality of pure light they’re actually about making contact

24:17with that reality and then channeling it into this world so the herar is actually

24:23an extremely World affirming positive worldview that celebrates the beauty of

24:28existence the beauty of reality and uh doesn’t teach us to escape from the

24:34world but actually U tries to teach its practitioners to transform the world to

24:40make it better to make it more beautiful and to make it more true um so

24:45nonduality the reality of one reality of Light which is the only reality that

24:51really exists One Core element of Thea and the other core core element is the

24:56task of trying to channel that Universal light into our material world and um

25:03that I think is the core uh concept are the Core Concepts of thetic htic

25:08spirituality that you find here and as Scholars and that is what I do in my daily life you can uh Trace how these

25:16text with this strange and often misunderstood message get uh interpreted

25:22reinterpreted passed on often misunderstood or creatively re

25:27interpreted in all kind of ways through the century until we reach the present day and the reinterpretation of the

25:33hertica is still going on at this moment in all kind of alternative spiritual circles and maybe we will talk about

25:39this also with Justin sletch about this so that was my small introduction thank

25:49you um what I want to talk about is a bit what valter mentioned um there’s sort of what hermeticism was and sort of

25:56what hermeticism was in the ancient world but there’s also how we’ve received hermeticism what it was and how

26:02we received it are quite different things as you can imagine and what prompted this at some level was me

26:07thinking about how I use the word hermetic when I’m sitting down writing scripts for esoterica and what I

26:12discovered was that I use it in all kinds of completely different ways this word took on so many valences of meaning

26:20and I began to ask myself where did some of these valences come from and I think

26:25that question is incredibly complicated and I’m going to give you one tiny answer to where I think that may have

26:30come from and where that answer comes from I think at some level that answer is very overdetermined and this is just

26:37one piece of that puzzle perhaps a footnote that could have been a valter’s book in fact is that we often find the

26:42Corpus syum and hermetic literature traveling with other texts often

26:48Scholars will talk about the Corpus of medicum as if it’s sort of floating alone by itself and in some editions it did but in a great many editions

26:54especially editions that were very decisive and very popular the Corpus herum is moving alongside as a fellow

27:02traveler to other texts and as you can imagine you know many folks here have

27:07been painted like The Fringe you keep The Company You Keep we begin to be painted as the company we keep for

27:13better and and force so this text is a very important

27:19text in the history of all of this this is a 1497 uh Aldine this is if you even

27:24folks here may recognize the type of Aldis monut uh this is a platonic primer This was

27:30meant to be a a text basically that you would pick up and you would read before you read ficino’s complete translation

27:36of Plato now what’s important about this text iside the fact it’s the first time that yamus appears in print this is

27:43where he gets famously the title day Myster e that you see a complete interesting collection not yet with the

27:49Corpus ticum but a very interesting collection of all kinds of texts that

27:56when you look at them I bet you look at them and go hermetic right you kind they give you sort of hermetic Vibes even

28:02though the Corpus hermeticum isn’t there but we have is De mysteres by yamus we have the commentary on the alabes we

28:10have Pro’s book on sacrifice and Magic what’s also important about this is that many of these texts veilance this

28:15collection a little bit magicky there a little bit magicky veilance to these texts so on deities and diamonds on

28:22dreams on diamonds by Michael celis this is a famous sort of textbook of demonology a Christian text no less uh

28:28one of the few only Christian texts in here we go through and we get or a kind of grab bag of platonic literature

28:35neoplatonic literature Pythagorean literature that all is going to set the stage for marcelio ficino’s translation

28:42of Plato’s Opera now this text does not yet contain the Corpus hedum but it will

28:47in just a moment but again if you take a look at these texts they’re already beginning to take on some of the effects

28:54of what we Mal began to think about as kind of the thing that aen Renaissance megus would want to pick up in fact if I

29:00were a Renaissance megus I would be the first person in line to buy this

29:05compendium in 1516 right and this to FYI see I can pop back this is just two

29:11years before ficino dies right so just to get an idea and also it contains one text by ficino at the very end just FYI

29:19so already establishing and just FYI the Aldine press is funded by money from uh

29:24from the deorta family so giovan deorta is actually knee deep in this from the very beginning and the Aldine press

29:30which is quite famous one of the most beautiful presses of all time is already pumping out a book by ficino in 1497

29:36just a couple of year before he dies in 1516 this Edition is greatly expanded

29:43and the AL press logo is put right beneath it now for my book nerds in the room and I imagine there’s at least one

29:49of you the symbol of the Aline press is a

29:55symbol of extreme quality when you you want to think about the engine of the Renaissance it’s the Aldine press they

30:01are pumping out Greek and Latin text and accessible easy to read very easy to

30:06read relatively inexpensive volumes and the Aline press will eventually give us small books that will become the

30:12background for we now called paperbacks if you wanted access to Old wisdom add

30:18Fontes back to the sources the alme Press was your go-to and when the alme

30:24Press printed something it meant it was worth reading was a classic it was one of the

30:29sources and there it is right in the middle now of oops I’m sorry I don’t

30:35have it written out here but right at the very heart of this text is now murky

30:41Tris megisti Pander it’s now at the center of it in fact I have this at home

30:46if you open it up to the center hermus magistus is now at the Beating Heart of

30:52a platonic reader right follows it is the escolapios and then a grab bag

30:57mostly of ficino all ficino but many of ficino things taken from his three books on life many of which deal with quasi

31:05medical quasi magical ways of living the text is now even more leaning in the direction of something like what a

31:11Renaissance Megos would want including at Beating Heart now Hermes Tris magistus so with the Pander is now

31:18sitting at the very heart of what would be the book you would want if you were a John D if you were Gino de Bruno if you

31:24were someone like that this text is decisive in the history of all this because this is one of the first times

31:31where the Pander will be printed with other texts and this Edition in some form of fashion is going to become one

31:38of the most best-selling editions of the corpus sedicum now when we talk about

31:43editions of a corpus fum we might say this is 11th edition of the Corpus fum the 11th Edition when you hear that what

31:50you’re hearing is it’s the 11th edition of the Corpus medicum as if the corpor amicum is by itself it’s not it’s now

31:58traveling with a collection of books that are now shaping what hermeticism is

32:04what adantes means so when you read books like when you bury procol’s book on Magic and cel’s book on demons right

32:12next to Pythagoras and that’s now beginning to color what hermetic is going to mean hermetic is

32:17now taking on AV veillance because now it’s traveling with other books that are now coloring what it’s going to look

32:25like the 15 16 Edition would be now would be the last time that the Aldine press would pick this up the next

32:31edition of the Corpus medicum the very next edition of the Corpus medicum right would now be printed in 1532 now switched over to basil and now

32:39look what’s happened all the ficino’s been dropped so is the Michael cellus on demons maybe that made some people

32:44uncomfortable demons have a tendency to do that and yamus and Pander have

32:50switched pride of place he now is no longer at the center of the collection he is now at the top and many of the

32:56things have been dropped but not yamus not procus including on spirits and on Deon and on sacrifice and

33:04Magic probably one of the most popular books about sort of occultism in the in

33:10the Middle Ages this Edition with one with one change we’ll see in just a minute this one right here is also very

33:16important because it follows a different manuscript tradition than the 14 Infamous 1471 edition of the Pander this

33:23Edition never achieved great success as an addition however this addition did beginning in

33:31uh 1549 this the center of location for this printing is now going to be switched over into France in this

33:38Edition as you can see has now switched yamus for p of place now he’s now at the

33:43front again and now heres Tris mistas bookends the text Michael CIS has made a return

33:50on demons has come back and what we have still poery and procus notice how much

33:56more magically inclined this collection is now than the first one it’s almost the plurality of the

34:03text we’re dealing with demons and magic and Hermes Tris magistus is now the bookend of the text this Edition

34:10beginning in 14 1549 would go into I haven’t counted them yet but there would be editions printed almost every five

34:17years through the 17th century think about that time period about 1549 into

34:22the sort of mid 17th century that’s the time period where we see a huge explosion in the interest of people like

34:29d and things like that this text I think would have been the goto text that you

34:34wanted to go to to get access to this literature this was a octavo Edition very small

34:40inexpensive if you wanted a copy of the of the Hermes Tris magistus if you wanted access to that ad Fontes you

34:46picked it up here now think about this from the point of view of the reader to get to the Herm you have to

34:53cross this path if you’re reading the book cover to cover imagine imagine the primed imagine what you’re thinking as a

34:59reader as your mind has been primed through this reading and by the time you get to the to the

35:06Pander imagine to valter’s point imagine what you are now receiving you are now reading the Pander through this prism

35:14and I think that’s an incredibly important prism to understand when we think about an addition of the Corpus

35:20ticum we have to think about how Not only was it received but literally how it was read

35:27in a book at that time understanding the book culture shapes how the

35:33understanding of these texts happened and without understanding that book culture and this literature as it’s put

35:38into this configuration I think that tells us a great deal or at least gives us part of

35:43a clue about how this hermeticism whatever that means is going

35:49to be received by readers and by people like who are going to be practicing

35:54hermeticism just to drive this point home and to make it a little bit more ancient and more I may perhaps more

35:59interesting uh this is the Edition this is the text from the 1549 I think would be an interesting thing for my folks out

36:05there who are mystically inclined toward hermeticism would be put yourself back into the

36:101550s go meet all your 1550s buddies start a reading group and then read these texts in this

36:16order and see what it would have felt like intellectually to work through

36:22yamus and to come through the Plato commentary on Plato’s alabes which by the way is never the Plato’s albies is

36:28never read now I’ve went through five years of graduate school in philosophy and the only thing we ever learned about

36:33it was Plato probably didn’t write it right but I tell you this you know what the first book you read if you signed up

36:39to a neoplatonism class by yamus you read the alabes everybody read the alabes now

36:46nobody does aside from Specialists so and this by the way is a commentary on uh particularly a commentary by procas

36:53on the alabes I challenge you if you’re interested in in this read those read these books in this order because that’s

36:59how someone like John D would have picked this book up and he had this on a shelf by the way this is how he would have read it so Gathering these books

37:07from from the past we have to think about Hermes Tris mistas and the Pander

37:12and his wisdom as not isolated into one book or one system of books but buried

37:17among other books and relating intellectually and gaining avalance from

37:23these other books this is nothing new if we rind all the way back to the

37:30nagamati library the only other place in Antiquity really where we find hermetic text in C2 in the actual volumes the

37:38physical Coptic volumes we also find hermetic literature writing along other

37:44literature nagamma codex 6 is a weird codex I know that the nagamma Codex are

37:51all kind of weird but the nagati Codex 6 is especially unusual it’s the only one

37:56to have an Max Thunder perfect mind is unlike any other text in the nagamati library for folks who know it it’s

38:02beautiful maybe one of those beautiful texts of the ancient world the authoritative discourse and the concept

38:07of our great power are also very odd kinds of text you probably even if you’re interested in nostic ISM you

38:13probably haven’t heard much about them they’re relatively brief and they’re relatively odd texts there’s a random

38:18chunk of the Republic which has a very interesting veillance when it’s been translated into Coptic and then the last

38:23three texts are hermetic I would say and argue that this is not new in the same way that we can

38:31look through the printing history of the Corpus medicum we could probably assume at some level at least from this one

38:37piece of evidence that it may have not even in the ancient world traveled by itself it may have always been a kind of

38:44ancient traveler and what that means at some level is that whatever hermetic

38:49meant and valter’s point whatever hermetism was in IPO in itself it

38:55probably always also Flo as a signifier it probably meant something different in

39:01different communities in different textual contexts it certainly meant something you know what connection and

39:06when the when the when the the Codex writer was putting this together what connection in their mind connected

39:12Thunder perfect mind to the discourse of the V and the inot I don’t know and I

39:17don’t think it was random but I don’t know and that’s a great place to at least speculate why put them in this

39:24codex and so what I want to say as sort of a conclusion to wrap this up

39:29is that the hermeticism that anyone has inherited is always floated in this way it seems like we have evidence in the

39:35late Antiquity for this we have evidence in the history of printing for this and I think that what’s fascinating and

39:41what’s exciting about that is that on the one hand we can do a great links to do what I what I would call forensic

39:47philosophy the great work that valter has done in his recent book to sort of forensically reconstruct hermeticism as

39:54it was in these texts and which interesting I think voucher in your work is how also you take some text and put

39:59them sort of closer to the periphery of what hermetism was and some outside of it right and even that and I think

40:04that’s an interesting part of this like you have now also entered in sort of rearranged them in a way that you think

40:10makes the most sense and I like the fact that we could throw your yeah you could throw the diagram up here as well and it

40:15will be part of this history of how we’ve rearranged them to make them the hermetism we think is the authentic hermetism yeah uh and I think that

40:23that’s a great and I find your read very compelling but it’s an interesting part of sort of the how we put these things

40:29together we could throw valters up there as well but what that means is that we have hermeticism in Hermes and hermus

40:35megistus as something like we might call floating signifiers they mean something it doesn’t you can’t say anything’s

40:41hermetic but the exact meaning is always determined at some level by how we receive it and how we receive it is

40:48often in history been through these bundles of wisdom not a not in itself a

40:54bundle of wisdom and that’s exciting because it means that whatever hermetism is or was it’s not hermetically closed

41:02it’s hermetically open thank

41:14you well the cogs are turning with uh all the information you’ve both given us um I think you’ve really given us a good

41:21introduction to um what the original practitioners of hermetic religion we’re

41:27after um and centuries later we’ve heard something about the reception um

41:32obviously this is not just a gap of time it’s a gap between relived religion and

41:37reception through texts um and I I wonder what what needs

41:44these discourses these traditions this religion or these thoughts have served

41:49over the over the centuries and I think we can even extend that to Scholars I mean this served something for Francis

41:56Yates as well yeah yeah so I just be curious about both your thoughts about

42:02that one thing I was thinking listening to your to your wonderful story a story about how these texts travel is uh is

42:10that in a certain way you are uh giving New Life to maybe to something of Fran Shades narrative because I’ve been

42:17deconstructing Franc Shades narrative and you’re in a certain way reconstructing it by saying this uh this

42:22hermatic literature uh was read as close connection with magic right with with

42:29magical text and text about demons etc etc and so the interesting thing is that

42:35if you actually read the Corpus herum in the translation by ficino they you find

42:40there’s no magic in it there’s no magic anywhere um so you find magic in the escalus but not in the carpus ofum and

42:47um so and also another thing is also that uh it um that that has been a bit

42:54bit forgotten but fito strangely enough he translated it because because kimoi

43:01told him you have to translate it well if you’re MOS tells you that you translate it uh that’s very clear so he

43:08did it but uh it seems that he wasn’t very interested and K also seems to they

43:14do not seem to have been so impressed by the Corpus and meum they made no effort to translate to to printed wasn’t

43:21printed it got printed in 171 Years Later by a pirate in a pired copy uh by

43:28two other humanists who just rested through the press and um FICO himself

43:33never tried to publish it so I always get the impression that uh for them the

43:39Corpus was a bit of a disappointment actually uh didn’t offer them what they

43:44had thought it would give them but then it gets caught up in the whole you know what what you’ve been telling us all

43:51these uh all these new prints and new additions that travel with a text and you get this kind of this kind of uh

43:58yeah hermatic magical hermatic you know constellations and uh and that is what

44:04Francis Shades talks about would that make sense I think so and I think and if I could rewind this I would go back to

44:10one of these slides and we look at that collection and to us I think we think

44:15all that makes sense all that makes sense together Pythagoras and Michael celus and ficino and all that but if you

44:22actually read those books they don’t sit comfortably together yamus didn’t agree with poery Michael cettus was a

44:28Christian if you look at these texts by ficino wasn’t really interested in in in hermatic ideas it doesn’t seem like they

44:35had a huge impact on him what’s interesting to me is that the printer thought they made sense to go together

44:41and that we look at them and they make sense together to us but intellectually they are it’s a very

44:47tense conversation and I think what’s interesting right is that what I’d point out is a dialectic actually between

44:54Francis the8 saying they’re all connected and I’m saying they’re connected but the connection actually

45:00isn’t natural it’s a connection that makes sense that made sense to a printer and what’s interesting is that we’ve

45:05inherited their decisions it sounds like it was a marketing decision it could have been it could have been clickbait

45:11right like demons and mistas he could have been Renaissance clickbait for all I know but um who demons and and but

45:18what’s interesting is that we’ve we we’ve inherited a decision that may have been made by two printers yeah or by two

45:24humanists who just leged a copy of the Pander yeah and and and a defective copy

45:29and a defective copy yeah yeah yeah and I think that that’s um and uh and what’s interesting is when it’s the 1471

45:35Edition and when it’s not um and so I think what for me it’s not so much a a

45:41defense of the Yates position it’s a sense that it was natural for her to come to that position because that’s how

45:46it traveled and again going to point back to your point about contingency the

45:51decision made by a printer and Aldis mantua’s press in 1497 shaped how an entire generation came to

45:59view this collection of literature despite the fact that that collection of literature had nothing to do with Michael cus or or nothing to do with own

46:06demons or nothing to do with Theus or um or poery for that matter and yet that

46:11surveillance it got right because the accident of history and another effect of this was that certain other auers

46:17that should have gotten more attention were marginalized because uh so lelli my

46:22guy uh really um he gets printed in uh you know early 16th century but he never

46:29never got the got a popularity uh that might have been gained by traveling with

46:34all these other guys and uh and one reason is that there was no nothing nothing magical in him either it wasn’t

46:41in P it wasn’t in lell no magic but interestingly and maybe as as a footnote

46:46that’s interesting I think is that um that the author who was most influenced

46:51by lelli uh but you can hardly tell this if you don’t pay very very close attention

46:57is agria and agria the great author of The you know the three books on Magic uh

47:04actually uh many of his core ideas come straight from from lelli but uh this is

47:09kind of an esoteric Secret in um in agria you don’t notice it unless you

47:15really studied very care and it’s so important to note that lazzari’s addition of the Corpus medicum was complete it had all 17 yeah and he’s the

47:23first person in history to say hermetic kusum I am a hermeticist that’s true no

47:29one they people say they were on the path of Hermes in Antiquity no one called themselves a hermeticist but it’s

47:34great because he says heran that’s an excellent point that’s that’s absolutely true uh yes he is the

47:40first to say that and he believed also uh sorry to go on B we were both fans of

47:46laari I mean yeah I am in her yes he said that and a Christian and uh he

47:52believed that he had encountered the reincarnation of Po MRE the teacher of Hermes and the

47:59Corpus of medic one who had who was the same entity as Jesus Christ so for him

48:04po mandri was the logos was Christ who had now now returned in his own time as

48:10this wondering preacher giovan Doro who was his master his Guru and um so he

48:16believed that Christ and and po mandas had returned in his own time and so the end of time was near uh yeah he was so

48:22so so he was so unusual that solers doubted he really existed for a while yeah yeah yeah yeah but be that unusual

48:29that in the future people doubted you really were real yeah well I I wanted to go back to to your explanation V about

48:35what um about what the original um people on the path of Hermes were after

48:41and you said light yeah and I thought what is this light is it an experience

48:48what is the light and to what extent is it a a factor for these later people I

48:53mean maybe these Christians also saw this light and of course there are many passages in the Bible Christ is the

49:00light of the world and so forth um but what do you think they understood this light to be well uh H this is this is I

49:09think a core Point uh the most important uh word I think in the hertica is n the

49:15Greek word n that is the core text if you don’t get the the core word if you want to understand the hertica you have

49:22to start understanding what new means in Greek now if you uh if an open open up

49:28in the Greek dictionary uh dictionary and you look up the word news the

49:33dictionary will tell you it means mind or it means intellect and so you immed

49:38and that’s Al also what you find in all the modern translations uh news gets translated as mind or intellect and

49:44immediately everything starts looking very philosophical to us because well we know what intellect is right we have an

49:50intellect we are intelligent we have a mind it’s in our brain this are all this is all very very familiar language to us

49:56so we read this word about the news and we think we know what it means I’m arguing we do not understand at all what

50:03it means when we translate as intellect or mind because it meant something else and in order to find out what it meant

50:11you have to uh read the text themselves and you have to have to to let their

50:16hermetic authors tell you what news means to them and forget about the dictionary translation for a moment and

50:23if you read read it carefully then I think the only conclusion you can draw is that this is what it means there is

50:29such a thing as an Universal Divine Light God is light this is not of course

50:36the light that comes from the lamps here this is a spiritual reality of Light

50:41which you uh which you can only perceive which you cannot perceive with your natural senses with your eyes you can

50:48only perceive it by an inner uh sense the an inner kind of visual visual sense

50:56which again is called noose so you can only understand the light of divinity

51:01with the light of your own mind or your own noose um so your own noose your own

51:07light your own Inner Light is the light by which you see the light if that makes any sense uh but this light is not

51:15natural light it is a spiritual light and it is the only is the essence of what God really is and um but it is not

51:23just a philosophical concept it is something that is being uh you know according to the hertica so

51:28at the very beginning of Corpus hertica one the poas uh in the very first verses

51:34you will find that the Visionary uh Hermes probably is in a kind of an yeah

51:40an altered state of consciousness in an ecstatic State his bodily senses are on shutdown so to speak uh his new um sour

51:49high he says and um at one point he um gets to see he no I should say

51:58differently he gets to see an enormous being a great entity uh who introduces

52:04himself as pandri this great entity who talks to him and asks him what do you

52:10want to know and he says I want to know the nature of reality and I know want

52:15want to know what God is and then uh pandus changes his appearance and uh

52:21then hermy sees a universal light uh which and he he um spontaneously feels

52:27feelings of love for that light and that is the news so what actually happens is

52:33that that pandis is the news he changes his appearance and he shows what he really is universal light so if you ask

52:41me what is it yeah uh the the hermatic ERS would tell tell you there’s only one

52:47way to know it and that is by experiencing it and then you will know what it is it is not what comes out of

52:52this LMS but what you describe sounds a lot like what you can read in MA eot in

52:58Toler in souo and by the way they’re all also in all the encyclopedia is a

53:03philosophy right so I you know I don’t see the problem with uh philosophy and religion well the problem is that it’s

53:11not the problem is that um we easily get

53:16uh sidetracked because we think that we know when you hear the word intellect they you think oh yeah I know what

53:22intellect is and and we tend to take an Anon IC perspective and to to project

53:28our modern understandings of intellects intellectual intellectualism intellectual rationality rationality

53:34mind we tend to project it onto the text and and then and that uh keeps us very

53:43easily from reading what what are they actually telling us that it means and we

53:48we just pass our own meetings over the meetings that they this exactly what the examples you showed um illust St I think

53:56it’s an example of what we sometimes in philosophy called the dictionary fallacy it’s if if we’re having a debate about something and you say well the

54:02dictionary says it means this dictionaries tell us how words are used not what they mean meaning is only

54:07determined by context and if you go to a dictionary to look up the word noose it says intellect you’re like well settled

54:13like yeah words change meaning and depal context and when you have an incredibly

54:19technical context like what the was happening at the Corpus amicum you’re committing the dictionary fallacy

54:27okay well I have a whole list of questions here and we could go on all night but I’m pretty sure uh the

54:32audience has a few questions too Corey yeah

54:38thanks um I have a question valter you mentioned in your remarks that um the hermetica are basically an

54:45inexhaustible uh F or source for different interpretations as you read

54:50them later um could you maybe give an example of one of your interpretations that changed as a consequence of later

54:58reading or as you develop or sort of changing of one of your conclusions

55:03yeah yeah thank you that was actually one of the question that we thought about earlier how have you changed your

55:09mind and I might as well well interpreted like that yeah um I’ve become extremely interested over the

55:16past 20 years or so for all kinds of reasons in the concept of um alterations of Consciousness or Altered States Of

55:23Consciousness that has become a major uh concern for me a major prism for reading

55:30um materials that I study and um and when I read this text in the 1990s that

55:36concept was not on my radar uh but later later it came on my radar and um so what

55:43I have been arguing in this book uh which has the subtitle altered stat of knowledge and late Antiquity um is that

55:51um uh you know anything that we can know at all uh yeah depends on our state of

55:58consciousness so at this moment I am in an sober State of Consciousness I am

56:04quite sober and focused I’m wide awake I’ve had a cup of coffee uh I can see

56:09you guys I can I can gain a lot of knowledge at this moment by looking at you I know what you look like I can I I

56:16can see the trees outside Etc that’s knowledge that accessible to me in this state of mind I can also in the State of

56:22Consciousness I can also sit behind the computer and start writing an scholarly article and that goes very well in this

56:28state of consciousness right but if you are in an radically altered state of consciousness like for instance the

56:34state that Hermes describes in the first creats of the carpus hermeticum an ecstatic State then um in that stat you

56:42know forget writing an article or that kind of thing you cannot do that but so there’s certain kinds of knowledge that

56:49are not accessible to you then but other other kinds of knowledge are accessible to you so at that’s in that state he

56:55suddenly can uh see the news and he can see poyares and in our state of consciousness now we cannot see the news

57:02poies we do not see the universal light right so so the point is that as we change our Consciousness our state of

57:09consciousness certain uh types of knowledge become accessible to us and other types of knowledge knowledge

57:15become inaccessible to us and um this for me has become an uh a key for

57:23understanding the hertica it’s something that I did see in the past I began to understand

57:28that uh the uh that an number of key

57:33texts of the hertica especially Corpus 1 Corum 13 and the tweeters on the eight

57:39and the N of nedy really are uh the descriptions of radical alterations of

57:45Consciousness which allow radically different types of knowledge which can

57:50which are only accessible in that state and not in another state and this

57:55relates to a concept that I find fascinating uh this idea of State specific knowledge so this idea that

58:01certain kind of knowledge are specific to this state of consciousness other states of knowledge are spe specific to

58:09other states of Consciousness and is there a state in which any kind of Consciousness is accessible to you I

58:16doubt it so I I personally doubt it I think that any knowledge that we have is dependent on the State of Consciousness

58:23that you’re in and this for me has has become kind of really a key uh for

58:29reading the hermetica and of course everybody reads the text from their own perspectives and I’ve been criticized in

58:36a lot of earlier Scholars who read the text through their own biased

58:41perspectives and misunderstood them and no doubt people will say at one point V hanov is is misinterpreting because he

58:48has his interest in altered state of consciousness possible but uh but at

58:53least it’s another kind of reading which I think makes sense so I hope that’s an answer Justin do you want to answer the

58:59same question has your thinking changed uh over time about these things yeah very dramatically actually I remember an

59:06undergraduate first discovering the Corpus of medicum and just being blown away by it just being like this is

59:13amazing and just thinking it was such you know part of it motivated me eventually to coming to study under under valure here at the

59:19hhp and then I went to graduate school and I discovered this thing called middle platonism and I started reading

59:25middle Pless like numinus and Pho and then I looked back to the Corpus of medicum and thought to myself this is

59:32bad philosophy right this is just like this is like low brand you know numinous um

59:43and then uh maybe five years ago or something it sort of dawned to me this

59:48is soteriology not not philosophy and that shift to this is so

59:54iology this is philosophy in the in the service of serology right then the text

1:00:00spoke to me again and that was why I so excited when your book came out because I got affirmed I got you know when you

1:00:06when you come to an idea that vter autograph like writes a 300 page book and it’s like you’re like

1:00:11ah thank god um and so I I it’s that it was for me that progression what an

1:00:18amazing text then I had my ficino moment I was like H not such an amazing text and then I was like ah it’s amazing for

1:00:25reasons I didn’t appreciate the failure was my inability to see it for what it

1:00:31was it’s a text of ser a collection of soteriology and phenomenology oh yeah

1:00:37right that in so far it’s it’s text of serology and phenomenology bam it it hit

1:00:42me again so it’s a all disappointment all

1:00:48dialectic yes um oh sorry sorry uh you just me

1:00:54mentioned meister eart and actually uh I wrote something about Margaret pet and

1:01:00um she might have inspired him I think she did Super biased but um what actually what the whole news um um the

1:01:08way you describe it really made me think of the concept of Love uh by Margaret pet actually um the same type of sorry

1:01:16the same type of um attributes and uh you know what it does what love does is

1:01:22kind of similar to what noose does it’s like kind of knowing uh a kind of a circuit between um the soul and God and

1:01:29that in the end um the eye that sees is the same eye that looks but this these

1:01:35type of things you also find in neoplatonic things a lot so I was just wondering did you ever make this

1:01:40connection yourself or how do you view love or Aros in this whole hermetic um

1:01:48constellation I mean I I guess to this is the minim mystics some of my favorite hi is perhaps my one of my favor

1:01:54favorite Poets of all time was just set bhof this today and it’s one of my favorite places in Amsterdam I love H

1:02:01it’s just one of my favorite poets I think that there is a kinship between mystical Christianity and hermeticism

1:02:08and I think the proof of that is that we have hermeticism at all it when it passed through the Byzantine filter

1:02:13which changed it right and I call it the Byzantine filter but really the Byzantine filter took things out and

1:02:19added things in and Michael cus probably was somewhere in there maybe

1:02:25but I think that the reason why it survived for instance in lactantius and the reason why and Augustine really

1:02:30hated it but it survives a bit positively in lactantius and stoas and eventually it it does cross that

1:02:36Byzantine hump is because there is enough philosophical kinship between certain strains of neoplatonic

1:02:41Christianity and certain readings of the Corpus of medicum that they if you kind of squint and look at it sideways it it

1:02:48it passes a smell test otherwise if it didn’t pass that smell test I don’t think the vistine editors would have ever let it get through and so I think

1:02:54that for whatever reason it it was there was something there was a kinship enough

1:03:01that they were able to squin at it look sideways tweak it a little bit and then pass it on with kind of an imprator

1:03:07stamp and I think the the evidence that there’s a a kind of intellectual connection is the fact that we have it

1:03:14at all yeah I would like to add something else also maybe

1:03:20um one possible angle to look at this is uh use in modern research on neurology

1:03:27and uh brain brain process Etc and uh there is quite some evidence to assume

1:03:34that certain kind of states are simply possible because our brain is able to produce them and so it’s possible that

1:03:41and this remains speculative but it’s possible that Mar pet had similar kind of experiences as are described in the

1:03:48carpus and medine and so it’s it does not just have to be an uh an question of

1:03:55borrowing from one source to another it can also uh it’s also possible that certain kind of mental states are have a

1:04:02certain kind of universality because they are based upon how the brain works it’s possible I just throw this in here

1:04:08as a possibility uh with respect to love um in hertica It’s Complicated they

1:04:14don’t use the word love so much uh there is a notion of platonic love in the S

1:04:21sense of the desire for ultimate beauty that you want to want to attain but I think more

1:04:27important in the heraa is the opposed sense that uh the source of reality

1:04:33which is the paga in Greek the source which is an name not just for God but the source that out of which God himself

1:04:41comes maybe the ultimate mystery of existence the py they call it um they

1:04:46describe it as some kind of boundless source of creativity of manifestation everything comes out of it and uh

1:04:53everything is produced by the P by The Source out of pure generosity and pure

1:04:59uh you know giving so it is a very positive idea that uh out of pure

1:05:05goodness the source generates reality for our enjoyment and um so uh there is

1:05:13good reason to uh interpret this as the source is an source of Love of uh of the

1:05:19love for existence for anything that flourishes that lives that is beautiful

1:05:26Etc yeah hello can you hear me hello thank

1:05:34you very much for highly interesting lecture I have uh a couple of comments

1:05:39or questions first uh the thing about U dictionary meaning of of words like you

1:05:46can look up News Psy whatever and it will not do I totally agree you have to

1:05:52read these terms in in context and and I also think that uh in appropriate translations of the hertica these terms

1:06:00should perhaps not be translated into modern languages yes I agree yeah so but

1:06:06but are there any Modern English translations of the hertica that can be recommended I have read several that

1:06:13they are all different in some in some aspects I personally think that there is no uh really satisfactory modern

1:06:21translation of theum uh uh at this moment I think they’re all highly problematic uh for

1:06:28that’s not an criticism for the for the you know through the translators they’re doing their best but they’re doing

1:06:35they’re using certain procedures for instance translating everything as intellect Etc which I think uh this

1:06:41starts the meaning uh I I can already give I can however give give good news

1:06:46there is an uh new translation coming up by Christian wilberg which will be published in one or two years and uh

1:06:53I’ve seen some uh chapters of it it’s excellent it’s better than all the other ones that I’ve seen and there’s

1:06:59something very interesting also which touches a bit on the whole transmission of text that you you’re you’re referring

1:07:05to um and that is a point that he has highlighted namely in the transmission of the text very often a scribe copies

1:07:13the text and then makes annotations in the margins what has happens and

1:07:18everybody has overlooked this until Christian wiberg is that the next stripe

1:07:23often uh moves that annotation uh into the main text and

1:07:29then another scribe thinks it belongs to the text and so it’s so the so there are many pieces of Thea that actually do not

1:07:36belong there and but have have been misinterpreted as belong to the hermatic text it results in all kinds of uh

1:07:43grammatical mistakes sometimes the text doesn’t make sense carbus herum 3 is a notorious example uh it is full of

1:07:50grammatical inconsistencies you cannot read it but uh he has reproduced or

1:07:56reconstructed this text by putting all the marginalia back into the margins and reconstructing the original text and

1:08:02suddenly it’s a crystal clear text and all the problems has vanished and uh that is not just for Corpus 3 that’s for

1:08:08a whole series of other text so this is a revolutionary new translation that’s coming up very soon it’s going to change

1:08:15our view of trtica that’s great news yeah escalus too is also very defective yeah and I

1:08:23also say the escal 2 is very defective oh it’s a mess it’s it’s been known to be a mess for centuries it’s a mess

1:08:29absolutely true yeah and my second question is about U the arguments for a

1:08:36non dualistic reading of the hertica I find that very interesting the arguments for that AR

1:08:42Arguments for uh non dualistic reading what my arguments are what I’ve what I

1:08:49just been trying to do is hermeneutics I talk a lot about hermeneutics I use gamer Etc and uh I’ve just been trying

1:08:58to understand this text on their own terms I’ve been trying to understand what are they trying to tell me are

1:09:04trying to bracket any kind of a uh prejudices that I could think of that I could identify that might that I might

1:09:11be be a projecting on them and try to let the text speak to me and

1:09:16um this is the conclusion I draw this is yeah for the argument you will have to read the whole book but I that I think

1:09:24once you see that they’re talking about about nism that that is their background metaphysics all kind of questions fall

1:09:31into place as there have been this heavy uh dualistic Gnostic frames put on it so

1:09:38people have wanted to see a gnostic dualistic Gnostic matter against Spirit

1:09:44kind of narratives on her hertica it doesn’t work it cannot account for many

1:09:49of the text and if you take a non-dualistic reading I think it’s resolves well I would say

1:09:5795 yeah percent of the problems there are a few tricky cases I can understand that that’re totally out great with you

1:10:02thank you much and I would say to also valter what’s interesting about this collection and nagamati 6 is that we

1:10:08typically think of gnosticism whatever that category is as dualism these texts are interesting because as a bag these

1:10:14are not terribly dualist texts no and I think the fact that these three at the end is not an accident that this bag is

1:10:21is an interesting sort of non-dualistic bag of things going on that’s interesting I have to have to follow up

1:10:27on that Thunder perfect mind is a great text that really undermines dualisms and things like that so I think that part of

1:10:32what may have been motivating this author may have been these texts are unusual in that respect and they all got

1:10:38thrown into the grabb of codex 6 that’s an excellent suggestion I’m going to to

1:10:43follow up on that and yeah yeah well it occurs to me that we have a really full

1:10:48room tonight and that indicates something namely the fascination um Within this material and Justin you have

1:10:55a lot of interaction with with your followers and I just wonder what you think where does this Fascination come

1:11:02from with these stories and images and the material in general I one of my

1:11:08favorite groups of people to interact with on the internet uh which is which is sometimes a difficult thing to say

1:11:14that because interact with people on internet but I think one of the most exciting groups of people that I’ve got to interact with on the internet are the

1:11:20what I would call sort of Neo hermetic folks uh that are on the uh hermeticism subreddit who are big fans of you but

1:11:27also sort of Reviving a form of hermeticism and it’s it’s fascinating watching them interact with your work

1:11:34with my work as they grapple with that problem and I think that they they are willing to do that frankly spiritually

1:11:41athletic work it is you know it’s one thing for Scholars to reconstruct and talk about there another thing to try to

1:11:47live it and that’s an amazingly heroic I think and and deeply athletic thing

1:11:52spiritually I think I think what people are find so fascinating about it is that it is a western non-dualism those are

1:11:59rare since you know Plato in some sense and um there is something that combines

1:12:06to your point earlier something about the Machinery of Greek philosophy which is very very powerful with something of

1:12:14the spirituality or or whatever word we want to use of ancient Egyptian spiritual technology and that’s a that’s

1:12:21just a cocktail worth drinking Greek philosophy Egyptian spirituality in in this really deeply

1:12:28sympathetic synthetic form I think that just excites a lot of people because it’s a powerful monistic alternative to

1:12:36uh to something like the abrahamic faiths which have frankly done a lot of harm to a lot of people and so it gives

1:12:41them an Avenue in their own Western tradition to have access to a spiritual technology that combin so much of what

1:12:49people are craving and I think that’s why people are willing to do the in my opinion again very impressive very

1:12:55admirable work of bringing these Traditions back into a kind of of of Neo

1:13:01Neo hermeticism and uh I’m just incredibly impressed by by folks going to do that work yeah and the the the

1:13:08term spiritual technology is a very nice one it is also FCO uses an almost similar kind of term which is very

1:13:15applicable here and I think one the reason is simply that a lot of uh modern practitioners yeah they’re practitioners

1:13:20they’re maybe interested in Reading ancient text but they’re really interested in experience and practice

1:13:26they want to do it they want to have the experience themselves last week just last week fascinating I got an email

1:13:32from an guy in Venezuela that I don’t know who first wrote to me under a secret name uh an ritual name because

1:13:39he’s member of an uh of a society uh they they used they call themselves The

1:13:45University of alchemy uh in in Spanish and it turns out that these are people

1:13:51uh in Venezuela who are uh they he contacted me because he had read a book

1:13:56H but for years already um they have been uh practicing rituals uh with an Amazonian drink which

1:14:05some of you may know about uh aaska which is quite well known now and they are using iasa in a ritual setting so

1:14:13iasa has a mind altering uh effect and they are using the text of the corus mum

1:14:19as their basic template for drinking aasa in ritual content so they using Corpus 13 there is the hyn that they

1:14:27that about the D and all that and they’re doing this in order to um expel

1:14:34the demons from their body and and invite the forces of light into their body that’s what you read in Corpus 13

1:14:41and they really they’re just PR practicing this and so this is how how hermeticism you know continues in

1:14:48completely new context in Venezuela it’s a bit stronger than kofy incense I imagine uh yeah yeah right so yeah this

1:14:55was fascinating I heard this last week contact with and again that’s and I think what’s fascinating about that is that that the what of all the things we

1:15:03know about these spiritual Technologies was that they highly syncretistic and Technologies are all about what’s effective not Dogma yeah and so exactly

1:15:11like if it’s effective awasa is getting you to sose yeah I imagine that in Egypt if they had aaska you best believe that

1:15:18they they and they we do know they were using kofy incense and other kinds of things that have these kind of uh these kind of power so to me that’s that

1:15:25people say oh that’s a a weird Innovation I’m like that’s what technology is exactly yeah that’s might

1:15:31be actually the perfect place to interject my question because um while you were talking about um po Andre being

1:15:39identified as being Christ I was reminded of one of your recent YouTube videos where you were talking about uh

1:15:48Apostle Paul’s vision of uh Christ uh legitimizing him to be uh spreading

1:15:55gospel even though he never met him but you connected that to an ancient Jewish

1:16:00tradition of uh meraba meditation kind of things and there in that context I

1:16:06was wondering I I I was thinking about like this uh Rabbi from Israel Shannon

1:16:11who was thinking about that the ancient Israelites might have been drinking uh an anaa like from Syrian Ru and acaia

1:16:20wood where you can make DMT and like make a Sim kind of Brew so that there’s like the possibility and then like you

1:16:27have the other work of M resu recently uh immortality key about the early

1:16:34Christian sects being offshoots of uh mystery schools from the Greek world

1:16:40where it’s also really quite uh possible that they were eming certain uh concoctions uh that made them uh uh uh

1:16:49carried them to the Chariot of God or however you may call it in the uh so I was wondering how how you were

1:16:55thinking about this in uh uh the broader context of uh the the hermeticism and

1:17:01Altered States and the seccy behind it I mean I would say that there are

1:17:06certainly psychotropic substances being used whether it’s alcohol or kofy incense and other kinds of uh incenses

1:17:13that you know the cannaboids that were found recently at terod um certainly they’re being used the question is where

1:17:19do we have evidence for it and when we fill the gap of evidence of specul it’s really important to to name that as

1:17:25speculation the am Mystics never mentioned in we we get some list of the techniques they used but they’re they

1:17:31look a lot more like yoga than they do em bibing certain kinds of substances what I would say is though that the

1:17:38hermetica literature Ami literature there’s just a bunch of different Technologies of of as scent that are

1:17:45going on in this period And I think it’s in some level being motivated by the crisis of the thirr century and that by

1:17:52in the third in the third Century you had a lot of reasons to want to get out of town and the Jews had their way to get out of town and the hermic had their

1:17:58way to get out of town everybody’s looking for a way out of the crisis of the third century and I think that that

1:18:03that may be also part of it but for me it would be the question of where do we have evidence and when Theus tells us

1:18:10that this instance is being used we need to chase that to the very end and we need to be especially attentive of it

1:18:16because there’s been such an anti psychedelic anti uh uh anti-substance

1:18:23bias in Academia for so long but I think we need to double down on those efforts to to give that a fair play but find out

1:18:29what was really happening yeah you must find an uh find a middle ground here because because you’re quite right

1:18:36there’s no evidence in the hertica zero nothing uh in yamas you have a few

1:18:41references at one point twice he mentions some concoction something we do not know what it is uh and I do

1:18:48interpret yamus as an as an practitioner of the hertica so so that’s that’s

1:18:54puzzling it’s interesting but we simply don’t know more kufi instance yes there

1:18:59are some other things I talk about this but the evidence is very hard to interpret and it’s very minimal so I

1:19:06very very much agree with you we we we should not project these things on the on the materials if we don’t have

1:19:12evidence at the same time you’re also right there is this kind of anti- energetic uh kind of bias in scholarship

1:19:19which doesn’t want to see it at all um and I try to push back against that a

1:19:24little bit in my book on the other hand there’s also you mentioned by Mor rescu uh and other people there’s also an an

1:19:31other kind of bias which wants to see it everywhere and uh and Bayan is an I

1:19:37think an example of that it’s an interesting book but it’s full of rhetoric but the actual evidence is very

1:19:43very slight there’s one piece of evidence is very very interesting that he has has discovered for the for the Illini mysteries in Spain that is I

1:19:51think fascinating for the rest I’m not so not so convinced so I think we have to find a balance between this tendency

1:19:57of wanting to see anthens everywhere and wanting to see him nowhere I think we have to see them where they uh where we

1:20:03have evidence or where we are uh have good reason to assume that uh this is in

1:20:11credible hypothesis right I I tend to call this spectrum because I get comments that you know every episode I

1:20:17do I get it was DMT um and and I and I call this on the one hand this I call it second eliminativism where we want to

1:20:24eliminate all psychotropic drugs from history but the other is what I call DMT reductionism it was always just DMT and

1:20:30so I psycho psychedelic limi ISM uhuh but also DMT reductivism uhuh uh it’s

1:20:37it’s going to be more complicated than that I was always wondering like in uh uh I haven’t really found any references

1:20:43to this but every time I read uh in the Bible in Daniel 53 there’s this story

1:20:48about Nebuchadnezzar calling upon the the uh the the the barrels from the Temple of Solomon to be carried and then

1:20:56they drink from it and their knees start trembling and then the hand of God announces the Doom of his failed Kingdom

1:21:03and that sounds an awful lot uh about like a psychedelic trip gone wrong for

1:21:09Nebuchadnezzar uh so in that sense just a lot of wine yeah but like if you also see like

1:21:15evidence that in Galilee like lots of traveling Mystics From Galilee used lots of uh potions that had way more than

1:21:23just wine in the sense that so that’s that it’s like not that weird it’s like

1:21:28maybe modern I think we agree that we have to fight a middle yeah we yeah when we when

1:21:33when we see yamus use a word that we don’t understand then we have to stand in the presence of Unknowing and it at

1:21:40least again double down on the possibility and Chase it to the very end but often at least in my experience

1:21:47doing this research and about I don’t know about yours often the very end is I don’t know the evidence is simply inconclusive but there are cases I mean

1:21:54so the tendency of not wanting to see it at all I am discussing an the text uh in

1:21:59in the book which is not hermatic but it’s in the Greek magical papiery as they’re called the so-call Mithra litery

1:22:06and that’s an interesting case because there’s a F this is a famous text it has been commented on by many scholars it’s

1:22:13really a well studied text and well to the best of my knowledge I found almost

1:22:19nobody who mentions the anth theogenic component there and it actually contain

1:22:24there’s one fifth of the complete text uh consists of a recipe of how to make

1:22:29an psychedelic concoction it’s the recipe is there you have to take this you have to take that you have to put it

1:22:34together in this way Etc there are a couple of ingredients that are not identified so we cannot replicate it uh

1:22:40but there isn’t one fif of the text is a recipe and almost all the scholars have

1:22:47ignored it and I find that’s a a very strong example of of I agree or Dela

1:22:53there’s psychedelic drugs in delapa that people just ignore yeah yeah like he gets all this phrase but it’s like how

1:22:59to go insane for a day yeah well believe it or not we’re already running out of time so maybe the

1:23:06people who have already that you’ve already recognized and then I have one more question that I think we really

1:23:11need to ask before we let these two guys go thank you very much for your uh

1:23:17interesting lecture I have two questions one goes back to uh I think uh the

1:23:24comment you made about the the man who said he was both a hermeticist and a Christian I was wondering about what

1:23:32time uh that was written and uh that goes with how we receive

1:23:39hermeticism like whole Europe was Christian these texts are rediscovered

1:23:46they are cared for in such a way because they recognize each other they become

1:23:51great friends and I wonder how you see how that evolves if it does into the

1:23:57emergence of for example Rose chanism and then another question I have perhaps

1:24:03more uh for you vouter um if the hermeticist had this nonu VI and they

1:24:10didn’t have this uh um you know antagonism between matter and Spirit uh

1:24:17I was reading the tus of Plato and that’s quite difficult to get through

1:24:23but the the notion that that the the the

1:24:28the ideas are impregnated into the the matter the the sort of underlying

1:24:36substratum the Virgin matter of creation then giving rise to the Sun or the form

1:24:43how how that plays a role if it does in in the hermatic world view um those are

1:24:50my two questions thank you very much for your uh talks yeah I think here so Yus I think

1:24:56this is one of the key references for Yus and I do um I do interpret in my

1:25:01book yamas as an hermetic practitioner I go I’m very insistent with this he uh he

1:25:07talks about our hermetic mysteries in his book people have often wanted to keep him out of Egypt because Egypt is

1:25:13Magic and Superstition and he’s a philosopher so he shouldn’t go there but he actually went there I think he lived

1:25:19there and he studied there and I have Arguments for this and um uh and uh yeah

1:25:26so this is where you find this idea that’s that’s that’s the ideas or the

1:25:31The Good the beautiful and the true the ultimate realities have to be em have to get embodied into into matter uh so you

1:25:38find it there so yeah and the Tas is a key reference so I totally agree and you know the other question is yeah so this

1:25:45guy was lelli yes he was a Christian and uh interesting for him so this was the

1:25:501480s all right uh um but interesting was that um he was not interested in

1:25:56Plato he was not interested in other uh you know platonic philosophies Yas or whatever just just the Bible and the

1:26:04hertica that that was it was it for him that is what interested him and he uh he was reading his understanding of

1:26:11Christianity back into the hertica or maybe giving an hermatic interpretation of Christian whatever want you he want

1:26:19to see it and uh yes this was Radical and relatively new in the way that he did

1:26:25it and I would say also about the tus is that Plato there’s a there’s a Plato can

1:26:31never make his mind up in the in the fadis right matter is pretty evil and in the tus it’s just limited no matter how

1:26:38good of a builder you are if the thing you have to build with isn’t very good the house will always be imperfect it’s

1:26:44just a limitation so in the T it’s it’s a limitation it’s there’s no dualism in in the Tas Yus really wants to go with a

1:26:51full em ENT of the Soul just completely sunk into the body unlike platinus who

1:26:57wants to say not completely sunk right and you turn inward and I think that this is this is a tension inside of this

1:27:04is a tension inside of platonism that we don’t talk about because we talk about neoplatonism as if it’s a thing it’s an

1:27:1118th century invention that covers over the fact that this tension plays itself out in py and Yus and I think that yamus

1:27:18falls on the side of the Corpus of medum because the Corpus of medum is precisely what you argue it’s a text about the the

1:27:23the goodness of the world and precisely as embodiment and I think that’s why he leans hard on the tus and not so hard on

1:27:30the Fades Eddie leads also hard on the on the on the Symposium because in the

1:27:37Symposium DEA and I find it relevant that that an female um uh Priestess of

1:27:44the Mysteries is initiating Socrates there into what it is all about and this

1:27:50is not philosophy but it is erotica it is erotica it’s erotics and she explains

1:27:55what it’s all about and what she says it’s about um giving birth in beauty

1:28:01that is the formulation um so uh it is not about escaping from the world it’s it’s giving

1:28:08birth to the higher forces to the ideas into the world so she used the language

1:28:14of uh giving birth uh to explain what the key of of platonic wisdom is all

1:28:21about and I find is extremely uh significant uh for understanding the hertica we actually have a question from

1:28:28from somebody in the in the remote audience asking about if some of the if some of the um well-known platonists

1:28:36could have had um teachers who were versed in hermetic

1:28:41Traditions when one of the pl sorry of the platonic so for example um do you

1:28:47believe that someone like Pythagoras had teachers in Egypt that were well versed in the Hermetic tradition or ideas no

1:28:53that’s too early so Pythagoras is much earlier so the Hermetic writing that’s why I expanded I think the direction the

1:29:00person is going in is is can there be a real link there well there’s one interesting thing so so Pythagoras is

1:29:07much earlier than the htic writings so the Hermetic writings are second third Century the question is could the

1:29:12Hermetic writings come from an older tradition that’s much older than that and I uh I

1:29:20am cautiously tending towards uh the view that among other people Peter

1:29:26Kingsley has been promoting uh saying that there is an pagaran the tradition

1:29:31which ultimately goes back to Parmenides so you can trace a line from Parmenides

1:29:36that’s really early and Pagan Traditions that gets connected to uh to rtica there

1:29:43are many questions to be asked about it it is very it is speculative to a certain point it’s very hard to prove

1:29:49but I think there are reasons to take that hypothesis seriously so that doesn’t mean that her herar is influence

1:29:55influential on pythagoreanism but it could mean that pythagoreanism and also

1:30:01primes is one of the background uh ontologies or metaphysical system that go into hertica I tend to see I tend to

1:30:08see them mostly the the intellectual Machinery coming from middle platonism like numinus is I think the most direct

1:30:14person that the new the pythagore if you’ve never read numinus really read numinus next to uh the Corpus of medicum

1:30:21I think that’s the main intellectual power that things are coming from but also what’s really exciting is there’s a new addition out of the conversation of

1:30:28the House of life that’s a demonic text that is attributed to Toth it was used

1:30:33as an initiation probably as an initiation text written in Egyptian used in these temples and so we are getting

1:30:39at least a glimpse now into what was previously basically a black box of what are these Egyptian priests people like

1:30:46zosimos what are they doing in these temples from a from a lurgical and philosophical point of view in the

1:30:51Egyptian I language the text is very difficult but I do think that that’s an Avenue of research that I’m super

1:30:57excited about uh hi I have a question about I’m

1:31:03here hi uh I I have a question about the technical hermetica because uh we’ve

1:31:10been mostly talking about the um the philosophical or spiritual hermetica but

1:31:16um I don’t know that much about technical hermetica other than that they are also attributed to Herm

1:31:22but I think some of those are actually a little bit older than uh the philosophical her I’m right uh but they

1:31:29always feel like quite separate things to me and also yeah tonight is an

1:31:35example because we’ve been mostly talking about philosophical hereda like how closely were they connected and did

1:31:41the technical Armeda play a part in the Quest for nosis uh for pract

1:31:47practitioners um for example in classical times or in Renaissance like did it travel a bit of a similar path

1:31:56uh such as the philosophical Meda I mean I I guess what I would say

1:32:01is I would I I think I would agree with bter and I would say I just want to challenge the distinction between philosophical spiritual and Technical

1:32:07hertica and say that that the technical hertica Tech like the corini something like that are some of these alchemical

1:32:14and astrological texts part of what’s motivating them to be attributed to heris magistus is the idea of the

1:32:21goodness of the world and by studying the goodness of the world through Alchemy or astrology one enlivens one’s

1:32:28noose to to Behold The Glory the beauty and through IIA reverence of the world

1:32:35and therefore I would say that the distinction between the the soteriological hermetica or the

1:32:42philosophical hereda and the technical hermetica are actually just a Continuum one actually makes the other possible

1:32:48because at some level if the world is just bad if you’re I don’t know if you’re radical dualist why study this thing it’s just a giant clock driven a

1:32:54bunch of by evil damn archons like like why would I get out but if it’s like no

1:33:00it’s this is part of the beauty of the world and I experienced that through reverence and that’s part of the road to

1:33:07Salvation then this this this distinction just breaks down and I think that that that breakdown is is a very

1:33:14important thing we need to be begin doing is separating take showing these as as as a hand and a glove and not

1:33:21technical versus one actually makes the other possible yeah there’s there’s some continuity I would say it’s a spectrum

1:33:28and uh there is a middle ground where where you it’s harder to say whether it’s technical or spiritual it’s both

1:33:33and zos is a good example so the the practi the practitioner of alchemy uh

1:33:39whom I interpret as an as an hermetic practitioner next to yamas and so he was

1:33:44working in Laboratories all the time that of us is work and I find it hard to to believe and it’s that I think is also

1:33:52so consistent with what we know of socios it’s hard to believe that somebody who is insistently working with

1:33:58matter all the time would have a totally anti perspective and he has often been

1:34:04seen as agnostic against matter stereotypical agnostic against matter

1:34:09but that doesn’t make sense I think you have to see him also as a spiritual practitioner for whom you’re trying to

1:34:16uh discover the secrets the mysteries of matter uh which and affected from a

1:34:22dualistic point of view the whole breakdown between M the the whole distinction between matter and spirit

1:34:27breaks down and uh you’re just working with one of the same thing um yeah well

1:34:34you’ve both hit on things that um you know need to be worked on and can definitely uh be delved into further and

1:34:41so I wanted to ask you both what you would like to explore in the future and what do you think are the kind of the

1:34:46big questions that still need to be to be investigated

1:34:52I who goes first I guess what I would say what

1:34:57excites me is one the discovery and publication of Egyptian literature and looking at how Egyptian literature is

1:35:03tying into this literature and two more work needs to be done on the technical hereda because I think that getting

1:35:10there’s so much of that in Arabic and so much of that uh in in syak that we we

1:35:15tell a story of of uh Egypt Greece Thomas aquinus and I’m like hold on

1:35:23what what about the you the brethen of Purity and what about and so there’s a story about the transmission of all that

1:35:28that you know went into bdad and the B hikma and without telling that story uh

1:35:34we have two legs of a stool and I think that’s uh I don’t want to sit on that stool so the so so these big gaps in

1:35:42transmission yeah and and also trans gaps in Innovation what do the brethen of Purity do what are they what’s going

1:35:48on in the natine and agriculture how are they transforming her from being what it is in this text to

1:35:54now being the prophet Enoch and how is this how is the spirituality and the spiritual technology adapting to new

1:36:00environments especially in uh in the near East yeah I would say something similar to what you you just said I

1:36:06think uh one of the major challenges is to change our narratives and not just uh

1:36:11the narratives about heraa but in order to interpret them in a better new way we have to uh get rid of a whole range of

1:36:20uh old-fashioned eurocentric uh narratives of progress

1:36:26that uh say that uh basically everything you know philosophical and good comes

1:36:32from Greece Etc and uh marginalizes everything that comes from Egypt Etc and

1:36:38is superstitious and magical Etc these are very deeply ingrained narratives in the standard ways of of uh thinking of

1:36:45academics in my work on the hermetica I’ve been fighting constantly with with the power of those Nar narratives so

1:36:52Scholars have kept projecting narratives of Greek superiority on hertica and you

1:36:57completely get it wrong when you do that uh they have been been projecting uh Christian and biblical narratives on

1:37:04their hertica the hertica Are pagan there is not a trace of Christianity in it and uh very very little Judaism a

1:37:11little bit but very very little they’re basically Pagan and uh but nevertheless

1:37:17Scholars have have projected the entire Genesis Narrative of the fall of Man into matter under hermetica he thought

1:37:24it was there and it wasn’t there and the for generation for Generations people have kept repeating that narrative so we

1:37:30have we have to get rid of a lot of these narratives and another one and it links to what you said so you mentioned

1:37:35the bre of Nar the Breen of Purity and all many of these things in the Islamic world we have to um look at Western

1:37:43culture uh in a much more inclusive way which which includes the whole transmission of pagan pagan Traditions

1:37:52uh Judaism Christianity and Islam so we have to get rid of this idea that uh Judaism and Christianity belongs to the

1:37:59west and Islam doesn’t belong there if you want to act actually understand how these things work you have to see this

1:38:05in a much broader context and include a whole largely unexplored field of the

1:38:11transmission of esoteric and hermetic literature in the Islamic world as well so you need to have the languages you

1:38:17need to have uh have you need to look at at at Arabic and Persian and syak and

1:38:23all these languages and there’s tons of work to be done there yeah yeah really

1:38:28really basic stuff to I know a lot of visitors are are are surprised to hear

1:38:33that um Knowledge from from Egypt had anything to do with the Renaissance well okay God forbid have

1:38:41some things to tell them then yeah yeah well everyone please join me in

1:38:46thanking these two

1:38:58[Applause]

1:39:05well before I let you go I’d like to make just a couple of quick announcements our next lecture is on the

1:39:1113th of July and we’ll be talking about hermetica again we have Marat Nasser

1:39:17here she’s a very interesting lady an Egyptian lady lady who had a a career in

1:39:23in um London and is now using her substantial wealth to build something called her mopis in central Egypt um

1:39:32building on and commemorating um this this this culture and these events that happened a millennia ago um so she’ll be

1:39:39here to present her project to us um and I also want to mention that starting in September we’re going to have an online

1:39:46lecture series on the thought of Jung Carl Yung and un Burma so keep your eyes

1:39:53open for that um but please join us now in the cafe uh for a beverage and I think the garden is maybe open as well

1:40:00so we can chat there thank [Applause]

1:40:17you

Transcription without Timestamps

I GOT TO TELL YOU NOW THE SHIP IS READY
WAITING ON THE SHELF.

[Music]
[Music]
a lesson that I’ve learned in my short life thus far is that if we let others Define what success is for us we never
achieve it however if we Define what success means to us and for us regardless of social political or
economic expectations then we might have a chance
this summer I got to experience a real bit of success what it feels like for me
for this channel for the project of esotera I got to join in a roundt
discussion with a personal hero of mine professor professor vouter hanrath at an
institution I also deeply admire and Revere the embassy of the free mind also
known as the Ritman library to discuss a topic that has long fascinated me the
philosophy and spirituality of hermeticism of course Professor hanuka’s
work has transformed the field of the study of wosa terorism and frankly it speaks for itself though I remember
being young person in my late teens probably and finding his work in the late 1990s and think to myself my God
you can study all this cool esotericism stuff with rigor with scientific
academic rigor and that that still motivates me down to this day further
when I discovered there was an entire vast Library where esoteric wisdom was
collected in the very antiquarian volumes and manuscripts that first brought that light to this world I
resolved I resolved that I would go there and I would study that material
come what may among the same canals that dayart and Spinosa once tried so on a
very very warm evening I got to experience a bit of what success is for me to speak on a topic dear to me with a
personal hero in a space I hold with reverence among a crowd of absolutely
wonderful like-minded people and some of the most wonderful dear friends I’ve met in the recent years so I want to
introduce you to this conversation by encouraging you to head over to the Embassy of the free Minds YouTube
channel and their website and subscribe subscribe to their content you can find the links below and in the
description if you like the content we put forward here at esoterica you’ll enjoy their content immensely indeed we
share a common goal making as a teric wisdom accessible with scholarly rigor secondly
I’d encourage you to support their work by picking up some of the items from their web shop for instance this two
volume Christ Plato Hermes Tris magistus volume is one of my absolute favorite
books it is a veritable catalog of hermetic and mystical wisdom documenting
the first 50 years of printing it’s like having a portable
Museum but for topics that esoterica specializes in it’s well worth picking
up I think you can get a copy of this two volume hardback really really amazingly bound and printed document for
like 50 bucks now we recorded a lot of material at the Ritman Library so I’ll be rolling out some of that soon as well
so if you like esoteric spirituality really really beautiful old books and a 17th century Dutch mansion
on the canals of Amsterdam stay tuned but with special thanks to everyone at
the embassy of the free m especially Dr lenda Martin here is my conversation
with Professor hanra on hermeticism then and
[Music]
now okay okay sorry about the technical difficulties we’ve uh We’ve consulted and determined
it was the Hermetic dionis who were infiltrating our sound system let me
start over uh for those at home I’m Lucinda Martin I’m the director of the Ritman Research Institute and the bibla
philosophica hermetica the library of hermetic philosophy and this evening we
have a round table which we’re calling Hermes yesterday and today now as I said before our library
used to be one of the few places to study hermetic discourses and traditions these things were long viewed as
Superstitious by Academia and by mainstream churches and thus seen as Unworthy of of attention in the meantime
Scholars have begun to realize the contributions of hermetic streams of thought to the cultural history of
humanity and last November our library was added to the UNESCO memory of the world register because of the
contributions some of our authors have made to the development of modern human
rights in 2017 the Ritman family established a museum the embassy of the
free mind which is where we are this evening to teach the general public about the content of the library we
present exhibitions and we offer lectures and seminars and even a Children’s Program you might therefore
say that the kind of event that we’re hosting tonight is in our DNA it brings together two of the most
prominent voices about hermetic traditions and discourses one operating in Academia and one specialized in
communicating to the public and those are also our two concerns Val Jan is Professor of the
history of hermetic philosophy and related streams of thought at the University of
Amsterdam he has many scholarly Publications including his most recent book hermetic spirituality and the
historic imagination just Sledge is the creator of the YouTube channel esoterica which
has more than 300,000 followers this evening we want to explore the past present and future of
hermetic streams of thought and their study what role they’ve played in history what they mean to people today
and what questions are open that still need to be answered about this subject
each of our speakers will give a short presentation and then we want to open the discussion to as many questions as
possible both from our live and our remote audience in this way we hope to
include the perspectives of academics practitioners and anyone interested in
this fascinating subject with that please join me in welcoming vouter and
[Applause]
Justin start okay well thank you very much for the nice
introduction uh first of all and it’s very nice to be here again in the riton library a place where uh I’ve been
coming uh since uh the end of the 80s the 1980s and um which is really the place
uh where you can study the Hermetic literature uh there’s no better place no other place in the world which is as um
as Central to this kind of research as this place here so this is so I’m very happy to be here again um what I would
like to do just in 15 minutes is uh just give an very short uh introduction to
what our hertica are all about for somewhat larger audience many people in the audience here might already know
what it’s all about more or less but maybe the larger audience doesn’t so um
what are Thea all about I’d like to uh tell a little bit about this um by while
at the same time also telling you about my my personal interest and my own own development in my uh encounters my
encounters with th greatest herish herish Trish magistus the um the
legendary author of the Hermetic writings uh I encountered the carpus hermeticum the most Central text of
hermetic writings uh by the end of the 1980s uh in a Dutch translation which
was made possible by the biblo of philosophic hertica here in Amsterdam and the translation of the carpatica
made by uh um rulof Brook and K whel which was uh of great importance for uh
you know calling attention to the hertica in in the Dutch context I got fascinated I read these texts I was
wondering what is it all about I couldn’t really make out entirely what they were all about there were many
things that puzzled me about him but I got fascinated and hooked about this text um and um what is clear in any case
these are texts that are attributed to an legendary author Hermes mesus or in
which this legendary author or wisdom teachers plays a central role uh they
were written in the second third centuries of the Common Era more or less uh in Greek and um um but they were
written in Egypt and this combination of Egypt and Greek is interesting and and important for understanding what arar
are all about because uh when you think of Greece then you think usually about
Greece Greek culture as the origin of Greek rationalism Greek philosophy Etc
and many people think that the whole of Western civilization began in Greece right so Greece has this kind of iconic
status of the or as the origin of Western philosophy uh and rationalism
but then these these texts were written in Egypt and Egypt is often seen as the counterpart in that respect Egypt is
often perceived as the home of everything that’s not rational and not
philosophical but uh that has to do with magic and Superstition and all kind of
things that were seen as the counterpart of rationality and so the fact that her hetic writings were written precisely in
Egypt but in Greek and in Greek which uses a lot of philosophical language is
fascinating so you have these these two countries Egypt and Greece together so
to speak in uh one carpus of text hertica these Texs are attributed to
this legendary teacher um and uh they are all about the search for gnosis
ultimate knowledge knowledge about the true nature of reality the true nature of God and the true nature of ourselves
and um to already you know give you very shortly the answer of um what the quest
prognosis is all about the ultimate um um answer that our hermetic uh authors
gave to the question what is reality is all about what is the true nature of reality was that they said everything is
light there is only one reality spiritual light which is universal and
um God is light reality is light and the human being is light the only thing that
really exists is light Universal light and they call that the Noose with a Greek word um now of course when we’re sitting
here do you look at each other and we are looking we standing in a room here and you see people you see beautiful
pictures at the walls Etc you’re not seeing light uh you’re you’re seeing all kind of objects and people
um why is that well that is because according to the hertica uh we are not
actually perceiving reality as it really is we are diluted so our state of consciousness in which we find ourselves
is a diluted State a state of state of hallucination and this is these are really appropriate terms uh a state of
hallucination in which we see things that seem very real but are not ultimately real because the only thing
that’s really real is universal light that’s also a kind of core uh belief of the htic authors um so the question is
how do we uh uh wake up from the state of delusion and illusion in which we
find ourselves in which we think this is reality and how do we find our way towards a true perception of the true
nature of reality which is universal light that was really what the way of Hermes was all about and that is what
you find in the Hermetic literature so in the Hermetic literature you find the
description of what uh is often described as the path of Hermes or the way of Hermes in which um the authors
and practitioners who wrote these texts where describing how you can uh Free
Yourself liberate yourself from delusionary perceptions of reality and
find your way to gnosis of reality as it really is that’s a kind of a core
summary of what oura are all about these are unique profound very fascinating
text I have been studying them for decades now and this is in Corpus of text that you can keep reading there are
many text that you might come across when you read them a couple of times you know what they’re all about these are
text that you can keep reading because they always keep surprising you I’ve uh written a pretty thick book about him um
and been doing little else then studying the herar for five or six years I’m absolutely sure if I uh start reading
the text the text again I will again discover new things that I didn’t see before uh because this is how
fascinating and multi levs levels leveled their hetic text are so these
are Classics these are Classics um to say something else also about the
reception of the Hy because these a Tex from the second third Century late Antiquity uh Egypt and the Roman Empire
very long time ago uh many things happened with armatic writings over the centuries they got translated they got
copied by scribes Etc a lot can be said about it but an highlight of the Revival
of the Hermetic uh literature came in the 15th century when the Greek texts uh
especially the text that is known as the Corpus hermeticum uh got translated into Latin by one of the great humanists in
the uh of the Renaissance marcelio ficino and this famous translation came
out in 1471 uh known as the Pander uh the book on the wisdom and uh
power of God the famous translation of the carum now I got fascinated by uh the
reception and the translation of the hertica in the Renaissance in the spirit uh in 1997 and that’s maybe a nice small
story to tell of how very small things that happen in your life can totally change your life forever and because I
was living in Paris at that time uh I was one evening I was visiting a friend of mine famous scholar of the study of
esotericism antoan f uh who’s an pioneering St scholar in our field I was
having a nice evening at home with him and I was looking um at a little glass case that he had in his room which had a
collection of very old books uh very valuable old books the kind of books that you find here in the Ritman library
and one of them caught my interest for some reason I took it out it turned out to be in French translation from from
the 16th century of hermetic literature and um and somehow something
tickled my interest and I still think if I hadn’t taken that book out my life would have changed completely would have
been and I would not have done most of the things that I actually have done I asked Onan fa can I borrow this book
well it’s a valuable 16th century text with he amazingly uh you know allowed me
to take it home or with me to my room uh that I had in Paris and I took it with me and I was reading it uh in reading it
in b i very well remember this I couldn’t make out most of it it was written in 16th century French very
difficult uh I didn’t understand most of it but I understand some of it and I noticed there’s something about this
text there’s something fascinating about it it’s a kind of an intuition that you can have sometimes I want to know more
about this two weeks later I went to Amsterdam and I went to the bi of philosophic hertica here and I met an a
neolatin translator who happened to be sitting there with born uh who was translating hermatic text into Dutch and
I asked what are you what what are you doing and he said uh well I’m translating a text by looo lelli and
then a little bell went off my head because I had been reading this French text and this had been written by La
lazel that is the French the frenchification so to speak of lovic larell and so this was a coincidence I
thought I want to know more about loo latari I started working with with born and we ended up translating all the
works by latari uh from Latin into English wrote a large introduction about
it and published a book about this and why was this so important well uh why was this so fascinating uh to me and why
do I think it is important to say something about about larell well there is the famous there’s a famous narrative
that has been told about their htic Traditions by and the Hermetic tradition by Francis Yates an great scholar uh who
published an Masterpiece in 1964 jordano Bruno and the hetic
tradition in which she argued that the htic that the translation of the hertica in the 15th century um was a momentous
event in cultural history uh the translation that fito made of the Corpus
ticum changed the nature of the Renaissance it introduced Magic uh and
learned discourse about magic into the intellectual culture and it had a huge
impacts on the entire early modern periods and gave um the starting point
in many ways according to Francis Yates to the Scientific Revolution which for finally led to the modern world so she
created she made this beautiful large Grand narrative about the enormous
impact of the Hermetic literature the Hermetic tradition which um all started
with the Trans translation of the scorpus herum in 14 1471 now I was reading this L larel this
L larell and I was looking him up in Franc Jade’s famous book and I could
hardly find him he was mentioned here and there in a few foot notes but what I discovered was that this unknown guy
lelli had been the second translator of the carpus ticum next to uh to ficino he
had written some treatises that had not been included by ficino so it was not
just ficino who translated the carpus it was also lelli um so I wanted to know more about
lelli and to cut a very long story short short because I just have a few more minutes um it’s basically turned out
that by looking at one forgotten figure that’s already in this case when you actually start studying him and
contextualize him and learn about him and learn about his work you discover
that the basic normative standard narrative that had so impressed
countless people The Narrative by Francis Yates had to be revised and her whole story well turned out to be very
different from reality so uh basically on the basis of lell I came to the what
I discovered at that occasion was how strongly Scholars with their interpretation of ancient text can
determine the way that we look at history and sometimes their interpretations are
wrong and have to be revised and then suddenly the whole picture changes that uh that Discovery has always always
stayed with me um the whole story of the Hermetic tradition that Francis Jades
was telling had had to be revised on the basis of new discoveries of an unknown
hermatic author L lelli uh much more recently beginning in 2015 more or less
I decided to finally go back to this mysterious uh hermetic text themselves
the text that were written in the second and the third century and really studied them very very very carefully going back
to the Greek the Greek Originals looking at all the translations the footnotes the commentaries and whatever is there
reading all the secondary literature and again I found that um if you uh if you
delve deep into this text then you find that they are very profound they’re very deep there’s you you keep discovering
do things about them but what struck me most is that again the way that we look
at this text uh is often determined by the narratives that in this case 20th
century Scholars have put on these text and often these narratives are wrong and again in this case I have been arguing
and maybe we can talk a bit more about it later that uh we have to look at this whole whole hermatic literature of for
Antiquity in a radically different way from how we used to the text and that is my final part of my little talk these
text have often been described as the philosophical hertica so this which
which suggest these are philosophical texts um I’ve come to the conclusion that these are actually not
philosophical texts they use philosophical language Greek philosophy
they use elements from the from Plato and and platonic philosophy but they are
not interested in resolving philosophical questions in a way that standard philosophers are usually doing
they’re interested in something else they’re using philosophy in order to find uh answers to the question of what
is the ultimate nature of reality but most of all to find answers to how can we heal ourselves from our deluded
Consciousness and how can we find the way back to a direct perception of reality as it really is so I’ve proposed
to refer to this uh Corpus of philosophical hertica as spiritual
hertica this is not these are not philosophical text these are what I call spiritual text which uh are uh centrally
uh devoted to uh trying to transform our
interior Constitution to transform ourselves to transform our minds and our whole Consciousness in such a way that
we uh get liberated from deluded perceptions of the world and actually
discover how reality really is that is uh that is what these texts in my view
are all about final thing I want to say is that um so the Ultimate Reality that
you discover by means of gnosis that is the central method of Thea is that
there’s only one reality and that is light Universal light at the same time uh very often
Scholars have have suggested that this means that human beings according to Thea have to liberate ourselves from
matter from the material world from the body and find our way back to an non-material and other worlds of pure
spirituality but I found that this is actually not what texts say they’re actually about embodiment they’re not
about escaping from the world towards other spiritual reality of pure light they’re actually about making contact
with that reality and then channeling it into this world so the herar is actually
an extremely World affirming positive worldview that celebrates the beauty of
existence the beauty of reality and uh doesn’t teach us to escape from the
world but actually U tries to teach its practitioners to transform the world to
make it better to make it more beautiful and to make it more true um so
nonduality the reality of one reality of Light which is the only reality that
really exists One Core element of Thea and the other core core element is the
task of trying to channel that Universal light into our material world and um
that I think is the core uh concept are the Core Concepts of thetic htic
spirituality that you find here and as Scholars and that is what I do in my daily life you can uh Trace how these
text with this strange and often misunderstood message get uh interpreted
reinterpreted passed on often misunderstood or creatively re
interpreted in all kind of ways through the century until we reach the present day and the reinterpretation of the
hertica is still going on at this moment in all kind of alternative spiritual circles and maybe we will talk about
this also with Justin sletch about this so that was my small introduction thank
you um what I want to talk about is a bit what valter mentioned um there’s sort of what hermeticism was and sort of
what hermeticism was in the ancient world but there’s also how we’ve received hermeticism what it was and how
we received it are quite different things as you can imagine and what prompted this at some level was me
thinking about how I use the word hermetic when I’m sitting down writing scripts for esoterica and what I
discovered was that I use it in all kinds of completely different ways this word took on so many valences of meaning
and I began to ask myself where did some of these valences come from and I think
that question is incredibly complicated and I’m going to give you one tiny answer to where I think that may have
come from and where that answer comes from I think at some level that answer is very overdetermined and this is just
one piece of that puzzle perhaps a footnote that could have been a valter’s book in fact is that we often find the
Corpus syum and hermetic literature traveling with other texts often
Scholars will talk about the Corpus of medicum as if it’s sort of floating alone by itself and in some editions it did but in a great many editions
especially editions that were very decisive and very popular the Corpus herum is moving alongside as a fellow
traveler to other texts and as you can imagine you know many folks here have
been painted like The Fringe you keep The Company You Keep we begin to be painted as the company we keep for
better and and force so this text is a very important
text in the history of all of this this is a 1497 uh Aldine this is if you even
folks here may recognize the type of Aldis monut uh this is a platonic primer This was
meant to be a a text basically that you would pick up and you would read before you read ficino’s complete translation
of Plato now what’s important about this text iside the fact it’s the first time that yamus appears in print this is
where he gets famously the title day Myster e that you see a complete interesting collection not yet with the
Corpus ticum but a very interesting collection of all kinds of texts that
when you look at them I bet you look at them and go hermetic right you kind they give you sort of hermetic Vibes even
though the Corpus hermeticum isn’t there but we have is De mysteres by yamus we have the commentary on the alabes we
have Pro’s book on sacrifice and Magic what’s also important about this is that many of these texts veilance this
collection a little bit magicky there a little bit magicky veilance to these texts so on deities and diamonds on
dreams on diamonds by Michael celis this is a famous sort of textbook of demonology a Christian text no less uh
one of the few only Christian texts in here we go through and we get or a kind of grab bag of platonic literature
neoplatonic literature Pythagorean literature that all is going to set the stage for marcelio ficino’s translation
of Plato’s Opera now this text does not yet contain the Corpus hedum but it will
in just a moment but again if you take a look at these texts they’re already beginning to take on some of the effects
of what we Mal began to think about as kind of the thing that aen Renaissance megus would want to pick up in fact if I
were a Renaissance megus I would be the first person in line to buy this
compendium in 1516 right and this to FYI see I can pop back this is just two
years before ficino dies right so just to get an idea and also it contains one text by ficino at the very end just FYI
so already establishing and just FYI the Aldine press is funded by money from uh
from the deorta family so giovan deorta is actually knee deep in this from the very beginning and the Aldine press
which is quite famous one of the most beautiful presses of all time is already pumping out a book by ficino in 1497
just a couple of year before he dies in 1516 this Edition is greatly expanded
and the AL press logo is put right beneath it now for my book nerds in the room and I imagine there’s at least one
of you the symbol of the Aline press is a
symbol of extreme quality when you you want to think about the engine of the Renaissance it’s the Aldine press they
are pumping out Greek and Latin text and accessible easy to read very easy to
read relatively inexpensive volumes and the Aline press will eventually give us small books that will become the
background for we now called paperbacks if you wanted access to Old wisdom add
Fontes back to the sources the alme Press was your go-to and when the alme
Press printed something it meant it was worth reading was a classic it was one of the
sources and there it is right in the middle now of oops I’m sorry I don’t
have it written out here but right at the very heart of this text is now murky
Tris megisti Pander it’s now at the center of it in fact I have this at home
if you open it up to the center hermus magistus is now at the Beating Heart of
a platonic reader right follows it is the escolapios and then a grab bag
mostly of ficino all ficino but many of ficino things taken from his three books on life many of which deal with quasi
medical quasi magical ways of living the text is now even more leaning in the direction of something like what a
Renaissance Megos would want including at Beating Heart now Hermes Tris magistus so with the Pander is now
sitting at the very heart of what would be the book you would want if you were a John D if you were Gino de Bruno if you
were someone like that this text is decisive in the history of all this because this is one of the first times
where the Pander will be printed with other texts and this Edition in some form of fashion is going to become one
of the most best-selling editions of the corpus sedicum now when we talk about
editions of a corpus fum we might say this is 11th edition of the Corpus fum the 11th Edition when you hear that what
you’re hearing is it’s the 11th edition of the Corpus medicum as if the corpor amicum is by itself it’s not it’s now
traveling with a collection of books that are now shaping what hermeticism is
what adantes means so when you read books like when you bury procol’s book on Magic and cel’s book on demons right
next to Pythagoras and that’s now beginning to color what hermetic is going to mean hermetic is
now taking on AV veillance because now it’s traveling with other books that are now coloring what it’s going to look
like the 15 16 Edition would be now would be the last time that the Aldine press would pick this up the next
edition of the Corpus medicum the very next edition of the Corpus medicum right would now be printed in 1532 now switched over to basil and now
look what’s happened all the ficino’s been dropped so is the Michael cellus on demons maybe that made some people
uncomfortable demons have a tendency to do that and yamus and Pander have
switched pride of place he now is no longer at the center of the collection he is now at the top and many of the
things have been dropped but not yamus not procus including on spirits and on Deon and on sacrifice and
Magic probably one of the most popular books about sort of occultism in the in
the Middle Ages this Edition with one with one change we’ll see in just a minute this one right here is also very
important because it follows a different manuscript tradition than the 14 Infamous 1471 edition of the Pander this
Edition never achieved great success as an addition however this addition did beginning in
uh 1549 this the center of location for this printing is now going to be switched over into France in this
Edition as you can see has now switched yamus for p of place now he’s now at the
front again and now heres Tris mistas bookends the text Michael CIS has made a return
on demons has come back and what we have still poery and procus notice how much
more magically inclined this collection is now than the first one it’s almost the plurality of the
text we’re dealing with demons and magic and Hermes Tris magistus is now the bookend of the text this Edition
beginning in 14 1549 would go into I haven’t counted them yet but there would be editions printed almost every five
years through the 17th century think about that time period about 1549 into
the sort of mid 17th century that’s the time period where we see a huge explosion in the interest of people like
d and things like that this text I think would have been the goto text that you
wanted to go to to get access to this literature this was a octavo Edition very small
inexpensive if you wanted a copy of the of the Hermes Tris magistus if you wanted access to that ad Fontes you
picked it up here now think about this from the point of view of the reader to get to the Herm you have to
cross this path if you’re reading the book cover to cover imagine imagine the primed imagine what you’re thinking as a
reader as your mind has been primed through this reading and by the time you get to the to the
Pander imagine to valter’s point imagine what you are now receiving you are now reading the Pander through this prism
and I think that’s an incredibly important prism to understand when we think about an addition of the Corpus
ticum we have to think about how Not only was it received but literally how it was read
in a book at that time understanding the book culture shapes how the
understanding of these texts happened and without understanding that book culture and this literature as it’s put
into this configuration I think that tells us a great deal or at least gives us part of
a clue about how this hermeticism whatever that means is going
to be received by readers and by people like who are going to be practicing
hermeticism just to drive this point home and to make it a little bit more ancient and more I may perhaps more
interesting uh this is the Edition this is the text from the 1549 I think would be an interesting thing for my folks out
there who are mystically inclined toward hermeticism would be put yourself back into the
1550s go meet all your 1550s buddies start a reading group and then read these texts in this
order and see what it would have felt like intellectually to work through
yamus and to come through the Plato commentary on Plato’s alabes which by the way is never the Plato’s albies is
never read now I’ve went through five years of graduate school in philosophy and the only thing we ever learned about
it was Plato probably didn’t write it right but I tell you this you know what the first book you read if you signed up
to a neoplatonism class by yamus you read the alabes everybody read the alabes now
nobody does aside from Specialists so and this by the way is a commentary on uh particularly a commentary by procas
on the alabes I challenge you if you’re interested in in this read those read these books in this order because that’s
how someone like John D would have picked this book up and he had this on a shelf by the way this is how he would have read it so Gathering these books
from from the past we have to think about Hermes Tris mistas and the Pander
and his wisdom as not isolated into one book or one system of books but buried
among other books and relating intellectually and gaining avalance from
these other books this is nothing new if we rind all the way back to the
nagamati library the only other place in Antiquity really where we find hermetic text in C2 in the actual volumes the
physical Coptic volumes we also find hermetic literature writing along other
literature nagamma codex 6 is a weird codex I know that the nagamma Codex are
all kind of weird but the nagati Codex 6 is especially unusual it’s the only one
to have an Max Thunder perfect mind is unlike any other text in the nagamati library for folks who know it it’s
beautiful maybe one of those beautiful texts of the ancient world the authoritative discourse and the concept
of our great power are also very odd kinds of text you probably even if you’re interested in nostic ISM you
probably haven’t heard much about them they’re relatively brief and they’re relatively odd texts there’s a random
chunk of the Republic which has a very interesting veillance when it’s been translated into Coptic and then the last
three texts are hermetic I would say and argue that this is not new in the same way that we can
look through the printing history of the Corpus medicum we could probably assume at some level at least from this one
piece of evidence that it may have not even in the ancient world traveled by itself it may have always been a kind of
ancient traveler and what that means at some level is that whatever hermetic
meant and valter’s point whatever hermetism was in IPO in itself it
probably always also Flo as a signifier it probably meant something different in
different communities in different textual contexts it certainly meant something you know what connection and
when the when the when the the Codex writer was putting this together what connection in their mind connected
Thunder perfect mind to the discourse of the V and the inot I don’t know and I
don’t think it was random but I don’t know and that’s a great place to at least speculate why put them in this
codex and so what I want to say as sort of a conclusion to wrap this up
is that the hermeticism that anyone has inherited is always floated in this way it seems like we have evidence in the
late Antiquity for this we have evidence in the history of printing for this and I think that what’s fascinating and
what’s exciting about that is that on the one hand we can do a great links to do what I what I would call forensic
philosophy the great work that valter has done in his recent book to sort of forensically reconstruct hermeticism as
it was in these texts and which interesting I think voucher in your work is how also you take some text and put
them sort of closer to the periphery of what hermetism was and some outside of it right and even that and I think
that’s an interesting part of this like you have now also entered in sort of rearranged them in a way that you think
makes the most sense and I like the fact that we could throw your yeah you could throw the diagram up here as well and it
will be part of this history of how we’ve rearranged them to make them the hermetism we think is the authentic hermetism yeah uh and I think that
that’s a great and I find your read very compelling but it’s an interesting part of sort of the how we put these things
together we could throw valters up there as well but what that means is that we have hermeticism in Hermes and hermus
megistus as something like we might call floating signifiers they mean something it doesn’t you can’t say anything’s
hermetic but the exact meaning is always determined at some level by how we receive it and how we receive it is
often in history been through these bundles of wisdom not a not in itself a
bundle of wisdom and that’s exciting because it means that whatever hermetism is or was it’s not hermetically closed
it’s hermetically open thank
you well the cogs are turning with uh all the information you’ve both given us um I think you’ve really given us a good
introduction to um what the original practitioners of hermetic religion we’re
after um and centuries later we’ve heard something about the reception um
obviously this is not just a gap of time it’s a gap between relived religion and
reception through texts um and I I wonder what what needs
these discourses these traditions this religion or these thoughts have served
over the over the centuries and I think we can even extend that to Scholars I mean this served something for Francis
Yates as well yeah yeah so I just be curious about both your thoughts about
that one thing I was thinking listening to your to your wonderful story a story about how these texts travel is uh is
that in a certain way you are uh giving New Life to maybe to something of Fran Shades narrative because I’ve been
deconstructing Franc Shades narrative and you’re in a certain way reconstructing it by saying this uh this
hermatic literature uh was read as close connection with magic right with with
magical text and text about demons etc etc and so the interesting thing is that
if you actually read the Corpus herum in the translation by ficino they you find
there’s no magic in it there’s no magic anywhere um so you find magic in the escalus but not in the carpus ofum and
um so and also another thing is also that uh it um that that has been a bit
bit forgotten but fito strangely enough he translated it because because kimoi
told him you have to translate it well if you’re MOS tells you that you translate it uh that’s very clear so he
did it but uh it seems that he wasn’t very interested and K also seems to they
do not seem to have been so impressed by the Corpus and meum they made no effort to translate to to printed wasn’t
printed it got printed in 171 Years Later by a pirate in a pired copy uh by
two other humanists who just rested through the press and um FICO himself
never tried to publish it so I always get the impression that uh for them the
Corpus was a bit of a disappointment actually uh didn’t offer them what they
had thought it would give them but then it gets caught up in the whole you know what what you’ve been telling us all
these uh all these new prints and new additions that travel with a text and you get this kind of this kind of uh
yeah hermatic magical hermatic you know constellations and uh and that is what
Francis Shades talks about would that make sense I think so and I think and if I could rewind this I would go back to
one of these slides and we look at that collection and to us I think we think
all that makes sense all that makes sense together Pythagoras and Michael celus and ficino and all that but if you
actually read those books they don’t sit comfortably together yamus didn’t agree with poery Michael cettus was a
Christian if you look at these texts by ficino wasn’t really interested in in in hermatic ideas it doesn’t seem like they
had a huge impact on him what’s interesting to me is that the printer thought they made sense to go together
and that we look at them and they make sense together to us but intellectually they are it’s a very
tense conversation and I think what’s interesting right is that what I’d point out is a dialectic actually between
Francis the8 saying they’re all connected and I’m saying they’re connected but the connection actually
isn’t natural it’s a connection that makes sense that made sense to a printer and what’s interesting is that we’ve
inherited their decisions it sounds like it was a marketing decision it could have been it could have been clickbait
right like demons and mistas he could have been Renaissance clickbait for all I know but um who demons and and but
what’s interesting is that we’ve we we’ve inherited a decision that may have been made by two printers yeah or by two
humanists who just leged a copy of the Pander yeah and and and a defective copy
and a defective copy yeah yeah yeah and I think that that’s um and uh and what’s interesting is when it’s the 1471
Edition and when it’s not um and so I think what for me it’s not so much a a
defense of the Yates position it’s a sense that it was natural for her to come to that position because that’s how
it traveled and again going to point back to your point about contingency the
decision made by a printer and Aldis mantua’s press in 1497 shaped how an entire generation came to
view this collection of literature despite the fact that that collection of literature had nothing to do with Michael cus or or nothing to do with own
demons or nothing to do with Theus or um or poery for that matter and yet that
surveillance it got right because the accident of history and another effect of this was that certain other auers
that should have gotten more attention were marginalized because uh so lelli my
guy uh really um he gets printed in uh you know early 16th century but he never
never got the got a popularity uh that might have been gained by traveling with
all these other guys and uh and one reason is that there was no nothing nothing magical in him either it wasn’t
in P it wasn’t in lell no magic but interestingly and maybe as as a footnote
that’s interesting I think is that um that the author who was most influenced
by lelli uh but you can hardly tell this if you don’t pay very very close attention
is agria and agria the great author of The you know the three books on Magic uh
actually uh many of his core ideas come straight from from lelli but uh this is
kind of an esoteric Secret in um in agria you don’t notice it unless you
really studied very care and it’s so important to note that lazzari’s addition of the Corpus medicum was complete it had all 17 yeah and he’s the
first person in history to say hermetic kusum I am a hermeticist that’s true no
one they people say they were on the path of Hermes in Antiquity no one called themselves a hermeticist but it’s
great because he says heran that’s an excellent point that’s that’s absolutely true uh yes he is the
first to say that and he believed also uh sorry to go on B we were both fans of
laari I mean yeah I am in her yes he said that and a Christian and uh he
believed that he had encountered the reincarnation of Po MRE the teacher of Hermes and the
Corpus of medic one who had who was the same entity as Jesus Christ so for him
po mandri was the logos was Christ who had now now returned in his own time as
this wondering preacher giovan Doro who was his master his Guru and um so he
believed that Christ and and po mandas had returned in his own time and so the end of time was near uh yeah he was so
so so he was so unusual that solers doubted he really existed for a while yeah yeah yeah yeah but be that unusual
that in the future people doubted you really were real yeah well I I wanted to go back to to your explanation V about
what um about what the original um people on the path of Hermes were after
and you said light yeah and I thought what is this light is it an experience
what is the light and to what extent is it a a factor for these later people I
mean maybe these Christians also saw this light and of course there are many passages in the Bible Christ is the
light of the world and so forth um but what do you think they understood this light to be well uh H this is this is I
think a core Point uh the most important uh word I think in the hertica is n the
Greek word n that is the core text if you don’t get the the core word if you want to understand the hertica you have
to start understanding what new means in Greek now if you uh if an open open up
in the Greek dictionary uh dictionary and you look up the word news the
dictionary will tell you it means mind or it means intellect and so you immed
and that’s Al also what you find in all the modern translations uh news gets translated as mind or intellect and
immediately everything starts looking very philosophical to us because well we know what intellect is right we have an
intellect we are intelligent we have a mind it’s in our brain this are all this is all very very familiar language to us
so we read this word about the news and we think we know what it means I’m arguing we do not understand at all what
it means when we translate as intellect or mind because it meant something else and in order to find out what it meant
you have to uh read the text themselves and you have to have to to let their
hermetic authors tell you what news means to them and forget about the dictionary translation for a moment and
if you read read it carefully then I think the only conclusion you can draw is that this is what it means there is
such a thing as an Universal Divine Light God is light this is not of course
the light that comes from the lamps here this is a spiritual reality of Light
which you uh which you can only perceive which you cannot perceive with your natural senses with your eyes you can
only perceive it by an inner uh sense the an inner kind of visual visual sense
which again is called noose so you can only understand the light of divinity
with the light of your own mind or your own noose um so your own noose your own
light your own Inner Light is the light by which you see the light if that makes any sense uh but this light is not
natural light it is a spiritual light and it is the only is the essence of what God really is and um but it is not
just a philosophical concept it is something that is being uh you know according to the hertica so
at the very beginning of Corpus hertica one the poas uh in the very first verses
you will find that the Visionary uh Hermes probably is in a kind of an yeah
an altered state of consciousness in an ecstatic State his bodily senses are on shutdown so to speak uh his new um sour
high he says and um at one point he um gets to see he no I should say
differently he gets to see an enormous being a great entity uh who introduces
himself as pandri this great entity who talks to him and asks him what do you
want to know and he says I want to know the nature of reality and I know want
want to know what God is and then uh pandus changes his appearance and uh
then hermy sees a universal light uh which and he he um spontaneously feels
feelings of love for that light and that is the news so what actually happens is
that that pandis is the news he changes his appearance and he shows what he really is universal light so if you ask
me what is it yeah uh the the hermatic ERS would tell tell you there’s only one
way to know it and that is by experiencing it and then you will know what it is it is not what comes out of
this LMS but what you describe sounds a lot like what you can read in MA eot in
Toler in souo and by the way they’re all also in all the encyclopedia is a
philosophy right so I you know I don’t see the problem with uh philosophy and religion well the problem is that it’s
not the problem is that um we easily get
uh sidetracked because we think that we know when you hear the word intellect they you think oh yeah I know what
intellect is and and we tend to take an Anon IC perspective and to to project
our modern understandings of intellects intellectual intellectualism intellectual rationality rationality
mind we tend to project it onto the text and and then and that uh keeps us very
easily from reading what what are they actually telling us that it means and we
we just pass our own meetings over the meetings that they this exactly what the examples you showed um illust St I think
it’s an example of what we sometimes in philosophy called the dictionary fallacy it’s if if we’re having a debate about something and you say well the
dictionary says it means this dictionaries tell us how words are used not what they mean meaning is only
determined by context and if you go to a dictionary to look up the word noose it says intellect you’re like well settled
like yeah words change meaning and depal context and when you have an incredibly
technical context like what the was happening at the Corpus amicum you’re committing the dictionary fallacy
okay well I have a whole list of questions here and we could go on all night but I’m pretty sure uh the
audience has a few questions too Corey yeah
thanks um I have a question valter you mentioned in your remarks that um the hermetica are basically an
inexhaustible uh F or source for different interpretations as you read
them later um could you maybe give an example of one of your interpretations that changed as a consequence of later
reading or as you develop or sort of changing of one of your conclusions
yeah yeah thank you that was actually one of the question that we thought about earlier how have you changed your
mind and I might as well well interpreted like that yeah um I’ve become extremely interested over the
past 20 years or so for all kinds of reasons in the concept of um alterations of Consciousness or Altered States Of
Consciousness that has become a major uh concern for me a major prism for reading
um materials that I study and um and when I read this text in the 1990s that
concept was not on my radar uh but later later it came on my radar and um so what
I have been arguing in this book uh which has the subtitle altered stat of knowledge and late Antiquity um is that
um uh you know anything that we can know at all uh yeah depends on our state of
consciousness so at this moment I am in an sober State of Consciousness I am
quite sober and focused I’m wide awake I’ve had a cup of coffee uh I can see
you guys I can I can gain a lot of knowledge at this moment by looking at you I know what you look like I can I I
can see the trees outside Etc that’s knowledge that accessible to me in this state of mind I can also in the State of
Consciousness I can also sit behind the computer and start writing an scholarly article and that goes very well in this
state of consciousness right but if you are in an radically altered state of consciousness like for instance the
state that Hermes describes in the first creats of the carpus hermeticum an ecstatic State then um in that stat you
know forget writing an article or that kind of thing you cannot do that but so there’s certain kinds of knowledge that
are not accessible to you then but other other kinds of knowledge are accessible to you so at that’s in that state he
suddenly can uh see the news and he can see poyares and in our state of consciousness now we cannot see the news
poies we do not see the universal light right so so the point is that as we change our Consciousness our state of
consciousness certain uh types of knowledge become accessible to us and other types of knowledge knowledge
become inaccessible to us and um this for me has become an uh a key for
understanding the hertica it’s something that I did see in the past I began to understand
that uh the uh that an number of key
texts of the hertica especially Corpus 1 Corum 13 and the tweeters on the eight
and the N of nedy really are uh the descriptions of radical alterations of
Consciousness which allow radically different types of knowledge which can
which are only accessible in that state and not in another state and this
relates to a concept that I find fascinating uh this idea of State specific knowledge so this idea that
certain kind of knowledge are specific to this state of consciousness other states of knowledge are spe specific to
other states of Consciousness and is there a state in which any kind of Consciousness is accessible to you I
doubt it so I I personally doubt it I think that any knowledge that we have is dependent on the State of Consciousness
that you’re in and this for me has has become kind of really a key uh for
reading the hermetica and of course everybody reads the text from their own perspectives and I’ve been criticized in
a lot of earlier Scholars who read the text through their own biased
perspectives and misunderstood them and no doubt people will say at one point V hanov is is misinterpreting because he
has his interest in altered state of consciousness possible but uh but at
least it’s another kind of reading which I think makes sense so I hope that’s an answer Justin do you want to answer the
same question has your thinking changed uh over time about these things yeah very dramatically actually I remember an
undergraduate first discovering the Corpus of medicum and just being blown away by it just being like this is
amazing and just thinking it was such you know part of it motivated me eventually to coming to study under under valure here at the
hhp and then I went to graduate school and I discovered this thing called middle platonism and I started reading
middle Pless like numinus and Pho and then I looked back to the Corpus of medicum and thought to myself this is
bad philosophy right this is just like this is like low brand you know numinous um
and then uh maybe five years ago or something it sort of dawned to me this
is soteriology not not philosophy and that shift to this is so
iology this is philosophy in the in the service of serology right then the text
spoke to me again and that was why I so excited when your book came out because I got affirmed I got you know when you
when you come to an idea that vter autograph like writes a 300 page book and it’s like you’re like
ah thank god um and so I I it’s that it was for me that progression what an
amazing text then I had my ficino moment I was like H not such an amazing text and then I was like ah it’s amazing for
reasons I didn’t appreciate the failure was my inability to see it for what it
was it’s a text of ser a collection of soteriology and phenomenology oh yeah
right that in so far it’s it’s text of serology and phenomenology bam it it hit
me again so it’s a all disappointment all
dialectic yes um oh sorry sorry uh you just me
mentioned meister eart and actually uh I wrote something about Margaret pet and
um she might have inspired him I think she did Super biased but um what actually what the whole news um um the
way you describe it really made me think of the concept of Love uh by Margaret pet actually um the same type of sorry
the same type of um attributes and uh you know what it does what love does is
kind of similar to what noose does it’s like kind of knowing uh a kind of a circuit between um the soul and God and
that in the end um the eye that sees is the same eye that looks but this these
type of things you also find in neoplatonic things a lot so I was just wondering did you ever make this
connection yourself or how do you view love or Aros in this whole hermetic um
constellation I mean I I guess to this is the minim mystics some of my favorite hi is perhaps my one of my favor
favorite Poets of all time was just set bhof this today and it’s one of my favorite places in Amsterdam I love H
it’s just one of my favorite poets I think that there is a kinship between mystical Christianity and hermeticism
and I think the proof of that is that we have hermeticism at all it when it passed through the Byzantine filter
which changed it right and I call it the Byzantine filter but really the Byzantine filter took things out and
added things in and Michael cus probably was somewhere in there maybe
but I think that the reason why it survived for instance in lactantius and the reason why and Augustine really
hated it but it survives a bit positively in lactantius and stoas and eventually it it does cross that
Byzantine hump is because there is enough philosophical kinship between certain strains of neoplatonic
Christianity and certain readings of the Corpus of medicum that they if you kind of squint and look at it sideways it it
it passes a smell test otherwise if it didn’t pass that smell test I don’t think the vistine editors would have ever let it get through and so I think
that for whatever reason it it was there was something there was a kinship enough
that they were able to squin at it look sideways tweak it a little bit and then pass it on with kind of an imprator
stamp and I think the the evidence that there’s a a kind of intellectual connection is the fact that we have it
at all yeah I would like to add something else also maybe
um one possible angle to look at this is uh use in modern research on neurology
and uh brain brain process Etc and uh there is quite some evidence to assume
that certain kind of states are simply possible because our brain is able to produce them and so it’s possible that
and this remains speculative but it’s possible that Mar pet had similar kind of experiences as are described in the
carpus and medine and so it’s it does not just have to be an uh an question of
borrowing from one source to another it can also uh it’s also possible that certain kind of mental states are have a
certain kind of universality because they are based upon how the brain works it’s possible I just throw this in here
as a possibility uh with respect to love um in hertica It’s Complicated they
don’t use the word love so much uh there is a notion of platonic love in the S
sense of the desire for ultimate beauty that you want to want to attain but I think more
important in the heraa is the opposed sense that uh the source of reality
which is the paga in Greek the source which is an name not just for God but the source that out of which God himself
comes maybe the ultimate mystery of existence the py they call it um they
describe it as some kind of boundless source of creativity of manifestation everything comes out of it and uh
everything is produced by the P by The Source out of pure generosity and pure
uh you know giving so it is a very positive idea that uh out of pure
goodness the source generates reality for our enjoyment and um so uh there is
good reason to uh interpret this as the source is an source of Love of uh of the
love for existence for anything that flourishes that lives that is beautiful
Etc yeah hello can you hear me hello thank
you very much for highly interesting lecture I have uh a couple of comments
or questions first uh the thing about U dictionary meaning of of words like you
can look up News Psy whatever and it will not do I totally agree you have to
read these terms in in context and and I also think that uh in appropriate translations of the hertica these terms
should perhaps not be translated into modern languages yes I agree yeah so but
but are there any Modern English translations of the hertica that can be recommended I have read several that
they are all different in some in some aspects I personally think that there is no uh really satisfactory modern
translation of theum uh uh at this moment I think they’re all highly problematic uh for
that’s not an criticism for the for the you know through the translators they’re doing their best but they’re doing
they’re using certain procedures for instance translating everything as intellect Etc which I think uh this
starts the meaning uh I I can already give I can however give give good news
there is an uh new translation coming up by Christian wilberg which will be published in one or two years and uh
I’ve seen some uh chapters of it it’s excellent it’s better than all the other ones that I’ve seen and there’s
something very interesting also which touches a bit on the whole transmission of text that you you’re you’re referring
to um and that is a point that he has highlighted namely in the transmission of the text very often a scribe copies
the text and then makes annotations in the margins what has happens and
everybody has overlooked this until Christian wiberg is that the next stripe
often uh moves that annotation uh into the main text and
then another scribe thinks it belongs to the text and so it’s so the so there are many pieces of Thea that actually do not
belong there and but have have been misinterpreted as belong to the hermatic text it results in all kinds of uh
grammatical mistakes sometimes the text doesn’t make sense carbus herum 3 is a notorious example uh it is full of
grammatical inconsistencies you cannot read it but uh he has reproduced or
reconstructed this text by putting all the marginalia back into the margins and reconstructing the original text and
suddenly it’s a crystal clear text and all the problems has vanished and uh that is not just for Corpus 3 that’s for
a whole series of other text so this is a revolutionary new translation that’s coming up very soon it’s going to change
our view of trtica that’s great news yeah escalus too is also very defective yeah and I
also say the escal 2 is very defective oh it’s a mess it’s it’s been known to be a mess for centuries it’s a mess
absolutely true yeah and my second question is about U the arguments for a
non dualistic reading of the hertica I find that very interesting the arguments for that AR
Arguments for uh non dualistic reading what my arguments are what I’ve what I
just been trying to do is hermeneutics I talk a lot about hermeneutics I use gamer Etc and uh I’ve just been trying
to understand this text on their own terms I’ve been trying to understand what are they trying to tell me are
trying to bracket any kind of a uh prejudices that I could think of that I could identify that might that I might
be be a projecting on them and try to let the text speak to me and
um this is the conclusion I draw this is yeah for the argument you will have to read the whole book but I that I think
once you see that they’re talking about about nism that that is their background metaphysics all kind of questions fall
into place as there have been this heavy uh dualistic Gnostic frames put on it so
people have wanted to see a gnostic dualistic Gnostic matter against Spirit
kind of narratives on her hertica it doesn’t work it cannot account for many
of the text and if you take a non-dualistic reading I think it’s resolves well I would say
95 yeah percent of the problems there are a few tricky cases I can understand that that’re totally out great with you
thank you much and I would say to also valter what’s interesting about this collection and nagamati 6 is that we
typically think of gnosticism whatever that category is as dualism these texts are interesting because as a bag these
are not terribly dualist texts no and I think the fact that these three at the end is not an accident that this bag is
is an interesting sort of non-dualistic bag of things going on that’s interesting I have to have to follow up
on that Thunder perfect mind is a great text that really undermines dualisms and things like that so I think that part of
what may have been motivating this author may have been these texts are unusual in that respect and they all got
thrown into the grabb of codex 6 that’s an excellent suggestion I’m going to to
follow up on that and yeah yeah well it occurs to me that we have a really full
room tonight and that indicates something namely the fascination um Within this material and Justin you have
a lot of interaction with with your followers and I just wonder what you think where does this Fascination come
from with these stories and images and the material in general I one of my
favorite groups of people to interact with on the internet uh which is which is sometimes a difficult thing to say
that because interact with people on internet but I think one of the most exciting groups of people that I’ve got to interact with on the internet are the
what I would call sort of Neo hermetic folks uh that are on the uh hermeticism subreddit who are big fans of you but
also sort of Reviving a form of hermeticism and it’s it’s fascinating watching them interact with your work
with my work as they grapple with that problem and I think that they they are willing to do that frankly spiritually
athletic work it is you know it’s one thing for Scholars to reconstruct and talk about there another thing to try to
live it and that’s an amazingly heroic I think and and deeply athletic thing
spiritually I think I think what people are find so fascinating about it is that it is a western non-dualism those are
rare since you know Plato in some sense and um there is something that combines
to your point earlier something about the Machinery of Greek philosophy which is very very powerful with something of
the spirituality or or whatever word we want to use of ancient Egyptian spiritual technology and that’s a that’s
just a cocktail worth drinking Greek philosophy Egyptian spirituality in in this really deeply
sympathetic synthetic form I think that just excites a lot of people because it’s a powerful monistic alternative to
uh to something like the abrahamic faiths which have frankly done a lot of harm to a lot of people and so it gives
them an Avenue in their own Western tradition to have access to a spiritual technology that combin so much of what
people are craving and I think that’s why people are willing to do the in my opinion again very impressive very
admirable work of bringing these Traditions back into a kind of of of Neo
Neo hermeticism and uh I’m just incredibly impressed by by folks going to do that work yeah and the the the
term spiritual technology is a very nice one it is also FCO uses an almost similar kind of term which is very
applicable here and I think one the reason is simply that a lot of uh modern practitioners yeah they’re practitioners
they’re maybe interested in Reading ancient text but they’re really interested in experience and practice
they want to do it they want to have the experience themselves last week just last week fascinating I got an email
from an guy in Venezuela that I don’t know who first wrote to me under a secret name uh an ritual name because
he’s member of an uh of a society uh they they used they call themselves The
University of alchemy uh in in Spanish and it turns out that these are people
uh in Venezuela who are uh they he contacted me because he had read a book
H but for years already um they have been uh practicing rituals uh with an Amazonian drink which
some of you may know about uh aaska which is quite well known now and they are using iasa in a ritual setting so
iasa has a mind altering uh effect and they are using the text of the corus mum
as their basic template for drinking aasa in ritual content so they using Corpus 13 there is the hyn that they
that about the D and all that and they’re doing this in order to um expel
the demons from their body and and invite the forces of light into their body that’s what you read in Corpus 13
and they really they’re just PR practicing this and so this is how how hermeticism you know continues in
completely new context in Venezuela it’s a bit stronger than kofy incense I imagine uh yeah yeah right so yeah this
was fascinating I heard this last week contact with and again that’s and I think what’s fascinating about that is that that the what of all the things we
know about these spiritual Technologies was that they highly syncretistic and Technologies are all about what’s effective not Dogma yeah and so exactly
like if it’s effective awasa is getting you to sose yeah I imagine that in Egypt if they had aaska you best believe that
they they and they we do know they were using kofy incense and other kinds of things that have these kind of uh these kind of power so to me that’s that
people say oh that’s a a weird Innovation I’m like that’s what technology is exactly yeah that’s might
be actually the perfect place to interject my question because um while you were talking about um po Andre being
identified as being Christ

I was reminded of one of your recent YouTube videos where you were talking about uh
Apostle Paul’s vision of uh Christ uh legitimizing him to be uh spreading
gospel even though he never met him

but you connected that to an ancient Jewish
tradition of uh meraba meditation kind of things and there in that context I
was wondering I I I was thinking about like this uh Rabbi from Israel Shannon
who was thinking about that the ancient Israelites might have been drinking uh an anaa like from Syrian Ru and acaia
wood where you can make DMT and like make a Sim kind of Brew so that there’s like the possibility and then like you
have the other work of M resu recently uh immortality key about the early
Christian sects being offshoots of uh mystery schools from the Greek world
where it’s also really quite uh possible that they were eming certain uh concoctions uh that made them uh uh uh
carried them to the Chariot of God or however you may call it in the uh so I was wondering how how you were
thinking about this in uh uh the broader context of uh the the hermeticism and
Altered States and the seccy behind it I mean I would say that there are
certainly psychotropic substances being used whether it’s alcohol or kofy incense and other kinds of uh incenses

[definitely Psilocybin incense – Cybermonk

that you know the cannaboids that were found recently at terod um certainly they’re being used the question is where
do we have evidence for it

[YES. next question?]

and when we fill the gap of evidence of specul it’s really important to to name that as
speculation the am Mystics never mentioned in

[except ‘eucharist’ 10 zillion times]

we we get some list of the techniques they used but they’re they
look a lot more like yoga than they do em bibing certain kinds of substances what I would say is though that the
hermetica literature Ami literature there’s just a bunch of different Technologies of of as scent

[aka avoidance placebos]

that are
going on in this period And I think it’s in some level being motivated by the crisis of the thirr century and that by
in the third in the third Century you had a lot of reasons to want to get out of town and the Jews had their way to get out of town

[It was DMT.]

and the hermic had their
way to get out of town

[It was Psilocybin. you are correct]

everybody’s looking for a way out of the crisis of the third century and I think that that
that may be also part of it but for me it would be the question of where do we have evidence and when Theus tells us
that this instance is being used we need to chase that to the very end and we need to be especially attentive of it
because there’s been such an anti psychedelic anti uh uh anti-substance
bias in Academia for so long but I think we need to double down on those efforts to to give that a fair play

[while quadrupling down emphasizing our fabricated “traditional non-drug methods of the mystics”]

but find out
what was really happening yeah you must find an uh find a middle ground here

[like making a great show of throwing Walburga tapestry in the river, while also highlighting it in our gallery]

because because you’re quite right
there’s no evidence in the hertica zero nothing uh in yamas you have a few
references at one point twice he mentions some concoction something we do not know what it is uh and I do
interpret yamus as an as an practitioner of the hertica so so that’s that’s
puzzling it’s interesting but we simply don’t know more kufi instance yes there
are some other things I talk about this but the evidence is very hard to interpret and it’s very minimal so I
very very much agree with you we we we should not project these things on the on the materials if we don’t have
evidence at the same time you’re also right there is this kind of anti- energetic uh kind of bias in scholarship
which doesn’t want to see it at all um and I try to push back against that a
little bit in my book on the other hand there’s also you mentioned by Mor rescu uh and other people there’s also an an
other kind of bias which wants to see it everywhere and uh and Bayan is an I
think an example of that it’s an interesting book but it’s full of rhetoric but the actual evidence is very
very slight there’s one piece of evidence is very very interesting that he has has discovered for the for the Illini mysteries in Spain that is I
think fascinating for the rest I’m not so not so convinced so I think we have to find a balance between this tendency
of wanting to see anthens everywhere and wanting to see him nowhere I think we have to see them where they uh where we
have evidence or where we are uh have good reason to assume that uh this is in
credible hypothesis right I I tend to call this spectrum because I get comments that you know every episode I
do I get it was DMT um and and I and I call this on the one hand this I call it second eliminativism where we want to
eliminate all psychotropic drugs from history but the other is what I call DMT reductionism it was always just DMT and
so I psycho psychedelic limi ISM uhuh but also DMT reductivism uhuh uh it’s
it’s going to be more complicated than that I was always wondering like in uh uh I haven’t really found any references
to this but every time I read uh in the Bible in Daniel 53 there’s this story
about Nebuchadnezzar calling upon the the uh the the the barrels from the Temple of Solomon to be carried and then
they drink from it and their knees start trembling and then the hand of God announces the Doom of his failed Kingdom
and that sounds an awful lot uh about like a psychedelic trip gone wrong for
Nebuchadnezzar uh so in that sense just a lot of wine yeah but like if you also see like
evidence that in Galilee like lots of traveling Mystics From Galilee used lots of uh potions that had way more than
just wine in the sense that so that’s that it’s like not that weird it’s like
maybe modern I think we agree that we have to fight a middle yeah we yeah when we when
when we see yamus use a word that we don’t understand then we have to stand in the presence of Unknowing and it at
least again double down on the possibility and Chase it to the very end but often at least in my experience
doing this research and about I don’t know about yours often the very end is I don’t know the evidence is simply inconclusive but there are cases I mean
so the tendency of not wanting to see it at all I am discussing an the text uh in
in the book which is not hermatic but it’s in the Greek magical papiery as they’re called the so-call Mithra litery
and that’s an interesting case because there’s a F this is a famous text it has been commented on by many scholars it’s
really a well studied text and well to the best of my knowledge I found almost
nobody who mentions the anth theogenic component there and it actually contain
there’s one fifth of the complete text uh consists of a recipe of how to make
an psychedelic concoction it’s the recipe is there you have to take this you have to take that you have to put it
together in this way Etc there are a couple of ingredients that are not identified so we cannot replicate it uh
but there isn’t one fif of the text is a recipe and almost all the scholars have
ignored it and I find that’s a a very strong example of of I agree or Dela
there’s psychedelic drugs in delapa that people just ignore yeah yeah like he gets all this phrase but it’s like how
to go insane for a day yeah well believe it or not we’re already running out of time so maybe the
people who have already that you’ve already recognized and then I have one more question that I think we really
need to ask before we let these two guys go thank you very much for your uh
interesting lecture I have two questions one goes back to uh I think uh the
comment you made about the the man who said he was both a hermeticist and a Christian I was wondering about what
time uh that was written and uh that goes with how we receive
hermeticism like whole Europe was Christian these texts are rediscovered
they are cared for in such a way because they recognize each other they become
great friends and I wonder how you see how that evolves if it does into the
emergence of for example Rose chanism and then another question I have perhaps
more uh for you vouter um if the hermeticist had this nonu VI and they
didn’t have this uh um you know antagonism between matter and Spirit uh
I was reading the tus of Plato and that’s quite difficult to get through
but the the notion that that the the the
the ideas are impregnated into the the matter the the sort of underlying
substratum the Virgin matter of creation then giving rise to the Sun or the form
how how that plays a role if it does in in the hermatic world view um those are
my two questions thank you very much for your uh talks yeah I think here so Yus I think
this is one of the key references for Yus and I do um I do interpret in my
book yamas as an hermetic practitioner I go I’m very insistent with this he uh he
talks about our hermetic mysteries in his book people have often wanted to keep him out of Egypt because Egypt is
Magic and Superstition and he’s a philosopher so he shouldn’t go there but he actually went there I think he lived
there and he studied there and I have Arguments for this and um uh and uh yeah
so this is where you find this idea that’s that’s that’s the ideas or the
The Good the beautiful and the true the ultimate realities have to be em have to get embodied into into matter uh so you
find it there so yeah and the Tas is a key reference so I totally agree and you know the other question is yeah so this
guy was lelli yes he was a Christian and uh interesting for him so this was the
1480s all right uh um but interesting was that um he was not interested in
Plato he was not interested in other uh you know platonic philosophies Yas or whatever just just the Bible and the
hertica that that was it was it for him that is what interested him and he uh he was reading his understanding of
Christianity back into the hertica or maybe giving an hermatic interpretation of Christian whatever want you he want
to see it and uh yes this was Radical and relatively new in the way that he did
it and I would say also about the tus is that Plato there’s a there’s a Plato can
never make his mind up in the in the fadis right matter is pretty evil and in the tus it’s just limited no matter how
good of a builder you are if the thing you have to build with isn’t very good the house will always be imperfect it’s
just a limitation so in the T it’s it’s a limitation it’s there’s no dualism in in the Tas Yus really wants to go with a
full em ENT of the Soul just completely sunk into the body unlike platinus who
wants to say not completely sunk right and you turn inward and I think that this is this is a tension inside of this
is a tension inside of platonism that we don’t talk about because we talk about neoplatonism as if it’s a thing it’s an
18th century invention that covers over the fact that this tension plays itself out in py and Yus and I think that yamus
falls on the side of the Corpus of medum because the Corpus of medum is precisely what you argue it’s a text about the the
the goodness of the world and precisely as embodiment and I think that’s why he leans hard on the tus and not so hard on
the Fades Eddie leads also hard on the on the on the Symposium because in the
Symposium DEA and I find it relevant that that an female um uh Priestess of
the Mysteries is initiating Socrates there into what it is all about and this
is not philosophy but it is erotica it is erotica it’s erotics and she explains
what it’s all about and what she says it’s about um giving birth in beauty
that is the formulation um so uh it is not about escaping from the world it’s it’s giving
birth to the higher forces to the ideas into the world so she used the language
of uh giving birth uh to explain what the key of of platonic wisdom is all
about and I find is extremely uh significant uh for understanding the hertica we actually have a question from
from somebody in the in the remote audience asking about if some of the if some of the um well-known platonists
could have had um teachers who were versed in hermetic
Traditions when one of the pl sorry of the platonic so for example um do you
believe that someone like Pythagoras had teachers in Egypt that were well versed in the Hermetic tradition or ideas no
that’s too early so Pythagoras is much earlier so the Hermetic writing that’s why I expanded I think the direction the
person is going in is is can there be a real link there well there’s one interesting thing so so Pythagoras is
much earlier than the htic writings so the Hermetic writings are second third Century the question is could the
Hermetic writings come from an older tradition that’s much older than that and I uh I
am cautiously tending towards uh the view that among other people Peter
Kingsley has been promoting uh saying that there is an pagaran the tradition
which ultimately goes back to Parmenides so you can trace a line from Parmenides
that’s really early and Pagan Traditions that gets connected to uh to rtica there
are many questions to be asked about it it is very it is speculative to a certain point it’s very hard to prove
but I think there are reasons to take that hypothesis seriously so that doesn’t mean that her herar is influence
influential on pythagoreanism but it could mean that pythagoreanism and also
primes is one of the background uh ontologies or metaphysical system that go into hertica I tend to see I tend to
see them mostly the the intellectual Machinery coming from middle platonism like numinus is I think the most direct
person that the new the pythagore if you’ve never read numinus really read numinus next to uh the Corpus of medicum
I think that’s the main intellectual power that things are coming from but also what’s really exciting is there’s a new addition out of the conversation of
the House of life that’s a demonic text that is attributed to Toth it was used
as an initiation probably as an initiation text written in Egyptian used in these temples and so we are getting
at least a glimpse now into what was previously basically a black box of what are these Egyptian priests people like
zosimos what are they doing in these temples from a from a lurgical and philosophical point of view in the
Egyptian I language the text is very difficult but I do think that that’s an Avenue of research that I’m super
excited about uh hi I have a question about I’m
here hi uh I I have a question about the technical hermetica because uh we’ve
been mostly talking about the um the philosophical or spiritual hermetica but
um I don’t know that much about technical hermetica other than that they are also attributed to Herm
but I think some of those are actually a little bit older than uh the philosophical her I’m right uh but they
always feel like quite separate things to me and also yeah tonight is an
example because we’ve been mostly talking about philosophical hereda like how closely were they connected and did
the technical Armeda play a part in the Quest for nosis uh for pract
practitioners um for example in classical times or in Renaissance like did it travel a bit of a similar path
uh such as the philosophical Meda I mean I I guess what I would say
is I would I I think I would agree with bter and I would say I just want to challenge the distinction between philosophical spiritual and Technical
hertica and say that that the technical hertica Tech like the corini something like that are some of these alchemical
and astrological texts part of what’s motivating them to be attributed to heris magistus is the idea of the
goodness of the world and by studying the goodness of the world through Alchemy or astrology one enlivens one’s
noose to to Behold The Glory the beauty and through IIA reverence of the world
and therefore I would say that the distinction between the the soteriological hermetica or the
philosophical hereda and the technical hermetica are actually just a Continuum one actually makes the other possible
because at some level if the world is just bad if you’re I don’t know if you’re radical dualist why study this thing it’s just a giant clock driven a
bunch of by evil damn archons like like why would I get out but if it’s like no
it’s this is part of the beauty of the world and I experienced that through reverence and that’s part of the road to
Salvation then this this this distinction just breaks down and I think that that that breakdown is is a very
important thing we need to be begin doing is separating take showing these as as as a hand and a glove and not
technical versus one actually makes the other possible yeah there’s there’s some continuity I would say it’s a spectrum
and uh there is a middle ground where where you it’s harder to say whether it’s technical or spiritual it’s both
and zos is a good example so the the practi the practitioner of alchemy uh
whom I interpret as an as an hermetic practitioner next to yamas and so he was
working in Laboratories all the time that of us is work and I find it hard to to believe and it’s that I think is also
so consistent with what we know of socios it’s hard to believe that somebody who is insistently working with
matter all the time would have a totally anti perspective and he has often been
seen as agnostic against matter stereotypical agnostic against matter
but that doesn’t make sense I think you have to see him also as a spiritual practitioner for whom you’re trying to
uh discover the secrets the mysteries of matter uh which and affected from a
dualistic point of view the whole breakdown between M the the whole distinction between matter and spirit
breaks down and uh you’re just working with one of the same thing um yeah well
you’ve both hit on things that um you know need to be worked on and can definitely uh be delved into further and
so I wanted to ask you both what you would like to explore in the future and what do you think are the kind of the
big questions that still need to be to be investigated
I who goes first I guess what I would say what
excites me is one the discovery and publication of Egyptian literature and looking at how Egyptian literature is
tying into this literature and two more work needs to be done on the technical hereda because I think that getting
there’s so much of that in Arabic and so much of that uh in in syak that we we
tell a story of of uh Egypt Greece Thomas aquinus and I’m like hold on
what what about the you the brethen of Purity and what about and so there’s a story about the transmission of all that
that you know went into bdad and the B hikma and without telling that story uh
we have two legs of a stool and I think that’s uh I don’t want to sit on that stool so the so so these big gaps in
transmission yeah and and also trans gaps in Innovation what do the brethen of Purity do what are they what’s going
on in the natine and agriculture how are they transforming her from being what it is in this text to
now being the prophet Enoch and how is this how is the spirituality and the spiritual technology adapting to new
environments especially in uh in the near East yeah I would say something similar to what you you just said I
think uh one of the major challenges is to change our narratives and not just uh
the narratives about heraa but in order to interpret them in a better new way we have to uh get rid of a whole range of
uh old-fashioned eurocentric uh narratives of progress
that uh say that uh basically everything you know philosophical and good comes
from Greece Etc and uh marginalizes everything that comes from Egypt Etc and
is superstitious and magical Etc these are very deeply ingrained narratives in the standard ways of of uh thinking of
academics in my work on the hermetica I’ve been fighting constantly with with the power of those Nar narratives so
Scholars have kept projecting narratives of Greek superiority on hertica and you
completely get it wrong when you do that uh they have been been projecting uh Christian and biblical narratives on
their hertica the hertica Are pagan there is not a trace of Christianity in it and uh very very little Judaism a
little bit but very very little they’re basically Pagan and uh but nevertheless
Scholars have have projected the entire Genesis Narrative of the fall of Man into matter under hermetica he thought
it was there and it wasn’t there and the for generation for Generations people have kept repeating that narrative so we
have we have to get rid of a lot of these narratives and another one and it links to what you said so you mentioned
the bre of Nar the Breen of Purity and all many of these things in the Islamic world we have to um look at Western
culture uh in a much more inclusive way which which includes the whole transmission of pagan pagan Traditions
uh Judaism Christianity and Islam so we have to get rid of this idea that uh Judaism and Christianity belongs to the
west and Islam doesn’t belong there if you want to act actually understand how these things work you have to see this
in a much broader context and include a whole largely unexplored field of the
transmission of esoteric and hermetic literature in the Islamic world as well so you need to have the languages you
need to have uh have you need to look at at at Arabic and Persian and syak and
all these languages and there’s tons of work to be done there yeah yeah really
really basic stuff to I know a lot of visitors are are are surprised to hear
that um Knowledge from from Egypt had anything to do with the Renaissance well okay God forbid have
some things to tell them then yeah yeah well everyone please join me in
thanking these two
[Applause]
well before I let you go I’d like to make just a couple of quick announcements our next lecture is on the
13th of July and we’ll be talking about hermetica again we have Marat Nasser
here she’s a very interesting lady an Egyptian lady lady who had a a career in
in um London and is now using her substantial wealth to build something called her mopis in central Egypt um
building on and commemorating um this this this culture and these events that happened a millennia ago um so she’ll be
here to present her project to us um and I also want to mention that starting in September we’re going to have an online
lecture series on the thought of Jung Carl Yung and un Burma so keep your eyes
open for that um but please join us now in the cafe uh for a beverage and I think the garden is maybe open as well
so we can chat there thank [Applause]
you

Adventures with Idea Development Technology: Keyboard Shortcuts & Broken Voice Transcription & App

misadventures

warning: here I am using voice transcription which is 80% awesome and 20% broken all to hell and frustrating.

90% failure, major data loss. THIS TECH IS NOT WORKING. bugs l & r.

Jesus: FOUR times here I summarized takeawys, of dos & donts — four times it lost my writeup. impressive failure rate.

keyboard shortcuts work 99% reliably & effectively.

I wish I could trigger a keyboard shortcut expansion through voice transcription because I use a lot of words that voice transcription cannot accurately and reliably transcribe and

so I need voice to be able to trigger a pre-fabricated correctly spelled keyboard, shortcut expansion.

I started using voice transcription on mobile around 2015 and unfortunately it doesn’t really seem like the voice transcription is any more reliable now that it was 10 years ago

Technology, in Erik Davis’ broad sense in book TechGnosis , is how I figured out Satori Zen mental model transformation in just 8 months from April 1987 to Jan 1988, While studying:

blotter loose cognition

& Minkowski 4D spacetime eternalism

& modrl of mental model transformation in loose cognition state.

new attempted notation for defining a keyboard shortcut :

Minkowski 4D spacetime eternalism – 4 d

1987 successful notation:

mental construct processing [MCP]

test of keyboard shortcut 4 d :

Minkowski 4D spacetime eternalism

voice transcription technology is frustratingly close to being awesome, but it is extremely broken, highly buggy and it is insane.

voice x is frustrating because it is insane:

It will transcribe correctly when I say the word Amanita or entheogen or motif — and then it will go back and ruin and destroy and delete and change that word to something completely different for no reason !

I suppose what will work for me given the limitations of the mobile technology is to add messy voice transcription at the bottom of existing posts.

This will avoid sending followers emails because I am pretty reluctant to send people emails, but I need to do a large bulk many thousands of words because for every thousand words I say or type there’s that many more ideas

Proof that going over the same ideas again makes progress in network connections per Paul Thagard’s model of iterative revision of connections between ideas to develop and refine and revise a theory.

The phrase “theory revision” is core to his model of scientific theory, replacement and development and modification.

I am making very good progress in my looping spiral of circling around and around saying the same thing over and over again, but proof :

Proof that spiraling is huge progress

when I was on hiatus in 2008 through most of 2011 in 2010 walking on the forest path mushroom forest path branching path.,

I had the idea of branching as a possible major theme in mythology

then September 2011 I posted about that subject and I had a breakthrough on that topic in November 2011

then in November 2012 I had a breakthrough in that exact identical topic

and then in November 2013 I had a giant breakthrough on that identical topic

then in December Christmas 2015 Thomas had posted a very high resolution picture of the dancing man salamander Bestie image in color :

maybe stand on right foot means eternalism-thinking and stand on left foot means possibilism-thinking?? 🤔💡

four entheogen scholars had misinterpreted that as a am am mushroom.

Dammit voice x got Amanita correct and then voice transcription then went back on corrupted its correct transcription

to a mushroom Mucaria mushroom.

It keeps writing

it keeps writing the word correctly and then going back and ruining and destroying it after it’s correct transcription — insanity!! AMANITA.

I am really reluctant to post 2 posts per day. I really don’t want to because it’s experienced as a lot of noise of low value, but I don’t know …

The problem is that it would produce a lot of large quantity of separate emails, but the problem is that with mobile it’s when editing or producing content on mobile. The app really wants to send a lot of emails a large number of short emails

the problem is that I’m trying to produce content at a massive rate, just tons and tons of content, because for every thousand words I write, it produces a certain number of ideas

the more words I write the more progress, the faster my progress, but the app for editing WordPress cannot handle. It just can’t handle that bulk in the form of long posts.

eternalism

possibilism

presentism

I am pretty sure that the app is malfunctioning and losing paragraphs after it has registered the paragraphs true data corruption true data loss .

p r m

e t m

In my 1987 notation for acronyms handwritten allcaps, that would be written as

PRESENTISM [PRM]

not as my latest in-development notation optimized for mobile device:

possibilism – p s m

Timothy Freke, Soul Story, Video PodBook (May 1, 2025)

Contents:

Video: Part 2: The Evolution of my Ideas about Spirituality (Apr. 18, 2025)
Soul Story: Evolution and The Purpose of Life (Freke, 2017)
Video: WHAT’S WRONG WITH NON-DUAL SPIRITUALITY : PART 1 (Freke, 2022)
- Video: WHAT’S WRONG WITH NON-DUAL SPIRITUALITY : PART 2 (with biscuits) (Freke, 2022)
- Video: Q&A on ‘What’s Wrong with NonDual Spirituality’ (Freke, 2022)
Summarize Points from Timothy Freke interview at YouTube
Deep Awake: Wake Up To Oneness and Celebrate Your Individuality(Tim Freke, 2016)
Timothy Freke Rejects Non-Duality & “Ego/ self is iillusion, Rejects “Minkows
and I believe I can prove that by pasting the transcription here –
In looking for a new direction, he is directionless
Timothy Freke Is Not Helping People Use Psilocybin
🗣️🎙️🤖💦🔫💥🔨🤬
Voice Dictation Cannot Handle the Word ‘Motif’
Highly effective to compare the new direction that Timothy Freke in evolutionary spirituality
Wish to integrate Voice Dictation with Keyboard shortcuts
In What Specific Way Is Recent-Freke a Mixed Bag?
Per the Egodeath theory, Ultimate Truth is, possibilism practical mental model + revealed underlying eternalism
Too Timid Tim – Reflects His Lack of Coherent Two-Leg Model
Incoming
Hermetica as a Path of Initiation (Litwa, 2025)
The Way of Zen by Alan Watts: “Truth Is Unspeakable” –> Freke, Ok <Throws Book into Fireplace>
Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: Freke Is Rejecting the Trite Cliched Ways of Talking About Transcendent Knowledge
Jesus Mysteries book: The #6 Bestselling Book at Amazon in 2000
Website
YouTube videos
Videos
Forthcoming Podbook (audio book)
Books
Rejection of Non-duality that negates individuals
Rejection of “only consciousness exists”
Motivation for this Page
Timothy Freke: Reconcile Individual & Nondual; eternalism & possibilism; altered state & ordinary state
Brand of Religion: Emergent Spirituality
Brendan Graham Dempsey video interview of Timothy Freke, Jan. 23, 2025
Video Transcript of “Live with Tim Freke”
Freke’s Vision of Emerging Mythic Spirituality, Post Scientific Revolution
A New Worldview, A New Form of Spirituality – A Transition Like the Scientific Revolution that Pushed Away Mythic Religion as “Not Up to the Job, We Can Do Far Better” — but Left Us Spiritually Adrift
Spirituality Got Left Lagging Behind Science
A form of spirituality that could not have existed before the Scientific Revolution — so, Post-Scientific Spirituality
We’re in an evolutionaryTM [magic key word alert] process
EvolvedTM into Conversing About the Universe [on cannabis]
Does the Soul Survive? or, Nonsense?
Non-Ego Death
A ProcessTM of EmergenceTM, of BecomingTM, of FormingTM [the Egodeath theory “of transformation” (period)] [not wrong, not helpful]
“TransformTM, EvolveTM, ProcessTM, EmergentTM, FormingTM” — Not Wrong, But Not Helpful
Spirituality is an emergentTM level of the One Process
Push Your Theory to See if It Falls Over or is {stable building}
To Clarify, I’m Talking About Next-Level EmergingTM & EvolvingTM & ProcessTM & FormingTM
Bring Spirituality back in a whole new Way [specifically, the Emergent Evolution Process way]
Resonant Frekeuncy Vibrations
Big Ideas: EvolveTM, EmergentTM, Multiple LevelsTM at the Same Time(!!)
UnfoldsTM, ResonantTM, VisionTM
Sky Meadow Institute, Vermont, to Explore the Emergent Vision: See Spir’y thru Lens of Complexity
Soul, Spirit, Meaning, & Purpose via Systems Thinking
Take It Out of Two-Worlds Mythology[?] and Put It into that one ProcessualTM DynamicTM EvolvingTM World
Integral Theory – Ken Wilber
Don’t Say “Spirit is Outside of the Natural World” – Say “EmergentTM” Instead
“Knife’s edge – = {blade}? & {fire}?
EvolutionaryTM, EmergentTM ProcessTM Moving into the Spiritual
Via ProcessTM of EvolutionTM and ComplexificationTM
Tim Freke’s Novel Contributions to Perennial Cliches: Contributing New Platitudinal Process Cliches, to Evolve and Emerge the Post-Science, Spirituality Lexicon
The After-Death Experience Is Undergoing an EvolutionaryTM ProcessTM
Terms: Soul, Psych
Types of Experience: Sensual & Imaginal
History of Ideas: We Are Body and Soul
De-Theologize ‘Soul’
The EvolvedTM ‘Soul’ or ‘Psyche’ Means the Ability to Make Sense Out of Tim’s Meaningless Utterances
Evolved b/c Biology, w/ Side-Effect the Psyche, that’s it?
Shamanic-Practices Spirituality (ie High Dose Psilocybin); the Esoteric Traditions of 12 Grams of Golden Teacher of Righteousness to Learn How to [finally we getting somewhere] Explore the Spirit Realm of Loose cognitive association to reshape the mental model of control to 4D Spacetime Mysticism while Preserving possibilism-thinking [i may be getting slightly ahead of Tim here]
We Should Seriously Take 12 Grams of Golden Teacher to Be EvolutionaryTM, EvolvedTM; Next-Level, and EmergentTM
Study the EmergentTM Realm, to Understand Lots of Spiritual Phenomena Like the Psyche
… so Let’s Talk About Physical, Bodily, Literal, Biological Death
When the Body Fails, the Psyche Continues, as a ProcessTM
Literal Bodily Physical Death Looks Like the Imaginal Continues More Vividly, Like Sleep & Dream
FINALLY! “Take Psychedelics” (in an EmergentTM, EvolvingTM Way, of Course) “or move your focus to the imaginal”
12 Grams Makes you Move Focus to the Imaginal, in High Definition Spirit Realm; Then You Get Real EmergentTM, and EvolveTM, and Become Leading-EdgeTM
“That 12-Gram Experience Is What I’m Trying to Explore”
Developing an Ontology of the Psyche after Bodily Death, through 12 Grams of Golden Teacher
If We ALL Has 12 Grams of Cubensis, We’d All Have a Experience of the Tremendous
Where Is the ImaginalTM Realm?
Psilocybin Interpretation of {rock} & {tree}
Informational Overlay Tracked Using Our Information Processing Systems & the Cyber Internet (with Language)
Travel with Psilocybin to Create Imaginal Spiritual Space to Construct God
Avoid AlgorithmsTM that Run in the Material World
Images of Freedom to Ride a Flying Horse [Golden Teacher Starting to Kick In]
You Are the Creator of Fantastic Spaces to Hear Command Voices
EvolutionTM = 12 G Psilocybin Imaginal Space Truckin
Proof I’m Right: Internet Conferencing Is Working Right Now, b/c of this EvolutionTM
If My Jargon Impresses You, You Are EvolvingTM
Takes 20-40 Minutes for the EvolvingTM to Kick In – we’re really moving now, I Wish I Could Claim It’s Because of my Jargon
12 Gram Psilocybin is not just spirituality that’s outdated mumbo jumbo, But the Rest is Too Old to Work
Can We Find Golden Teacher, Source of Mythic Imaginal, Again? If so, We’d Be the Absolute Leading EdgeTM; the Spiritual Exploration Awakening
Requires the Philosophy Strain of Psilocybin
“(I’m Presently Out of Psilocybin)”
As Simple as 12 G of Cubensis
Thunderstorm Mushrooms Give Spiritual Experiences that Are EvolvingTM
The mushroom-trees Are Psilocybin, Matters because Causes control instability driving mental model transformation from possibilism to eternalism
Nothing Comes Close to 12 G Cubensis
Study the Egodeath TheoryTM of Psychedelic EternalismTM
Eternal Conscious Life through Wishfulgenetic Fields
Answer = Resonate Vibrations: When I Was a Child, I Thought as a Child
I Hung with Sheldrake when I Was Childish
‘Consciousness’ = ‘Psyche’ Rises EmergentlyTM
The Psyche Can Exist Without the Brain, If You Take My Courses and Buy My Merch
Consciousness = Pay Attention to My Marketing Jargon Overlay Covering the Actual, Psychedelics Engine
Analogy Is the Fastest Way to Communicate Psilocybin’s EmergentTM EvolvingTM Effects
Understanding the Universe on Psilocybin Is Like an AI Learning System, Like the Latest Technology from 1200 to Instruct a Class about Balancing in a Mushroom-Tree to Avoid Loss of Control
Cybernetics Is Information and Communication About Control & 4D Spacetime Mysticism
Mystic Revelation Is Oneness Non-Dual Beginner Unity Experience
Enlightenment = ComplexityTM & Resonant Frequency Quantum Vibrations
Domino-Chain Causality of Pattern Recognition Formation Evolve Emergent Process
In the Revealed, 4D Spacetime Block, All Moments Equivalently Exist
Transcendent Knowledge is like Magic Propagation of Pattern Recognition
4D Spacetime: The Past Exists and Information Sits Distributed: the past hasn’t passed; no meta-change and meta-flow
Mental Patterns in 4D Spacetime Are Algorithms that Cybernetically Govern; the 4D Spacetime Heimarmene Block Governs All Creatures and Control-Thoughts
Psilocybin Transformation is EvolutionaryTM
WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE? WHAT DOES PHYSICS’ “TIME AS A DIMENSION” SAY ABOUT THAT? “Process”, “Evolution”, “Emergent” — Domino-Chain Causality Verbs Frozen in 4D Spacetime Block with No Meta-Change
Domino Chain Causality, Ego Steering Through Branching Possibilities Forward in Time to Create the Open Future
Throw More “Change” Verbs at the Frozen 4D Spacetime Block, to Shatter It and Be Born Forth from the Cosmic Rock: Chant “Action!” “Evolve!” “Emerge!” – Use of terms to imply Open Future
Egoic Branching-Based Domino Chain Causality Suspended Halfway Between Egoic and Transcendent Thinking
I Am My Past, and I Control and Create My Open Future by Ego Steering Power
I Had Past Thoughts, and I Am Creator/ Emerger/ Evolver/ Process-Driver of My Future Thoughts
I Am My Past (I Am Not My Future, Because That Hasn’t Been Created and Steered into Existence Yet by Me Selecting from Branching Possibilities Open to Me)
Do Not Look at the Source of Control Thoughts; Look Down at Your Biological Level Only
I Am the Control System
The Postivity[sp?] Is Two Levels: Biology Information, and Imaginal
Spiritual Survival of the Soul and Psyche Spirit Consciousness = Imagination Continues to Exist After the Physical, Literal Body Dies
After Your Physical Body Dies, Your Imaginal Process Continues, because You Evolved Emergent Spirituality
Super Vivid NDE Imaginal b/c Emergent Evolve
The psyche can exist on its own but not in another physical matrix; on Two Different EmergentTM LevelsTM
Yes and No and Maybe and I Didn’t Assert That, Next Question, Time’s Up
Ladder Model
Integral Theory – Ken Wilber
Tim Freke Seeing What Ken Wilber Is Up To
Psyche Independent from Brain: How Related?
The Body & Brain, Biological Processing/ Managment
The Psyche Emerged from Body: Ideational Level; the ideational network
The Telepathy Tapes Podcast about Autism Kids
My Lucid Living Book Is Great But Wrong
Perennial Philosophy is Wrong? Experiencing “It” in 1 Hour, per Huxley
My Books Were Perennial and Good — But Wrong
[the Egodeath theory lately is a bit like that: Marketing It too much as a 1-dimensional over-Focus on Eternalism/ no-free-will, Only; Short-Changes the Balanced Component of Retaining Isaac, Everyday Egoic Thinking/ Shape of Experience incl. during peak mystic window: embrace and include – hard but i have to work hard to RE-ARTICULATE the Egodeath theory & its “Benefits”; What Diff?]
“I articulated it so well for myself that I could finally see what was wrong with it”
Against the Dogma Cliche that “Transcendent Knowledge is beyond words” [never held by the Egodeath theory]
Freke STILL Sounds Like Usual “Unity Oneness Nondual Experience” Tripe of Beginner Level
Experiencing Oneness[TM]
I Can Tune into Dead People [= “evolve”?]
EmergingTM, EvolvingTM, Levels of EmergenceTM
[ empty, meaningless, Marketing jargon, like possibilismTM, eternalismTM, the Egodeath theoryTM]
Fake Math Affectation, like 4D Spacetime Mysticism Sold as psychedelic eternalism — whatever that means <– probably same thing as Quantum Mysticism (didn’t Parmenides fabricate that myth?)
Sacred Geometry
Emergent 4D Spacetime
FormlessTM
OneTM, in RelationshipTM as Two(TM??)
The Universe EmergesTM from OneTM – Too Complex for You to Understand, Words Cannot Express It [joke]
Freke Continues Making ‘Oneness Unity Nonduality’ the Reference for Religious Experience
Oneness Makes My Thoughts [= controls my personal control system? could we be actually getting somewhere relevant, here? or is this just an accident like infinite monkeys typing?]
OnenessTM of BeingTM (But there’s no quality to it) [i agree: a low-quality utterance, Tim]
The IsnessTM of Things: An Isness Which Everything Shares, and “It” is developed from “that” [??? What Is It?, asks Watts, & me]
Meditation [not Psychedelics]
Ken Wilber Yada Vibes: Big Framework, No Engine [-cm]
Giveaway Word “Connection” Reveals That this is the “Unity” Paradigm [like Ken Wilber = the “Advaita Meditation Huckster” Paradigm, at Core]
The Ego Tunnel; Philosophy and the Mind Sciences Journal (Thomas Metzinger)
Non-Branching, Snake-Shaped Worldline Frozen in 4D Spacetime Block Mysticism [FDML]
LevelsTM, Man [compare: in psychedelic eternalismTM, you end up {rider on donkey on path}; surface level of experience = possibilism-thinking; underlying real level = eternalism-reality; end up w/ qualified possibilism-thinking above eternalism actuality]
The Mythic Thing Has Been Around a Long Time – u dont say?
The OneTM Became the Two
rupert sheldrake morphic Fields
I have E. S. P. of the Universe, So Have a Spirituality that’s Grounded in This Reality
There Is Many Onenesses
The Soul Is Part of the OneTM ProcessTM BecomingTM [not wrong, but not very helpful]
It’s Origined from It, So, Process <-
Freke Lexicon: The Psyche Senses, Tune In
We Talk Philosophy on Sundays, to EvolveTM and EmergeTM, to E.S.P.-Sense Each Other & Our Established Collective Group (and call that “the divine super-soul”)
Sense the planetary awareness
We Converse in the Psyche — and Physical & Biological TOO!
When We Talk Together, God-Oneness Is All Levels Interacting
Freke Book The Laughing Jesus
I Only Talk to Our Sunday ICU Collective
Experiential Retreat at SkyMeadow
Do Philosophy in the Experiential Realm
Sky Meadow, various thinkers communities
TheAvenues – Community?
VAGUE, “love is the point of Philosophy” – Love of Transcendent Knowledge, I should hope [cm]
Is “Emergence” a Magic Token Word in Place of Comprehension?
Key Dogma/ Jargon: “Evolution” (magic word)
“Cycle of Rebirth”
Main Theme: Do Not Lose the Individual (or devmt of the indiv.) During Egodeath Enlightenment
Tim’s Podbook
ICU Sunday Meetings
Tim Freke Video Podbook on YouTube, His Latest 8 Years’ Work/ Idea Development
“I did this whole thing, but now actually I think that’s all wrong”; learning and updating
Latest Update Patch to Tim Freke’s OS
See Also

Video: Part 2: The Evolution of my Ideas about Spirituality (Apr. 18, 2025)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bP2Lo30NAI&t=629s–

Video title:
Part 2: The Evolution of my Ideas about Spirituality
Tim Freke, Apr. 18, 2025

“In a follow up to our previous conversation, Richard Cox and I discuss the development of my ideas about spirituality:

from accepting the fundamental tenets of the perennial philosophy,
to embracing the philosophy of unividualism.

[i disagree with more aspects of what’s foisted as common-core mysticism and perennialism than Freke – it’s a beginners’ overemphasis on nondual unity oneness, fails to engage control model transformation & pass through the relevant gate. – Michael Hoffman]

“Follow Richard’s work at https://www.deepstateconsciousness.com/

‘Why Your Life Really Matters: The Podbook‘ is coming on 1 May. 2025

“Subscribe to be notified of new chapters weekly.

“Access all chapters I have recorded before they are released and connect with me in person at weekly online meet-ups by joining my online community: https://timfreke.com/online-community/

“Find out about my experiential online and in-person events: https://timfreke.com

“Sign up to my newsletter to hear about everything I am up to: https://timfreke.com

“I am the author of 35 books, translated into 15 languages, including a Sunday Times bestseller and Daily Telegraph ‘Book of the Year’.

[Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy’s book The Jesus Mysteries, 1999, https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Mysteries-Was-Original-Pagan/dp/0609807986/%5D

“For some inexplicable reason I was included in ‘The 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People’ lists in Watkins Magazine for 2021 and 2022.”

My Comment on the Video

In 1988, I discovered a 2nd way of thinking (4D spacetime block universe eternalism), instead of the common, first way of thinking.

For decades, I emphasized switching to that 2nd way of thinking.

But in 2000 (Jesus Mysteries book era), Coraxo in the Gnosticism Yahoo Group pointed out that my glorified 2nd way of thinking is what Gnosticism framed as a prison to escape!

So then in 2001, I read David Ulansey’s book explaining Mithraism as a way of rising above my glorified, exclusive 2nd way of thinking.

The Late Antiquity 3-part model (body, soul, spirit) disparaged my 2nd way of thinking as merely soul, merely half-transcendent.

And in 2024, I realized that my model, pushing exclusively 4D Spacetime Mysticism, simply would not fly if presented to my psych spirituality group, and is not entirely relevant to the mystical peak state nor daily life.

I recently struggled to stop disrespecting the first way of thinking and reframe both ways of thinking in an integrated way.

Now I’m following behind Tim Freke and Jessica Nathanson in a “both-and”, embracing approach, which conforms to Ken Wilber: “dis-identify, embrace, and include” the earlier developmental structures.

Isaac was sacrificed in a way (“because you have done this thing”), and preserved in a way, and because of that, Abraham and Isaac walked away blessed by the Transcendent and thriving into the future.

Looking forward to the Podbook.

/ end of Comment on video

Soul Story: Evolution and The Purpose of Life (Freke, 2017)

https://www.amazon.com/Soul-Story-Evolution-Purpose-Life/dp/1780289847/

Soul Story: Evolution and The Purpose of Life
Tim Freke, 2017

Blurb:

THE EMERGENCE OF SOUL, MEANING AND IMMORTALITY

“The grand religious stories that gave meaning to life and death in the past have crumbled under sceptical scrutiny.

“The dominant mainstream philosophy is now scientific objectivism, [“naturalism”; “materialism”] which describes a universe that exists for no reason and a life that ends in oblivion.

“Pioneering philosopher Tim Freke addresses the “soul crisis” in modern culture that has arisen from lack of meaning.

“He offers an intelligent “spiritual” perspective on life and death to help us make sense of a paradoxical world, which is sometimes bleak and banal, but also can be magical and full of significance.

“He presents a revolutionary paradigm shift in our understanding of reality that integrates the deepest insights of science and spirituality to create a new model of human identity, which makes the idea of the immortal soul intellectually credible.

“He explores the process of evolution, not as blind chance, but as the momentous story of the self-realising universe.

“The development of the material world has led to the emergence of “psyche” or “soul,” which you are experiencing right now as a stream of thoughts and images that don’t exist in space and aren’t made of matter.

“We are not insignificant specks in a vast purposeless cosmos.

“We are significant participants in the magnificent and meaningful story of soul.

“The universe is coming to know itself through each one of us and this process doesn’t end at death, because the evolution of soul has also been the evolution of immortality.”

Video: WHAT’S WRONG WITH NON-DUAL SPIRITUALITY : PART 1 (Freke, 2022)

Video title:
WHAT’S WRONG WITH NON-DUAL SPIRITUALITY : PART 1
YouTube channel: Tim Freke, May 6, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8Tx4OgEStw —

Video: WHAT’S WRONG WITH NON-DUAL SPIRITUALITY : PART 2 (with biscuits) (Freke, 2022)

Video title:
WHAT’S WRONG WITH NON-DUAL SPIRITUALITY : PART 2 (with biscuits)
Tim Freke, May 12, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPitdJOlo3A —

Video: Q&A on ‘What’s Wrong with NonDual Spirituality’ (Freke, 2022)

Video title:
Q&A on ‘What’s Wrong with NonDual Spirituality’
YouTube channel: Tim Freke, May 26, 2022
“A vibrant discussion about our 2 films exploring ‘What’s Wrong with NonDual Spirituality?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XQLCpU-TBY —

“This discussion is one of the weekly online meet ups with my online community. If you enjoyed it, consider joining us to take part in regular discussions like this!”

“Jessica Nathanson is dedicated to spreading awareness about the pitfalls of radically imbalanced non-dual teachings and exploring how to engage with non-dual spirituality in a way that honours rather than denigrates the individual self and inspires human flourishing towards the highest good for all.”

“She is trained as a spiritual emergency coach.”

https://www.thegloriousbothand.com

👁 JOIN TIM’S ONLINE COMMUNITY to take part in regular discussion
https://timfreke.com/ICU/

Summarize Points from Timothy Freke interview at YouTube

Check transcript at bottom of page

He rejected pop nonduality self is illusion, freewill is illusion, rejected Ramesh Balsekar & he specifically criticized in a different video specifically by name, Herman “Minkowski 4D space time ” – but that interview is really focused on survival of the soul, not those other crirtiques of pop spiritual tropes like

His critique of “nonduality”.
His critique of 4D Spacetime Mysticism (Minkowski) & Ramesh Balsekar (“enlightenment = Advaita meditation & no-free-will”) — I quickly heard him say those words in other videos. Freke has heard everything, and probably worked with everyone.
His critique of “ego is bad, get rid of it”.
“reason cannot grasp or describe the spiritual”.
The other dominant cliches.

Deep Awake: Wake Up To Oneness and Celebrate Your Individuality
(Tim Freke, 2016)

Deep Awake: Wake Up To Oneness and Celebrate Your Individuality
Tim Freke, 2016
https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Awake-Oneness-Celebrate-Individuality/dp/1780289863/ —

Blurb:

“Frustrated with outdated forms of spirituality that urge us to reject the ego, the bestselling author of The Jesus Mysteries invites us to embrace our personal selves as a doorway to spiritual awakening

“Is the author of more than 20 books on the world’s spiritual traditions, Tim Freke is in a unique position to present a revolutionary new approach to spiritual awakening.

With astonishing clarity and directness, he explains why popular spiritual teachings that urge us to reject the mind, attack the ego, and detach from the vicissitudes of life are misguided.

Using the powerful tool of ‘paralogical thinking’, he reveals that everyone has both a ‘deep I’ and a ‘personal self’.

The ‘deep I’ is our spiritual essence, which is one with everyone and everything.

We experience the ‘deep I’ as a feeling of limitless love.

The personal self by contrast is our tender humanity; it feels pleasure and pain, hope and heartache, love and loss.

The personal self feels separate* from the world.”

[note “unity” is still the master point of reference idea/ conceptualization]

“Tim’s powerful paralogical insights reveal that the personal self is not an obstacle to our spiritual essence which must be overcome but rather a doorway to the ‘deep I’.

“Indeed, it is only through the personal self that we can find and then embody the ‘deep I’ in our lives. The ego is not the villain but rather the hero of the spiritual journey.”

[The ego as steering agent is snok smoked when block-universe eternalism is reveealed – ego is smoked as virtual-only, ghost, but remains and is used constantly]

When we are deep awake, we wake up to oneness and celebrate separateness.

“We embrace both our spirituality and our humanity.

“Authentic spirituality is not about detaching ourselves from life, but about wholeheartedly diving in so that we can express our deep love and our unique human passion in the world.”

/ end blurb for Deep Awake

Timothy Freke Rejects Non-Duality & “Ego/ self is iillusion, Rejects “Minkows

ha. Another interruption, the theme of the morning is interruption to define keyboard shortcut. I need a keyboard shortcut for Herman Manowski 4D4 dimensional space time.

Minkowski 4D Spacetime – 4 d

announcement I am working on different ways of representing a shortcut that I am currently defining. I have to type in a way that works on mobile device my notation in the binder sheets, April 1987 is no good for this mobile editing format.

1987 notation:

mental construct processing [MCP]

Sometimes it gets the word right 90% of the time it does but occasionally voice transcription will successfully transcribe the rare special word for Dr secret entheogen

1/10 times, voice transcription correctly handles the word motif. proving that it can do it right this frustrating voice transcription. I know you can handle the word MOTIF because you do that correctly one out of 10 times what’s the problem?

It’s frustrating it would be so nice if it would work, but then in the one out of 10 times that it works and it transcribes the word MOTIF then two seconds later, it goes back in it ruins and corrupt and changes the word to some other word

Proposal: Timothy Freke says NOTHING in the first 20 minutes of https://youtu.be/4RRRvmxjhYc —

and I believe I can prove that by pasting the transcription here –

In looking for a new direction, he is directionless

Timothy Freke Is Not Helping People Use Psilocybin

Given: We only have religious experience r-e rx

keyboard shortcut rx

Dr Cybermonk prescription R X i prescribe the medicine poison remedy for ills ails you vexes and causess turmoil: u need religious experience

my huge motivation in researching loose cognition in 1985 was to repair my thinking

My life was charmed but vexed by one root problem: dysfunctional personal control system

I has to fix this problem of dsc dctsc

dysfunctional cross-time self-control

dctsc – dysfunctional cross-time self-control

where did my important breakthrough theory of transcendent knowledge come from my theory of psychedelics effects transforming transformative psychedelic effect my theory that the most important thing in religion is psychedelics and

my theory that the main effect of psychedelics is mental model transformation

The most important thing in the world is psychedelics.

Religious revelation is through none other than psychedelics

My theory that the only brand of religion worth developing and theorizing about is psychedelics.

🗣️🎙️🤖💦🔫💥🔨🤬

Timothy freak has the concept of ENTHEOGEN.

Voice Dictation Cannot Handle the Word ‘Motif’

The study of art interpretation motif

Highly effective to compare the new direction that Timothy Freke in evolutionary spirituality

Timothy Freke says eastern religion is irrationalism.

Now Freke says to avoid the irrational, and stop criticizing Reason and the individual, because Eastern religion says to be enlightened, you must get rid of your individual self, and you must stop using rationality.

Per pop spirituality cliches, you must say that “everything is an illusion”, and pretend like you said something meaningful, even though it is in fact, meaningless to say “Item X is an illusion”.

You’ve explained nothing; it is intellectually lazy to make these crude binary statements.

Act as if you said something profound, you said nothing when you said “the self is an illusion.”

it is taken Timothy Freke 30 years to realize the overselling of “nondual”, “self is illusion.”

To say the self is an illusion is meaningless nonsense that is of no help to anybody.

“Not wrong, but not helpful/ useful/ relevant/ simple/ clear.”

It is profitable to contrast recent development in the thinking of Timothy Freke versus my own recent development refining, my marketing framing of all that I have figured out about psychedelics mental model transformation, mythology, and medieval art motifs.

Wish to integrate Voice Dictation with Keyboard shortcuts

How did I make biggest breakthrough January 1988 figuring out

Integrate voice dictation with keyboard shortcuts containing my specialized, purpose built, custom lexicon for my theory development.

d c t s =

decoded by Cybermonk [4:42 p.m. February 12, 2023]

have been needing that recently, but what I do instead is simply enter the time date manually,

but instead of having to type the entire date, the keyboard shortcut is faster because expands the most recently defined date and then simply modify that by hand.

stable control – s c

self-control climax – s c c

stable control – s c

s c c = self-control climax

s c : stable control

Timothy Freke’s evolutionary spirituality brand of religion: what is its point, mission, strategy, goal?

Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory brand of religion: what is its point, mission, strategy, goal?

Michael Hoffman’s psychedelic eternalism brand of religion: what is its point, mission, strategy, goal?

Premise: The Mind has an innate desire to mature via Psilocybin; to mature in a sense that is defined by Psilocybin

The strongest sense of having a having a religious experience is via psychedelics.

Where should we look to find a standard of what constitutes religious revelation?

the answer is self evident through experience that

we experience the strongest possible sense of having a transformative religious experiencing is through psilocybin and modern equivalent blotter

Jan Irvin claims that those merely have a suggestion effect

But there he is specifically focused on social engineering imposing when one group of people imposes on another group of people psychedelics.

That social dynamic is called not entheogen but suggestogen; Irvin is claiming that the principal cognitive effect of psychedelics is suggestibility rather than entheogenic.

What kind of maturing does Psilocybin cause? branching to non branching.

In What Specific Way Is Recent-Freke a Mixed Bag?

This is the hard work of scholarship and competitive competent theory-construction — Freke is saying many great things, and is saying some wimpy, inadequate things, and failing to assert as good and definite a model of Transcendent Knowledge as the Egodeath theory (which leverages the Mytheme theory).

He’s just discovered that it’s possible to take a critical view against how Transcendent Knowledge is described – gee whiz!

I figured that out a zillion years ago – 9 months in.

Day 1: Oct 26, 1985
June 1986: “Transcendent Knowledge is described ineptly. I must figure out what ego transcendence is REALLY about, and then, do a way better, STEM-based expression of Transcendent Knowledge.”
1998: “And explain religious mythology to corrob & clarify the core theory of 1988/1997.”
2015: “Including art motifs such as stand on right foot.”
2020: Confirmed massively; motifs — like religious mythology — are depictions of Psilocybin transformation.

Per the Egodeath theory, Ultimate Truth is, possibilism practical mental model + revealed underlying eternalism

He labels this as fundamentalism (in the course of him correcting and backing away from his previous stance).

I double down. THis is the clear, simple, specificcal, two-leg mode; the mind ends up with this combination of compatibilitsm.

Timothy Freke is thorwing in a bunch of onise noise – he is too much doing REACTIONISM; he is rebutting bad ideas, including ones he held. I am not doing just reaction against poor expressions; I was driven by a need to clearly understand Transcendent Knowledge and model it and assert that model.

I half agree with many of his latest statements. He can lable “authoritarnian”, “ultimate truth” — I frame instead as, A SCIENTIFIC MODEL OF Transcendent Knowledge MUST SPEAK DEFINITELY, TO BE USEFUL. Timid Tim

Too Timid Tim – Reflects His Lack of Coherent Two-Leg Model

He’s working it out, a lot of sparks & smoke and self-countersignaling. His tone of voice gives it away, sounds like me chastising me in Oct 1985-March 1987, in my phase one initial approach.

April 1987 I gained a sure-footed sense – this is The Teacher of Righteousness. This is the specific meaning of the body of religious mythology.

Timothy Freke is backing away from any useful assertion. recent Tf is not sure-footed, not helpful.

AND HIS JUST DENIED THAT the EARTH IS THE CENTER OF EVERYTHING, contradicting astral ascent mysticism that I figured out.

Who in antquity Classical Antiquity created the cosmos model of 7 planets + the sphere of the fixed stars?

I’m not interested here in heliocentric, or precession of equinoxes. More basic model for astral ascent mysticism: formed when?

I am trying to ease back my assertions, in order to more vigorously assert a specific pair of Compatibilism of possibilism-thinking & eternalism-thinking.

Timothy Freke is easing back his assertions, b/c he fails to put forth a coherent, helpful system, to model Psilocybin transformation.

His modifications are good to hear, but, I hear him too much backing away from clarity and specificity that is useful and relevant.

Timothy Freke is becoming DIRECTIONLESS. So reasonable, he’s directionless. I go the distance.

Freke’s qualifying of his previous statements, is valuable, but the end result is NOT going to be a breakthrough explanatory framework to form a useful new technology of Transcendent Knowledge like the Egodeath theory.

DIRECTIONLESS. Not very useful/ helpful/ relevant/ simple/ clear, like the Egodeath theory.

Incoming

“I don’t know what ‘Ultimate Truth’ means, any more.” — Timothy Freke – “truth means something you can trust.”

Psilocybin is the test of trust, of integrity and merit.

If your mental model is viable and coherent, in the Psilocybin loose cognition state, then your mental model is “true”.

“Forget absolute truth.”

I DISAGREE; SO, I AM MORE USEFUL AND HELPFUL THAN FREKE.

We experience as freewill personal control agents, and, the underlying reality is eternalism. I don’t waffle there.

Freke is repositioning himself to distance himself from pop utterances about spirituality.

I definitely assert:

We experience as freewill personal control agents
The underlying reality is eternalism.
We can sort of – in a specific way — transcend eternalism.

If Freke can’t say specific assertions like that, he loses & I win. Timothy Freke fails to delete deliver THE SYSTEM; I deliver THE SYSTEM / the gnosis. He’s not up for the challenge of assertion; I am.

“Before the No Self tradition (it’s a reaction) was “each one of us is a spark of God, that is your self”.

Freke, like me, is critiquing WAYS OF WRITING. Need more inclusive ways of writing and affirms the individual, the ego system, the self, time – they DO exist.

The hard, non-lazy work is to avoid dumb inarticulate biinaryies, “does time exist, or not? does ego exist, or not? Yes or No?” as i say, “IN WHAT WAY” is X true or real? or illusory. BE SPECIFIC. Not lazy & inarticulate.

“These two aspects, contrasted or pitted against each other.” Both make sense, but in a new way.

Learn to integrate the self; bring the POVs into integration.

How is possibilism-thinking to be honored?

How is eternalism-thinking to be honored?

How do these two mental models work together as a whole that’s effective and enlightened?

Against such negation-eager, cliched way of writing.

Hermetica as a Path of Initiation (Litwa, 2025)

Hermetica I: The Corpus Hermeticum, Asclepius, and Nag Hammadi Hermetica Ordered as a Path of Initiation
M. David Litwa, January 2, 2025
https://www.amazon.com/Hermetica-Hermeticum-Asclepius-Hammadi-Initiation/dp/B0DS2CZKC3/ — He removed the junk random noise inserted by later writers, and arranged in order of initiation stages:

“The Hermetic corpus is a spiritual and intellectual treasure stemming from ancient Egyptian sages who could write and think in Greek.

“Since the Renaissance, this corpus has appeared in an order that does not fit the path of spiritual initiation suggested by the corpus itself.

“The present edition reorders the corpus—including the Latin Asclepius and the Nag Hammadi Hermetica—into four progressing parts: introductory tractates, general discourses, detailed discourses, and revelatory discourses.

“A short spiritual commentary follows each tractate.

“The book is written for all lovers of the Hermetica, but in particular for those who are willing, in some sense, to join the way of immortality.”

The Way of Zen by Alan Watts: “Truth Is Unspeakable” –> Freke, Ok <Throws Book into Fireplace>

Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: Freke Is Rejecting the Trite Cliched Ways of Talking About Transcendent Knowledge

x https://www.amazon.com/Ways-Thinking-Eastern-Peoples-Translation/dp/0824800788/ —

Jesus Mysteries book: The #6 Bestselling Book at Amazon in 2000

The Jesus Mysteries (Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy, 2000) https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Mysteries-Was-Original-Pagan/dp/060960581X/
tf01

https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Mysteries-Was-Original-Pagan/dp/060960581X/ —

https://read.amazon.com/kp/card?preview=inline&linkCode=kpd&ref_=k4w_oembed_aoHtNaF1qPhkKu&asin=060960581X&tag=kpembed-20 —

UK, April 2000:Jesus Mysteries

https://read.amazon.co.uk/kp/card?preview=inline&linkCode=kpd&ref_=k4w_oembed_766QEeJIUjksQJ&asin=0722536771&tag=kpembed-20

Website

https://timfreke.com

YouTube videos

http://www.youtube.com/@TimFreke1

Videos

https://www.youtube.com/@TimFreke1/videos

Forthcoming Podbook (audio book)

Search web:
https://www.google.com/search?q=timothy+freke

Books

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001HD0518/allbooks

Rejection of Non-duality that negates individuals

see video titles

Rejection of “only consciousness exists”

see video titles

Motivation for this Page

Freke’s adjustments late in theorizing are like mine.

He uses so much of the same conceptual vocabulary, need to focus on what the differences are – but we both have moving trajectories in core theory and in expression/ description of core theory.

Freke & the Egodeath theory both are rejecting tired old language of talking about mysticism.

I affirm a kind of compatibilism. Described well in emails in idea development p. 26.

Timothy Freke: Reconcile Individual & Nondual; eternalism & possibilism; altered state & ordinary state

Per Ken Wilber – “embrace and include” both views.

“not all nonduality is anti-individual; my approach was always a both/and approach”.

“the absolute and the relative” POVs

Brand of Religion: Emergent Spirituality

Brendan Graham Dempsey video interview of Timothy Freke, Jan. 23, 2025

Video title: “Live with Tim Freke“
YouTube channel: Brendan Graham Dempsey
Jan .23, 2025
METAMODERN MEANING PODCAST
“On Saturday, January 18, Sky Meadow Institute hosted a virtual meet-up and open Q&A with Tim Freke, author of Soul Story and a leading thinker in the emergent spirituality space.”

Search web for “emergent spirituality”:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22emergent+spirituality%22
https://emergentstudiesinstitute.org/academics/academic-departments/emergent-spirituality/
https://emergentstudiesinstitute.org

For more upcoming events, check out http://skymeadowinstitute.org

METAMODERN MEANING PODCAST
91 episodes
YouTube Channel: Brendan Graham Dempsey
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa_4sU5_wQrlw5b9oc1tDaziHyEqXUnl7

https://youtu.be/4RRRvmxjhYc?si=TZwY-1ING8yt0fbM —

Video Transcript of “Live with Tim Freke”

update April 15, 2025:

I wonder if I should have posted the transcripts of other videos instead.

I have now learned how to clean up the YouTube transcripts.

I am not interested in discussing survival of the soul after bodily death, which seems to be the topic of Soul Story.

I’m interested in critiques of pop spirituality cliches.

— Michael Hoffman

Host:

“well hi everyone uh I’m glad everyone could make it and uh this is a veryspecial uh kind of first of its kind event um and uh comes from someconversations that uh I was having with Tim um which I’ll explain a bit more in a second but first before I say anything thank you so much Tim for uh sharing your your time with us and uh and beingopen to yeah uh open this up for you know sort of a broader Community discussion and engagement

um yeah I

I found Tim’s book

well this actually this was the the result of finding some of Tim’s uh videos um online which um Igot really interested in really intrigued by

and Tim has been talking to some very um you know familiar faces inthe broader kind of community of folks in evolutionary spirituality

um and uhso he and I did a podcast and um and then

eventually that led me to find his soul story book which um is just it’s an excellent excellent read

and I I wanted to kind of have an occasion to kind of you know amplify it and uh and and kind of shine some light on that and put it on people’s radar because I feel like it’s really just such a wonderful primer in in a really concise accessible way for some of the most important ideas you know um arguably of our current moment

and so um yeah this led to just a number of ideas around trying to uh engage more maybe

try to get Tim out to Sky Meadow Etc

and so so um this is sort of a move in the direction of

trying to engage more with each other and uh and have some more conversations and in this case um openit up to broader Community engagement

this is the first kind of event um I’ve ever done where sort of a live event andwe’ll have sort of a live Q&A and just kind of uh again open up the conversation

I’m used to more podcast conversations where they’re you know recorded and it’s it’s just a dialogue or maybe a trialogue

but um for the mostpart it doesn’t really get uh more voices in

so U yeah this kind of experiment in that and uh and I’m looking forward to seeing what what people um have to bring into this

and uh and maybe some questions that we can post to Tim and what not

so anyway um that’s kind of my little setup thanks again Tim and uh yeah I’d love to jumpinto some conversation with you about this and then um after that kind of open things up for for other people’s input

how does that sound

sounds good to me lovely

so um allright well let’s start uh and again we’ll just talk for I don’t know uh 10 minutes or so

and then people can can can join the conversation

um but

let’s start with uh your work and what you’ve been up to again

this book Soul story now is probably uh it’s not old but it’s been out there for a few years and maybe one place to start with it is just for people who haven’t read it or only minimally aware of it

like can you can you

Freke’s Vision of Emerging Mythic Spirituality, Post Scientific Revolution

give a sense of the vision that you’re that you’re working with

the sense of emerging spirituality

kind of this big new story that you’re doing

your own wonderful work to help kind of uh bring to the you know uh broaderuh public awareness

yeah uh so

I’m intrigued as to what the next big jump in our understanding

of what this crazy thing is we’re experiencing and what it means

and

why does it matter if it does

and

I’m convinced there will be a new one because there always has been before

the question is what will it be

and

when will it come

and my own hunch with it is that

A New Worldview, A New Form of Spirituality – A Transition Like the Scientific Revolution that Pushed Away Mythic Religion as “Not Up to the Job, We Can Do Far Better” — but Left Us Spiritually Adrift

that new worldview will actually be a new form of spirituality

because the last big transition was the Scientific Revolution

and

part of that was to push away Mythic religion and just go okay this is not up to the job and we can do far better and we have

and that’s enabled us to be here connecting on the internet which is pretty damn amazing really

and uh butit’s also left us kind of adrift

Spirituality Got Left Lagging Behind Science

spirituality hasn’t been able to keep up

and what

what I think is coming

and and and I’m sure everyone here may may already be part of this is

A form of spirituality that could not have existed before the Scientific Revolution — so, Post-Scientific Spirituality

a form of spirituality that could not have existed before the Scientific Revolution — so, post-scientific spirituality

and that’s both about the level of inquiry and uh doubt and questioning which has come since then

the the level of our individual reflection

but also I think there’s some key ideas and the one that is absolutely Central I think is the idea that

we live in a process that

we’re in that

we now know

We’re in an evolutionaryTM [magic key word alert] process

we’re in an evolutionary process

which is an extraordinary idea and

everything seems so far to be pointing towards it being true

so we now know we’re in this you know

Evolved^TM into Conversing About the Universe 🤯 [on cannabis]

13.8 billion years have got us from hydrogen to you and me having a conversation about the universe

which is the thing that always blows my mind

and so the question for me then as someone who has

spent his life exploring experientially and teaching around spirituality

it’s written on I don’t know 35 books on all of the different spiritual Traditions

the question for me is well

how does spirituality fit into that [into evolution]

and specifically the big questions that that like

Does the Soul Survive? or, Nonsense?

The survival of the soul, which is absolutely Central to most forms of spirituality

is that something we now just abandon that’s like

oh well

We used to believe all that nonsense, but that we’ve gone beyond that.

My own experience has pointed in the opposite direction.

Non-Ego Death

I’ve been around death a lot

I worked with the dying and uh I was a a very early in near-death experiences when I was very young and so

that’s just one example but it it’s like

where does that fit in

A Process^TM of Emergence^TM, of Becoming^TM, of Forming^TM [the Egodeath theory “of transformation” (period)] [not wrong, not helpful]

and so the idea in essence Brendan I think that’s motivated Soul Story was

can I make sense of a worldview which goes what this is is a process of emergence, it’s a process of becoming or forming

[experiencing Psilocybin transformation from possibilism to eternalism, then transcendent freewill]

“Transform^TM, Evolve^TM, Process^TM, Emergent^TM, Forming^TM” — Not Wrong, But Not Helpful

and everything

everything that has any form whatsoever is part of one natural process

can I make sense of that because it’s so beautiful and elegant nothing outside nothing before nothing just the one process of realization of forming something formless in the process of forming and

can we make sense of that

can we make sense of the scientific knowledge from that perspective

which I think we can

and then

can we

see spirituality as an emergent level

or or can we

Spirituality is an emergent^TM level of the One Process

see what spirituality is concerned with as an emergent level of this one process

and I think we can and and that means that we can

integrate spiritual experience on its own terms

but by

seeing it in this new evolutionary way with our vast knowledge now in physicsand and bi ology

so that’s I think was the motivation to do it was to was to just

Push Your Theory to See if It Falls Over or is {stable building}

start in that book [Soul Story] to to lay out a almost like a program a vision of see what about if we see it like this and then

for the last eight years I’ve been pushing it and pushing it and pushing it to see It’ll fall over and it’s just got stronger and

stronger and stronger so that

To Clarify, I’m Talking About Next-Level Emerging^TM & Evolving^TM & Process^TM & Forming^TM

now I’m ready to take it to the next level and share

what the last eight years have been of intensely going

right let’s really dig into this and and and bring this out and because if we can it

Bring Spirituality back in a whole new Way [specifically, the Emergent Evolution Process way]

it brings spirituality back in a whole new way

yeah awesome well there’s so much that um resonates with that I mean deeply

Resonant Frekeuncy Vibrations

deeply resonates

and the the again

Big Ideas: Evolve^TM, Emergent^TM, Multiple Levels^TM at the Same Time(!!)

the way that you’re able to express these uh really really big Ideas

so concisely and and accessibly is is wonderful

I feel like this is again like a primer

a wonderful introduction to this

Unfolds^TM, Resonant^TM, Vision^TM

uh because it just um it unfolds very beautifully and elegantly in your expression and

there’s so many things that are resonant about that Vision which I find very attractive

I should have mentioned at the outset too

where this is sort of uh

Sky Meadow Institute, Vermont, to Explore the Emergent Vision: See Spir’y thru Lens of Complexity

this event is kind of Under the Umbrella of Sky Meadow Institute

and uh

that’s the Institute that I run here in Vermont and we are really dedicated to exploring just that sort of vision that you’re explaining oflike uh of of seeing spirituality through the lens of complexity of

Soul, Spirit, Meaning, & Purpose via Systems Thinking

seeing meaning and purpose through the lens of kind of systems based thinking and trying to

apply those lenses um to that in a way that re situates what we’ve always kind of meant by things like Soul and Spirit and meaning and purpose

umbut

Take It Out of Two-Worlds Mythology[?] and Put It into that one Processual^TM Dynamic^TM Evolving^TM World

taking it out of that sort of Two Worlds mythology and putting it into that one processual Dynamic evolving world that that you’re describing

um and allowing us just a different set of Yeah

Integral Theory – Ken Wilber

a different way to relate to all that stuff and those familiar with like integral uh Theory um you know have a similar sense of that kind of move which is like

Don’t Say “Spirit is Outside of the Natural World” – Say “Emergent^TM” Instead

rather than say that spirit is like outside of of of the natural world

and and something like that but it’s more like uh it is

the emergent kind of a

“Knife’s edge – = {blade}? & {fire}?

image: f134 Great Canterbury Psalter with lots of blades, touching left limb

Evolutionary^TM, Emergent^TM Process^TM Moving into the Spiritual

knife’s edge of an evolutionary process and an emergent process that we’re actually moving into the spiritual

in a sense maybe we’re uh at least inthe past uh that looked very different and and uh it’s been

Via Process^TM of Evolution^TM and Complexification^TM

through the process of evolution and complexification

that um yeah

these ideas that are kind of core to spiritual and religious Traditions historically come to make sense in a new light when we situate that as sort of a product of the complexification process rather than maybe somehow outside of it or uh you know undering it from the beginning and getting it going different ways of thinking about it

so it’s a a new way of approaching all this

at this and and as far as its newness as well I mean

I was going through this book again before this

and um

you’re not just stating some of those big Ideas which again other folks have been getting at for for some time as well

Tim Freke’s Novel Contributions to Perennial Cliches: Contributing New Platitudinal Process Cliches, to Evolve and Emerge the Post-Science, Spirituality Lexicon

you’re really also offering some really novel contributions to to that

um and maybe just briefly we’ll touch on this before opening it up to to some other uh people who want to bring in their ideas to the conversation

but uh one of the most striking aspects of this is is your kind of notion of the am magnos [imaginal?] or the

the kind of the the emergence of sort of the imaginal realm for human beings

and thinking about

The After-Death Experience Is Undergoing an Evolutionary^TM Process^TM

that after death experience potentially itself is undergoing a kind of evolutionary process

so maybe just as one point which um if you wanted to speak a little bit to that

I find that a fascinating Prospect and

I’d never heard anything like that before I’d read uh your book

so I don’t know if there’s any thoughts you’d want to you know weave that into your account at all or anything else you wanted to say before uh we again kind of open this up a little bit

yeah

I got too many thoughts around that’s the truth it’s just like oh there’s a lot um so so for me uh

I’ll try very hard as I go through to Define what I mean by the terms I use

and then hopefully you know people use words in different ways

Terms: Soul, Psych

for me what I mean by the soul or the psyche thepsyche is just the Greek word for soul the ancient Greek word for soul

to me it’s like what I have been exploring is

Types of Experience: Sensual & Imaginal

oh I’m always experiencing two types of experience

I’m experiencing the sensal Sens sensual world and I’m experiencingthe imaginal

and it’s always the case and I think that’s

History of Ideas: We Are Body and Soul

what’s given rise throughout history to the idea that we are Body and Soul because we’re experiencing it every day

De-Theologize ‘Soul’

now the word Soul has got completely theologized into something else

but for me it’s like

The Evolved^TM ‘Soul’ or ‘Psyche’ Means the Ability to Make Sense Out of Tim’s Meaningless Utterances

that’s what it is you’re experiencing it right now with your body

you’re hearing the funny noises I’m making

and with your soul or your psyche you’re understanding the meaning

there’s no meaning in the funny noises

all of that’s on the level of the soul and that has evolved I think

there most evolutionists would say yeah of course it’s evolved

so the question is

is it just evolved as some byproduct of biology

you know is is the story which is what I see in the mainstream which is

Evolved b/c Biology, w/ Side-Effect the Psyche, that’s it?

yes it’s all evolved up to biology and then then this is side effect the psyche and and that’s it

rather than going

what the psyche it seems to me has evolved as a whole domain

it the as an ecosystem

just as much as a biological ecosystem

and we are in that ecosystem right now

and that’s what I mean by

the magnos [imaginal?] is that there’s an imaginal realm now

Shamanic-Practices Spirituality (ie High Dose Psilocybin); the Esoteric Traditions of 12 Grams of Golden Teacher of Righteousness to Learn How to [finally we getting somewhere] Explore the Spirit Realm of Loose cognitive association to reshape the mental model of control to 4D Spacetime Mysticism while Preserving possibilism-thinking [i may be getting slightly ahead of Tim here]

spirituality has always been about that from shamanic times

if you study shamanic if you especially if you do shamanic practices it’s about

the esoteric Traditions are all about learning how to explore that realm the spirit realm

the the the dwat [duwat?] for the Egyptians the bardos, that it’s like it’s ubiquitous

so what I’m exploring is

What happens if we take that seriously

and my experience of my own spiritual experience is

We Should Seriously Take 12 Grams of Golden Teacher to Be Evolutionary^TM, Evolved^TM; Next-Level, and Emergent^TM

it’s a good idea to take that seriously

but we see that as evolutionary that the psyche has evolved and just as biological systems evolve together in an ecology so the psyche has evolved onto another level

and just as the ancient teaching would be well it’s a whole different realm

it’s not a different realm

Study the Emergent^TM Realm, to Understand Lots of Spiritual Phenomena Like the Psyche

it’s a more emergent realm

and it’s that which we can study if we want to understand a whole lot of spiritual for one of a better word phenomena

like the the psyche the well

… so Let’s Talk About Physical, Bodily, Literal, Biological Death

well one of the things it does is it it gives a very simple understanding of the question that I face when I think about my death which to me is oh

When the Body Fails, the Psyche Continues, as a Process^TM

when this biological part of my system fails does the psyche part of my system just stop

because it can’t

or is it or is this process which I am able to continue and

what intrigues me about the literature and also the N [near dth?] experiences and also being around death is that

Literal Bodily Physical Death Looks Like the Imaginal Continues More Vividly, Like Sleep & Dream

what it looks like is the imaginal not only carries on but becomes more and more Vivid

which is the same thing we all experience when you go to sleep and you withdraw your attention from the biological and you dream

FINALLY! “Take Psychedelics” (in an Emergent^TM, Evolving^TM Way, of Course) “or move your focus to the imaginal”

and it’s you have an amazing dream or you take psychedelics or ka or something or you

you um in any way

12 Grams Makes you Move Focus to the Imaginal, in High Definition Spirit Realm; Then You Get Real Emergent^TM, and Evolve^TM, and Become Leading-Edge^TM

when you you move your focus to the imaginal it comes to life because Wherever You focus [DID YOU MEAN TO SAY, WHEN YOU INGEST 12 GRAMS OF GOLDEN TEACHER??] you start processing that in high definition

so that’s

“That 12-Gram Experience Is What I’m Trying to Explore”

that’s the beginnings of what I’m trying to explore

which is okay maybe this Spirit realm as it you know whatever you want to call it the that has itself is another is an emergent level of reality

and that

we can see it’s the Leading Edge

so that not only does this this allow us to approach

it allows us to ask questions

like could the psyche function

could you and and not regarded it as simply like worst nonsense

so that we can have an intelligent conversation about it

Developing an Ontology of the Psyche after Bodily Death, through 12 Grams of Golden Teacher

because he

what I’m developing is an ontology which makes sense of that possibility

and I and and to be able to open up to these things again

If We ALL Has 12 Grams of Cubensis, We’d All Have a Experience of the Tremendous

I think would have a tremendous impact [not?] just for individuals but also collectively

one last question

on yeah before we we uh you know again open things up is um one question thatcomes to mind for that uh which

we could spend so much time talking about is like where

here’s how I’ll frame it but it’sa admittedly

this isn’t even the right question but

Where Is the Imaginal^TM Realm?

where is that imaginal realm

right like

Psilocybin Interpretation of {rock} & {tree}

if look at like the biosphere I can kind of look out there and I can point and say oh yes there’s the rocks and the trees

and if we’re maybe even talking about the new sphere [? the Ennead, above heimarmene??] you know in sense of like ah

Informational Overlay Tracked Using Our Information Processing Systems & the Cyber Internet (with Language)

there’s an informational overlay

you know

that we can kind of track using our information processing systems

and the internet and and our language

and all this stuff um you know

what you’re also describing in this book uh is

a beautiful image to me of you know this like this

this realm

uh this

this space of that imaginal spiritual

reality um where it dovetails so beautifully with other you know imagesthat I’m familiar with from say like the the imperion from Dante and the the

the construction of of God out of the imaginal

so but the question is like yeah where

how do we think about that as a reality that obviously isn’t immediately available to like point to

and you know what I’m saying there’s a

there’s a question there

well I

my Approach very much Brendan is

we’ll have a look now where is it, well it’s nowhere

it’s an imaginal space

Travel with Psilocybin to Create Imaginal Spiritual Space to Construct God

it creates space when you you can dream up a whole world and inhabit it you can you know it’s it’s

it is images of the sensory world but it doesn’t have any of the what I call postivity [?]

Avoid Algorithms^TM that Run in the Material World

it doesn’t have any of the the the habits of the or the algorithms that run the material world

Images of Freedom to Ride a Flying Horse [Golden Teacher Starting to Kick In]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jGYx0hMjM0&list=PLB6NUJ4VTK_wyUld9PQytewNsg8PUcvU1

it’s images of them which allows it to have a certain Freedom which means you can get on a horse and fly

or you can

you can do anything [CAREFUL WITH THAT THOUGHT, EUGENE]

and because it’s images

You Are the Creator of Fantastic Spaces to Hear Command Voices

but you’re creating spaces through which you can walk around and you create a space in which you can hear yourself speak to yourself

which is thinking

you know you can I can say it out loud and now I’m going to say it to myself

well where did I do that

well it’s in a completely different space which has arisen like a um as a as imageof the century [?] experience

and then it’s taken off

Evolution^TM = 12 G Psilocybin Imaginal Space Truckin

so to me that’s where all the evolution is happening my you know

biologically we’ve changed but not much

Proof I’m Right: Internet Conferencing Is Working Right Now, b/c of this Evolution^TM

but what’s happened in the realm of images and ideas in the imaginal has allowed us as we said to be now on the internet talking across the whole world and that’s because of this massive Evolution that’s happening

If My Jargon Impresses You, You Are Evolving^TM

you know

to the degree that anyone here is intrigued by anything I say or you say or any else says we will be evolving now

we’re actually evolving now it’s happening this is it

and that’s how fast it is on this level

Takes 20-40 Minutes for the Evolving^TM to Kick In – we’re really moving now, I Wish I Could Claim It’s Because of my Jargon

we’re really moving now

so I I think

it’s what I what

12 Gram Psilocybin is not just spirituality that’s outdated mumbo jumbo, But the Rest is Too Old to Work

I want to be able to claim really

and and first put it out in Soler [Soul Story book?] is look

this area of spirituality far from being something to dismiss as outdated mumbo jumbo

although don’t get wrong

a lot of it is

a lot of it or

a lot of the understanding is simply old, that’s all

and and what it needs is to go what

what’s the essence of it

and and can we find that again

Can We Find Golden Teacher, Source of Mythic Imaginal, Again? If so, We’d Be the Absolute Leading Edge^TM; the Spiritual Exploration Awakening

because I think it’s the Leading Edge

I think

it’s the absolute Leading Edge , the spiritual exploration Awakening

that these are

Requires the Philosophy Strain of Psilocybin

these are where we’re going and

if we haven’t got the philosophy to support that, we won’t be able to make it there

“(I’m Presently Out of Psilocybin)”

and at the moment we haven’t

and I know there’s lots of interesting people trying [cultivating new strains]

and I want to contribute to that to try

and

the image I’ll just say this

I mean this is very

I like to try and get it down as simple as I can

As Simple as 12 G of Cubensis

because is to say look if you

if you went back to the 9th century or something and there was a big Roll of Thunder and someone went oh yeah that’s that’s Thor

Just to show what I mean, I enclose a miniature of ca. 990 which shows a mushroom-like shape, and a glass painting which shows an even more emphatic schematization of the mushroom-like crown.
https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/01/07/panofskys-letters-to-wasson-transcribed/#Sentence-1-7

that’s a that’s a that’s a big man in the sky with a an anvil hitting something it would be nearly impossible to say well maybe or maybe it’s a kind of side effect of electromagnetism because that wouldn’t make any [ __ ] sense at all

there have no idea what that means

but listening to the Thunder is the same

that’s real and I feel like

Thunderstorm Mushrooms Give Spiritual Experiences that Are Evolving^TM

with spiritual experience it’s like look these things are significant spiritual experiences which themselves are evolving

everything’s evolving, so they’ve changed too as we’ve changed

but our understanding needs to jump forward as to what they are and why they matter so much

The mushroom-trees Are Psilocybin, Matters because Causes control instability driving mental model transformation from possibilism to eternalism

because I think anyone and

I suspect many people here have had them

you know

if you have these profound experiences you know subjectively this is really significant

it really is I for me it’s like

Nothing Comes Close to 12 G Cubensis

there’s nothing comes close

so how can we understand them now in a way that does them Justice?

Study the Egodeath Theory^TM of Psychedelic Eternalism^TM

I think that’s the motivation

yeah well of course you and Icould keep talking and I would love that but I want this to be an occasion uh for other people to to uhyeah bring their ideas and voices in the mix

so um let’s open it up at this point I’ll continue to have you know questionsand things I can throw at you if uh if

if people don’t want to um jump uh to the microphone so to speak uh right away so but if anyone does have anything that they um want to ask or bring into the conversation and we can open this up uh

just I guess uh you know use your react to button and you know raise your hand if you’re able to do that and then uh Ican just kind of call on you um and then yeah I’d love to get other people’s thoughts on all of this and hopefully at least this has been

so yeah just go ahead and do that anytime that that you’d like um but hopefully this is oh great

we’ve got some we off wonderful we’re off all right well then

I’ll stop uh pontificating then and

let’s go to Lawrence go you had your hand up first

hi Lawrence I’m here I’m here umuh so I understand what you’re saying Tim and um I kind of agree with it but

the um what about in other words if if

if Consciousness is is an epipphenomenon of the brain or is in the brain can Consciousness exists outside the brain but in another physical Matrix in other words in in an energy field in other words or you know like Mr Cel Drake says the the you know the morphogenic field

and I see like

if we have a energy field and then conscious goes from your brain into that field and I call it the cosmic memory field whatever um and

then it remains active

in other words

it could do things in that field

so in other words

Eternal Conscious Life through Wishfulgenetic Fields

it can exist individually with other Consciousness collectively

what do you think of that

uh well

Answer = Resonate Vibrations: When I Was a Child, I Thought as a Child

I resonate with the uh way the place you’re going very much

and and andand rer

when I was younger especially was a big influence on me

and

I Hung with Sheldrake when I Was Childish

I had the chance to talk to him a few times about it

he’s a lovely man the I I I

let me say the same thing back to you in a different words

just because that’s the way that I have come to see it

first of all

‘Consciousness’ = ‘Psyche’ Rises EmergentlyTM

the word Consciousness

the word is used in widely different ways

I think you’re using it as a as a word

I I’m not trying to presume Lawrence but like

the way that I use the word psyche

that you know this

this thing which has arisen

now the question you’re raising is of course the big question which is

The Psyche Can Exist Without the Brain, If You Take My Courses and Buy My Merch

is it [the psyche] a byproduct of the brain or can it exist without the brain

what I’m trying to explore

I’m going to try and say this really fast

there’s quite a lot to say so I’m going to try and cover it which is that it I think I think

Consciousness = Pay Attention to My Marketing Jargon Overlay Covering the Actual, Psychedelics Engine

paying attention is what Consciousness is

we’re conscious of what we pay attention to when when we’ve evolve to pay attention to our own processing it’s given rise to this world of images so the psyche has arisen from the biological sphere

I would definitely say that however

Analogy Is the Fastest Way to Communicate Psilocybin’s Emergent^TM Evolving^TM Effects

the ontology that I want to explore is quite close I think to what you’re saying which is let me use a metaphor just because or an analogy actually

it just

it’s the quickest way to try and get it across

it feels that

Understanding the Universe on Psilocybin Is Like an AI Learning System, Like the Latest Technology from 1200 to Instruct a Class about Balancing in a Mushroom-Tree to Avoid Loss of Control

Cybernetic Transcendence

we can understand the universe a bit like a learning AI system now

it’s not an AI system it’s not a computer it’s reality but it’s the latest technology

and it’s giving gives us a fabulous analogy because what we now know is

Cybernetics Is Information and Communication About Control & 4D Spacetime Mysticism

first of all physics has shown that the the language we need to understand the very very Primal levels of reality are inform as information it’s not matter it’s information

and what is information

it’s differentiation into this or that

that’s what the bit is the simplest piece of information

so what the way I have come to see things is

Mystic Revelation Is Oneness Non-Dual Beginner Unity Experience

the universe is a fundamental Oneness which is formless it has no form which is being differentiated into everything and

Enlightenment = Complexity^TM & Resonant Frequency Quantum Vibrations

that one process which is from the very simplest thing you can possibly imagine is becoming ever more complex

and we now know from AI that you can Google just did this didn’t they last year if you saw it was fascinating

if you take digital information random information and weight l enough it starts forming patterns

and they start interacting with each other

there you go that’s what looks like the universe is and

those patterns I think are what sheldrake’s trying to get at with his morphic resonance I call it postivity because what it seems to me is that

Domino-Chain Causality of Pattern Recognition Formation Evolve Emergent Process

everything that has formed starts governing what can happen next

so that the patterns that have Arisen will continually repeat

but it’s

but never in quite the same way

so that you’re in a process which is governed by repetition what I call postivity and creativity

so so it’s it’s work every you look at this moment

In the Revealed, 4D Spacetime Block, All Moments Equivalently Exist

This Moment’s pretty much the same as the one before

but not quite

and this one and this one and it’s like and

that’s continually happening now

that’s very much

like an AI system, it’s generative

Transcendent Knowledge is like Magic Propagation of Pattern Recognition

it takes the patterns of the past and slight does something new with them and I think

that’s what’s got us to here this evolution of information

now to me the way that I’ve ended up looking at it which has been definitely inced by by by rert would say would be to say it’s like

4D Spacetime: The Past Exists and Information Sits Distributed: the past hasn’t passed; no meta-change and meta-flow

the past hasn’t gone anywhere it’s actually information which is accumulating

the past hasn’t passed

it’s accumulated

there’s more of it now than there was

Mental Patterns in 4D Spacetime Are Algorithms that Cybernetically Govern; the 4D Spacetime Heimarmene Block Governs All Creatures and Control-Thoughts

and that past is creating the let’s call them algorithms or habits or rup put would call them which is governing how everything is functioning

so you’ve done a lot of things already there one of one of the things you’ve done is you’ve gone

look even

Psilocybin Transformation is Evolutionary^TM

the laws of nature are evolutionary

everything’s evolutionary

they’ve also come into form

and then you’ve gone the past

physics for a long time has talked about time as a dimension

that the past exists

WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE? WHAT DOES PHYSICS’ “TIME AS A DIMENSION” SAY ABOUT THAT? “Process”, “Evolution”, “Emergent” — Domino-Chain Causality Verbs Frozen in 4D Spacetime Block with No Meta-Change

we are we

we are a process

we are and

Domino Chain Causality, Ego Steering Through Branching Possibilities Forward in Time to Create the Open Future

this is arising from the past now in an AI system

Throw More “Change” Verbs at the Frozen 4D Spacetime Block, to Shatter It and Be Born Forth from the Cosmic Rock: Chant “Action!” “Evolve!” “Emerge!” – Use of terms to imply Open Future

it’s arising all that information is isis on a hard disk and

the analogy I would throw out very quickly here is going look I think

the past is like the hard disk of the universe

it’s not a hard disk but it’s like one

so in the same way that I’m looking at this screen right now and if someone came up and went um all that exists is what’s on thescreen Tim I

I would say no you don’t be DED [?]

there’s a there’s a hard disk behind this

everything is huge [?] and what I see on the screen is just what arises from it and I think

what we experience is that the forming the moment is like that it’s the equivalent of the screen of the universe and

Egoic Branching-Based Domino Chain Causality Suspended Halfway Between Egoic and Transcendent Thinking

the hard disk is all of the past which is governing what everything does now

if you get that then you can look at your identity in a different way

because you can go oh I’m not just this

I am all of my past

I Am My Past, and I Control and Create My Open Future by Ego Steering Power

I am all of the algorithms that make Tim speak with an English accent not an American accent

which you know which keeps my biology working which I can say these things because I’ve read these books or had these thoughts

I Had Past Thoughts, and I Am Creator/ Emerger/ Evolver/ Process-Driver of My Future Thoughts

every so I am and so are you

so what’s happening now is

you’re meeting everything that’s ever been Tim

and I’m meeting everything that’s ever been Nish or Rebecca or Brendan or Justin

it’s like

that’s what we are

I Am My Past (I Am Not My Future, Because That Hasn’t Been Created and Steered into Existence Yet by Me Selecting from Branching Possibilities Open to Me)

Do Not Look at the Source of Control Thoughts; Look Down at Your Biological Level Only

so then you can look at the biological level and go ah so it’s more complicated than or more interesting than I’m I’m a biological thing

I am but actually I’m the system which is running this

I Am the Control System

which is why cells come and go all the time trillions of them and

why you have heard the estimates I’m sure youk now that every single atom in my body is different from 10 years ago because all of that’s passing through because I’m not that

I mean

I am that in one way obviously , but I’m not I’m the system organizing this moving things around to keeping it going

and then you go okay

and then there’s another level to the system, what does that do?

well

it organizes imaginal information so you’ve now got a program as it were on the hard disk which is organizing this level and this level

now what happens if if this this this level of the psyche has evolved so much now that it can just keep functioning and the analogy and look these are very quick analogies

please forgive me but I’m trying to get across some ideas very quickly here

if if here we are connecting on zoom and you can see me and you can hear me but if right now suddenly we lose the sound and

you’re not going to think

“that’s impossible that’s impossible how how can I see him but not hear him, because they’re the same thing, they’re all part of the same thing”

you’re not going to go well look we we

“we evolved the ability to convey sound decades before we we had the ability to convey visuals, how can I see him but not hear him?”

you’re not going to do that, because you know that there’s a zoom program on my computer running this, and it’s perfectly possible that the sound bit can fail and the video bit can still work

and you’ll go oh

that bit’s not working

so with this quick analogy what I’m saying is

The Postivity[sp?] Is Two Levels: Biology Information, and Imaginal

when you get that you are a postivity system, you’re a system which is organizing information on the biological level and on the level of the imaginal

what I’m Sugg interesting is

Spiritual Survival of the Soul and Psyche Spirit Consciousness = Imagination Continues to Exist After the Physical, Literal Body Dies

it’s perfectly possible that the system can fail on the level of the biological but carry on on the level of the imaginal

and that what’s surviving death isn’t some special little thingy called a soul or a spirit or conscious anything

what’s surviving is you the process that you are continues

it’s just that that bit of the process doesn’t work anymore so you can’t access the biological senses you can’t accessthe biological level that’s you can’t you can’t that’s gone but what’s surviving is you

After Your Physical Body Dies, Your Imaginal Process Continues, because You Evolved Emergent Spirituality

which is why it seems to me one of the interesting things about the near-death experience is that one of the most common common things that happens is the is the Life review where people see the whole of their life

because I’m suggesting that’s what they are

they didn’t have a life

they are a life

you are a life

that’s what you are and

that what’s happening then is that person that that process continues but just part of it dropped away

you can’t do that anymore , that’s gone

Super Vivid NDE Imaginal b/c Emergent Evolve

but you got this and that the part that you still continue with it looks to me like becomes super super Vivid and you able to enter the imaginal with much greater depth because you’re no longer carrying all of the postivity of the biological level

oh how did I do that was a bit ambitious but I had to go Lauren excellent excellent excellent but let me just follow up and so you’re saying

The psyche can exist on its own but not in another physical matrix; on Two Different Emergent^TM Levels^TM

the psyche can exist on its own not in another physical Matrix

yes although I don’t

yes I do and I’m say

but I’m not saying it’s something separate

I’m saying look

there is a psychobiological system which is Lawrence right now and it’s all integrated and working together but it’s working together on two very different levels of emergent reality there’s the biological material Leveland then there’s the imaginal level level and just as we saw earlier with Brendan the imaginal level is quitedifferent there’s no space there’s no matter there’s it’s very it’s imaginal and so what I’m saying is the part of the pro the part of

the Lawrence “program” – I don’t want to devalue you; you’re a human being, but just for this analogy:

the part of the Lawrence program that when it when eventually which I suspect it will can’t function anymore on the biological level

Yes and No and Maybe and I Didn’t Assert That, Next Question, Time’s Up

it can just carry on just it’s just carry it on it’s just it can’t do that anymore

thank you thank you oh so much there but um

thank you a great question and uh

how about we go to uh Rebecca next

hi um thank you Brendan and Tim for doing this

um Tim

I didn’t even know who you were until Brendan posted the event

so uh this last week I got your book [probably Soul Story] and I read the whole thing in fact I read three of your books um and they theyresonate very much with me um I my question I think is kind of a technicalquestion um so in the in the realm of ofreincarnation um in this present Incarnation uh my name is Rebecca andI’m 55 years old let’s say in my past life I was a guy named Boband he passed away 60 years ago and 10 years later his wife died andhe was there to greet her but at that time Rebecca is now five yearsold um do does the soul do youfeel live their lifetimes at least in thepast because the the past is always there live those past livessimultaneously um no I don’t think that I think the the uh I think what thething you’re pointing to with with reincarnation is is an interesting question to which I I I have no answer Idon’t know but I it’s it’s a people do seem to meet their lovedones and there I mean basically all I’m suggesting with that I always want toroot it in what we’re experi ing now it’s like I’m already connected with my daughter and my wife I can feel them nowand if I practice I can really tune into to them I’m already I’m connected with my mother she’s died but I I’m with hera lot because I can tune into to her and so I think we’re connected we’re in thisweb of connections and so the fact that that becomes something that happens to us when we die that seems quiteplausible to me um whether some how long somebody Waits before they reincarnate I

don’t know maybe it varies who knows but the but the question you’re asking aboutthe time it feels to me like no this is a process where one thing leads to another leads to another leads toanother and that that seems to be at that this process ofbecoming is what existence is so it’s not that what I’m suggesting is that itcan’t happen at the same time because it’s one thing after another and it can’t and we can’t go back in timebecause we’re going forward it’s the wrong analogy we don’t go back and forward it’s not time is not like goinginto town and coming home time is like something which is accumulating it’s forming and forming and forming andforming and what forms is based on what was formed already but in newrelationships so that would be where I’ve ended up with that at the momentRebecca thank you uh cool let’s go toAaron hey uh I am uh really excited touh meet yall I’ve been really looking forward to this uh I’m someone who’sbeen uh working on ideas about emergent spirituality ever since I read G girdleeser Bach and dropped acid back in college and I was actually uh about 300pages into building a WI wedia site about emergent spirituality when I came across Bobby aerion’s book and hissubstack and then when I joined his substack it recommended me Brendan substack and then I was like holy cowthese metamodern guys are doing almost exactly the same thing I’m trying to do so uh um but I noticed you know youguys uh tend to approach it I think from more of an academic philosophical and more of a new age spiritual uh tact uh Icome from a very secular humanist background uh I I was very involved inthe Sunday Assembly movement which is the uh The Atheist Church uh for formany years and that’s kind of where I come from and I know that thepeople in that neighborhood absolutely need moremeaning in their spirituality that’s the main problem that I saw with SundayAssembly is that it didn’t have that element to it it didn’t have the spiritual element they were goingthrough the motions but they didn’t have the vibe you know and uh my but if you were to havethis conversation about like reincarnation and the afterlife and things like that in front of that groupthey are going to roll their eyes so hard and my question is how can wepresent emergent spirituality in a way that can really be Broad ly uhunderstood and accepted can we create a populist emergentspirituality uh that that can really go beyond kind of the niche philosophical movement that it currently

is great question Ain so my I’ve been around the block with this for so manyyears I can’t tell you the place I’ve ended up right now is obviously say what’s appropriate to the people you’retalking to um but also I think we need to be bold I think we know with the issue of doesthe soul survive death does psyche survive death it’s going well either it does or it doesn’t we need to find outwe this we should be focusing on this we need to you know it’s a pretty important thing does it does that happen or not isthere a level of reality in which we’re connected in the way that

I’m suggesting or not and that we should have the samelevel of inquiry that we would have with any other level and I have immensesympathy or or empath was the right word resonance with uhatheists because most of the atheists I know are very smart rational people andthey’ve taken this idea of I’m I’m going to go for God can I do can I do that Brendan can I have a quick let let’shave a go at God go for it because this will address what you’re saying so you know to me I experienced something Ithought of was God very early on in my life blew my mind and I’ve had a relationship with something greater than me all through my life now you haven’thad any of that it sound like nonsense and that’s part of the problem you know if people who haven’t had theseexperiences it will sound like people are either making it up or they’re mentally ill and given the state ofspirituality which is just so full of charlatans and nonsense I I I understandwhy they would think that

so one of the things we need to do is we need to be able to share these profound experiencesthat’s one of the things so that people go oh right that’s what you’re talking about yeah what is that right ratherthan you know so that people actually have an interest you know a lot of people who have these that that rollingof the eyes around death have not looked into it have not gone into near-death experiences or have not been around

people dying very much if you do it changes everything because it’s like wowokay what’s this we have hundreds of thousands of accounts hundreds of thousands accounts of people going yeahI died and they medically died and some of them are neuroscientists you these are smart people and they’re going andthis happened well we shouldn’t just dismiss it oh well that’s just nonsense that’s that’s the place where I want tostart so engaging with it rationally the problem with spirituality is it’s pre-scientific it’s pre- rational weneed to be we need to be questioning we need to be rational then what I’m suggesting as a possibility is how howabout we can look at it in this way

so that it so it doesn’t have to be wooooso I think the whole Mythic God at the beginning who’s creating the universeI just think it’s doesn’t work and so I completely with the atheists it’s likeif there’s a God at the beginning he doesn’t know what he’s doing I mean there was five there’s been five wholeextinctions this God’s got no idea it’s taking him 13.8 billion years to get tous having this conversation we’ve gone through 250 million years of dinosaurs this God’s an idiot and and and thenlook at the world it’s so full of needless suffering you know it’s you know what I mean it’s like you know Idon’t want to you know suffering can play a role but some of it is just so all those the one that always gets mewas reading an account of a of a of

a little boy who’d gone swimming and a bug thing had gone into his ear and then ehis brain from the inside it’s like no [ __ ] that that is you know any God that’s responsible for that is one thatI’m not I don’t like him so is we’ve got this mean stupid God at the beginningdoesn’t work and what what I think the the The Atheist Spirit has come in and going oh for goodness sake and I thinkthey’re right it’s like yeah enough of that of course but hang on I keep havingthis experience and it’s not of something mean and stupid it’s of something Sublime and so loving and just like moreand just so much that it blows my it’s just this enormous benevolence and loveand so my what I’m playing with is okay okay well what about if this starts withthe simplest thing you can imagine which is the formless in relationship as a bitof information can’t get

any simpler than that but it’s evolved into the psyche which is this whole domain andthen from there it has evolved into another level another Supersystem which is what we experience as God so that it’s real it’s completelyreal it’s just not this madman at the beginning it’s the most emergent level of reality and the model for me for thatwould be somehow a whole load of individual cellsgot it together to form multicellular organisms eventually as complex as you and meastonishing well what if the same thing is happening on the next level and that when human when the psyche when humanbeings come into these spiritual states of Oneness when they they enter theseemerging awaken States they start to inte and what that integration is is acommunion of souls like the body is a communion of cells and the that so thethe big mind isn’t at the beginning the big mind is made of all the little mindsand again to use the computer analogy without wishing to sound completely crass you know if you take a whole load of AI systems and you plug them alltogether you get a super AI system and that’s an analogy for what I think is happening so we’re we’re tuning intosomething which is itself evolved so the so the UN so God isn’t God is a difficult word don’t even need to usethat word but that big mind that what that super intelligence is not where it’s comefrom the universe is flowering into God if you will just like it flowered intoyou just like you started as a a fertilized egg and then went through a whole lot ofbiological stuff and then

developed cons conscious and then developed a psyche and then off you gone and he you nowthat the Universe kind of is playing out the same basic pattern it’s starting with the simplest thing just the one astwo something we can only study with maths and it’s developed into life andthen it’s developed into psyche and then it’s developed into this Sublime super system and we can be partof that and that when we enter these deep spiritual States and I think they’re accessible toanyone i’ I’ve been sharing them for decades now all around the world that you can slip into them muchquicker than people think and so that what I would say to groups like who meeting is going look this is a way thatyou could approach this level and and see and first of all experience it and secondly go you don’t have to retreatinto a mythological mumbo jumbo you can think about this rationally and here’s a way that you could see it so that that’swhat that’s my answer to how we can go forward at the moment eraawesome big question and uh yeah go ahead Aaron I was gonna say how how do youthink of what do you think about pantheism as a way to get atheists to see the universe morespiritually um I don’t the problem with pantheism for me is it it it get it’s ait’s a it’s it’s still this idea that there’s something at the beginning whichis you know that God is arising as everything

well I two either there’s nothing there’s there’s two types of itreally there’s panentheism and pantheism so pantheism really the word God doesn’t mean anything if you just go with theuniverse is God which is what um oh God I can’t remember his name howembarrassing yes thank you thank you there you go you went straight there which was what Spinosa is saying I meanit’s it’s a it’s a way of trying to rescue God but it doesn’t mean anything anymore if you have panentheism which iswhat hegel’s saying you’ve still got God but God is arising as the universe and that’s very much the route I took for avery long time until it felt like no that’s not working there’s we need to see the beginning as radically simpleit’s not it’s not it doesn’t start with anything which is conscious or intelligence so not intelligent designbut the universe is the evolution of intelligence not a Creator but the universe is the evolution of creativityso when we say the one at the beginning what I mean by that now is not the onewhich is conscious and has intentions and wants to know itself and is kind of really

God Imean something that’s undivided just one has no other qualities it’s justundifferentiated that undifferentiated being is differentiating as everythingand then that anything we might want to use such a grand word as God or thatthat that greater than us n that you can experience that that’s not that’s that’swhere it’s going that’s not where it’s come from that’s where it’s going hey thanks so much yeah it’s areal pleasure yeah I want to go to Nish next but I also um it’s an invitation to chat with you Aaron and whoever elsewould like to explore this topic because around how we present these ideas to different audiences based on wherethey’re coming from based on you know are you coming from an atheistic background or religious background or what kind of religious there’s uh how welanguage these ideas and and um you know allow the conversation to to evolve anddevelop I think is a really important topic I think a lot about and um yeah I think that we there’s a lot more thatcould be said about that and trying to do that effectively hopefully events like this and things that various groupsof ours now like you’re up to this as well are doing that are offering these things to different kinds of groups and are landing in different spaces so weneed like a diversity of those um but I think uh I think that’s the that’s the sort of question we need to be askingand uh yeah can I add something else to that Brandon go ahead so this is my personal thing and I know that you knownot everyone feels this this is this is where I’ve ended up at the moment what I see is there’s I saw thatthat Rebecca mentioned Sam’s book I don’t I I haven’t um really studied Samin great detail so I’m not it’s not about him but what I see is that people who

are trying to bring science andspirituality together the ways that I’ve done it in the past has beento have something let’s call it I don’t know I did it a bit in story it’s in you know I’ve moved on from there where it’slike there’s a there’s a big mind or then a spirit or something which emanates or does something magic and andall of that which is still in the mythical mindset it’s still taking Concepts and what I mean let me Definewhat I mean by mythical it seems to me that there’s a very common anachronisticuse of language where we use the long the wrong language for the wrong level so and and science does it in one wayand spirituality does it in another so science has discovered that if youreally want to study the found conditionals of the universe you need to use mathematics that is what works butif you then take that language of mathematics and apply it to everything and go we can reduce you know everythinggets reduced your your love for your child is really just chemicals chemicals are just matter matter is justmathematics it’s like no it’s not each level is more than more than more thanthat’s the whole point of emergence so we can’t use this language here I can use it for studying for studying physicsbut I can’t I can’t it’s not going to help me when I want to understand why I love my daughter conversely whatspirituality has done because it’s old completely understandably is it’s takenthe language from the human level and applied it to previous levels well justearlier I said you went back in time and how would they understand Thunder well it’s a big man with a manthat’s taking the human level which is what you’ve got and going is is that that’s what’s happening it’s not we knowyou know because we now have understood it in completely other in mathematical language so that what’s the Mythic istaking the language of Consciousness intentionality purpose all these thingsthat will take billions of years to arrive and putting at the

beginning wellthat hasn’t happened what you’ve got here is a level that can only be understood with the the most fundamentalabstract relationships that we study with maths very cold that’s why people don’t like maths it’s because it’s veryfar from The Human Experience but it’s going to turn into The Human Experienceso what I see is that what I did before was I took the evolutionary process and this is the panentheism and went wellthere’s the something or the other spirit and then it’s projecting itself or coming to know itself or some Mythicthing and what I’ve done since has gone no no no none of that none of that andthen what I see with the other side and I think this is what people like Sam doing but please forgive me if I don’tknow his work well enough but you know the things I mean which is to take spirituality and go well obviouslythat’s all nonsense but meditation is good for you it changes your brain waves and you know you can find meaning and wecan translate spirituality into a kind of unspiritual form where we dismiss allthat because that’s mumbo jumbo and obviously the soul doesn’t survive death that’s nonsense but we can take the goodbits I think both of those are mistaken for the same reason that the other thing the anachronistic I think we need to bebold enough to go this is addressing a level of reality you can experience itfor yourself we just haven’t understood it and we need to think radic in radically new ways to understand it notto not to reduce it but not toti stick with the old Mythic ways of thinking wewe we need to develop a radically new that’s what I mean by an emergentspirituality so thank you let me rip on that Brendon I just oh yeah this is this is good stuff Rich stuff really enjoyingthis uh let’s go over to Nish go ahead Nish and great to see you hi n hi Tim

thank you so much for this um so I’ve got two questions actually so I’ll be quick the first question is the use ofthe term spiritual and tying it in with um a view of the cosmos as an anemerging or emerging system typically more traditionally the word spiritualhas been used to denote something uh that is concerned with something Beyondsomething Transcendent something that gives meaning to life which is otherwise meaningless some kind of relationshipbetween self and spirit now if we want to use the word spiritual in thisemergent Paradigm do we need to completely red defined spiritual or isthere a place

for these ideas Transcendent meaning Spirit do they justget redefined or is it something completely different and in what sense is it spiritual then yeah so that’s myfirst question second question relationship between the brain and the mind brain and the imaginal so two twomodels there’s a simple ladder model where matter complexifies to become lifelife complexifies to become mind hey hey Nish let me stop you let’s do the first one and then I because then I canconcentrate on the second one because I don’t want I don’t want to I don’t want to lose the first one because it was really good and and I I want to reallyget what you’re saying so so I’ve lost it already so just it’ll come back what was the first question was oh spiritualspiritual yeah how some Spirit yeah I know I’ve thought about that as well andpart of me you know I make up a lot of words because I can’t find a word I like and I thought maybe I need to do thatspiritual but somehow we need to make a bridge so what I mean by spiritual isreally what I what I think of is is about spiritual experience it’s a type of experience and what I mean byspiritual experience in its most simplest form is those moments when people justgo there’s more going on here isn’t there than my sociobiological existencethat just that now that that’s the the simplest form which I think a lot of people get just like yeah I kind of Livbeen living like this and hang on there’s something more going on here isn’t there a lot of people get that IR around death for instance right to thoseAwakenings where you go oh my God you know how did I miss all of this so we need some way of pointing tothat and then what I’m suggesting

with things like Transcendence and is that the thing I’m exploring theessential idea is what if existence is this process of becoming everything isone process of becoming CU it’s one and so that the levels that we previouslysaw as outside are the more emergent levels and in one way they’re outside because they’re not physical there we weStep Into the imaginal Now human beings have wrestled with the relationship between the imaginal and the sensoryforever and the traditional idea which emerged was that you are really the soulthe psyche and you’ve become trapped in a body and is this is not a good placewhich is why it’s such so full of suffering and life is so [ __ ] and you need to get yourself free and you know Plato

the body is a tomb and the whole Eastern tradition this ADM and you’resamsara and you get free get free then what’s happened they had no noidea about the evolutionary process so what we can do now is go no

no it’s it’s not this is not this the reason it’s sothe reason that it’s bittersweet that it can be so beautiful and also so bitter is because it’s even evolutionary itjust doesn’t know what it’s doing and we we are the ones going oh that that’s not good I love that more of that less ofthat that that because we are the universe become conscious so we can now do that and then this Transcendent levelis is I would suggest is this Divine superp system whatever name you want to give to that and when you touchthat that is the most that’s where the that I’m I’m working Brendan said

I’m working on a new project which is going to come out hopefully next month which will be a series of me talking like this but as chapters chapter one chapter 2 chapter 3 I call it a pod book because it’s a a love child of a podcast and a book the structure of a book and then the kind of spontaneity of a podcast or like this and I’ve called it why your life really matters because to me all of this philosophy and all of the experience is all about what are the the signifance significance of our lives and that’s meaning and I think if you touch if weif you have this understanding that that we are evolving into this greater thingand then then you experience it and you start living in relationship to it which is what you’re saying Nish as Iunderstand you then all of that the same experiences that were understood through

the Transcendent or something outside from which we’ve Fallen because that’s the that’s the old idea fundamentallywe’re Fallen God is already there and we’re a spark that’s got lost or we’re asoul that has you know got stuck in a lower level and it just flips that around and goes no no no not nothing as

pessimistic as that we can be much more optimistic about this this is reaching up further and further intothat and your life is part of that you you play a role in that and that’sthat’s that’s the meaning so that’s how I approached the spiritualthing as well as acknowledging what you said it’s a difficult word because youknow I live in a place called glastenbury

I don’t know if you know about it in in the US but glastenbury isa kind of new age it’s crazy I mean it’s just like so much of spirituality I just wantto run down the street sometimes going stop and think about it for a minute cuz it’s just so so nuts um butyou know that’s the problem with like language thank you thank you so much sowhat was number two yeah number two uh the relationship between brain and mindand the and you you were going to give me some models yes a couple of simple

models um there’s

Ladder Model

there’s the kind of more simple ladder model where you have matter matter complexifies becomes lifelife complexifies becomes mind yeah and we can think of those perhaps as uhfloors of a house and from what we can see you you can’t have life without matter I mean like youcan’t have a molecule without you kind of without atoms because it makes it up so for the imaginal realm which I’massuming is to do with mind

for that to existindependently in some way after life has fallen away would be like the secondfloor of a house kind of still being there after the first floor has fallen away that is okay so I’d need to alittle bit more on that to think about how that might work

Integral Theory – Ken Wilber

the second model which is slightly more complex modelwhich is the integral model of Ken Wilbur you have four quadrants and here instead ofreducing brain to mind or or saying that they’re radically separate they’re they’re two aspects of the same co-arising poon yeah and they co-arise together and the evidence for this seems to be that as there does seem to be a correlation between the complexification of brainand the complexification of mind

yeah um so again here

for the imaginal realm to exist independently you’d have to kind of take one of those quadrants uh and and say well that quadrant is going to continue independent of the other three even though they seem to be co-arising together.

So how would this fit into these kind of understandings where it all seems to be they all seem to be part of the same thing and not okay so it says they’re wrong okay um it says no don’t think about it like that there’s a better way um and part of my impetus to doing Soul story

Tim Freke Seeing What Ken Wilber Is Up To

and then all the work I’ve done since was being was seeing particularly what Ken was up to

and you know loving what he was up to

and also feeling like this is not right

this this bit here so so which can I address first um

let’s go for your levels

first of all complexity

it’s more

it has become more complex because there’s more past but things also simplify I just want to point that out

you know that it is more complex because there’s more and more past so there’s more and more information but things can also become simpler

it’s not like just everything just gets more and more complex

you see that in the evolutionary process just important but the past is what is Emer gent is is is um accumulating

so there’s just more and more information in that way it is more and more and more now what I’m suggesting is that we don’t think about

this as a Hol on I think that’s the mistake maybe I can do both of them at once the the the the the Ken idea if youtake it as the ins inner it’s like well I’m not sure it is I think it’s a complete new level I think that the thesubjective experience on the level of the body is thesensations the subjective there’s a subjective and objective level to thepsyche there’s a subjective and objective level to the biological and there’s a subjective and objective levelto the psyche the psyche is not the subjective level of the of the body the senses are look this is another level sothen it goes okay so this if that’s right if this this this is an objective and subjective level as well like thebody level is it built is it the next floor and I think that’s a confusion ofhonic systems with emergent systems emergent systems aretemporal some of them are are honic some of them arise by combining otherelements into a bigger hole the body is like that I think Gods like that but the psyche doesn’t combine

lots of bodies into another hole it’s a completely different thing it’s like youknow it’s like when you look at the emergence of social systems say completely different they’re emergentbut modernity didn’t gather together lots of feudal feudalism and build it’sjust change it comes to another level and what I think is happening with the psyche is that the psycho the biologicalsystem has evolved senses it has evolved to focus on whatmatters because that’s of great evolutionary benefit that’s what we experience as conscious all the rest weexperience as unconscious and then the process which has been going on for ever it canthen focus on that and that’s when it turns this whole new imaginal level arises and it’s not the flaw built on itit’s emerged from it it couldn’t have you couldn’t have the world of images until you’d have the experience ofSensations so it’s emergent it can only come by emergent that’s all I mean by

emergent by the way I just mean you couldn’t have this until you got that yeah I really so thatyou couldn’t have had you’re right the psyche until you got the senses and and the biological being conscious but it’s not another flaw it’s another aspect of the system which is arising you know it’s like the first sense is probably touch but sight isn’t built on

touch it’s another sense that developed and I think

the psyche is another sense

it’s a way of sensing the universe but it senses itself as well so it can sense its own processing and that arises as images

so so the two things I would say is I think I mean

I love Ken’s work

he’s very he’s done huge contribution but

I don’t think this the idea that the psyche is the inner aspect I think it’s a mistake

I think it’s missing that it’s a whole new level and and it’s absolutely essential to have that and

part of the reason that Ken doesn’t do that is because he’s got a load of spirituality at the beginning really with his whole life idea of involution so he’s really got it still in a Mythic context which is what I talked to him about when I filmed with him um so that’s why I think he’s he heis wrong and I also want to go look it’s not honic some things are honic but most of emergence isn’t

most of emergence is just new things new a system developing new new abilities new qualities the honic jumps are quite specific and quite rare so

the whole flaws thing is completely the wrong model and and what you’ve got is this evolving system on the hard disk of the universe the postivity and it’s developing to be able to do things and any system

I I wouldsay that

the whole evolutionary process has got kind of three aspects

so that and those three you know

Darwin stumbled ac across these three aspects so brilliantly with natural selection

but but but natural selection is only the biological level

obviously there whole physical level before that

so whatever the principles of evolution are they’re not just natural selection or genetics because there was nogenetics and I think

the principles are postivity and creativity the repetition and newness so things repeating but coming but never quite the same always coming into new relationships and then

sustainability which is any system has to fit in with the whole and when itcan’t that system will stop

that’s what happens everywhere you know it fascinating you know even with with like basic atoms they took quite a long time to be able to form and stay formed because they didn’t have any postivity I would say it’s chaotic

and then they formed and now they’re formed they’re just formed easy and that’s gone through

biology the same and and and and we can hold it together more and more

we’re all you know lived historically long lives already everyone here

and that’s developing and but

when it fails it will go

but the question is

is there a part of the system which can still function, because it it can still do what it does it can still —

the

the imaginal level is about working on this the level of the imaginos — it’s

that’s where it functions

it’s where it’s functioning right now

now also please don’t get me wrong I they are integrated like this right now you know you give me a sleeping tablet I will go out but what you see is as it par I mean

there’s another phenomenon I didn’t mention

when I was talking about near-death experiences which I’ve been studying a lot recently which fascinating which is terminal Lucidity which is well worth looking at

where the documentation is

it’s quite extensive again of people who have literally been had their or their brains are completely gone really and even and and then just before they die they become completely lucid

and it’s remarkably common

more common than you would possibly think

Psyche Independent from Brain: How Related?

so the whole relationship between the brain and the psyche I think is really up for grabs

how these two levels relate

and I would I would say as as an analogy that

The Body & Brain, Biological Processing/ Managment

the brain is functioning more like a interface, and that’s why it needs to be so complex because it’s first of all it’s doing all of this all of the biological level, which is huge running the body huge, so it’s it’s developed to do all of that

The Psyche Emerged from Body: Ideational Level; the ideational network

and then from it has come the psyche, which is this whole ideational level and they so the ideational network which is what the psyche is is interacting with the neurological Network which is what the body is

which is why

it functions as one thing but they are significantly different

they’re they’re different functions

that’s hence the analogy of looking at me and listening to me

they come together but they are different

and

it is possible you can have one without the other

more like that

thank you thank you very much Tim great question is

and something that I also am really interested in I thinkactually um Tim

we probably talked about that in in the podcast that we did as well because that’s a that that’s something I’m wrestling with in all this as well so thanks for uh uh

let’s go to Justin and then uh stina is that how you say your name uh yeah

so go ahead Justin

thanks thanks Brandon um so

Tim maybe 15 or 20 years ago I walked into this little new age bookstore in Calgary where I lived at the time and I asked the guy

what’s what’s really hot right now

like what uh what what are the

what’s some new ideas

what is a book that people are talking about

and he pointed me to this little book tiny little book uh I don’t remember the name of it but the invitation was to

imagine that you’re kind of like walking around in a dream

you could read this book in like an hour

and um that was my first encounter with you

nd based on what you’ve said there it is based on what you’ve said today I imagine that

that was the old you

that uh that you you know

some of the changes that you’ve spoken about

soum um

there’s just been so much I I would share

just a couple um uh references to space

and then I Iwant to try to maybe do a philosophical quibble with what you’re talking about that I’m probably not qualified to do

but um

The Telepathy Tapes Podcast about Autism Kids

I’ve been listening to the telepathy tapes lately and um there’s this podcast called the telepathy tapes it’s about kids with autism and how they seem to demonstrate this incredible capacity for telepathy

and um it talks about how a bunch of the kids uh from all over the world go to this place in the imaginal realm

I guess called the hill um where they’re able to communicate with each other and talk to each other

I don’t know if this is true haven’t looked into it enough but it’s just seems so interesting and it would kind of suggest what you mentioned earlier that

this imaginal realm doesn’t exist in space

and maybe time the way that we imagine it or that that we think of our our normal world and that also reminded me of um some of uh Kurt Leland’s work on um themulti-dimensional human where he Maps out like in great detail all these different bodies the subtle body and andmental body and budic body and causal body and how each of them go into thesedifferent Realms and there’s it’s like a whole map of all this different space and he talks about one of the skills youneed to to develop to like navigate all this territory is an understanding ofspace in this realm which is not like distant space it’s like a psychological space

so I found that very interesting

I don’t you know it’s it’s

it’s well beyond my personal experience but I find it interesting to read about and think about , if there’s actually people that have the ability to um kind of move through these spaces with that level of skill

but I was trying to hey JustinI I I by the

by the pause I had a feeling you were going to move on to the quibble

yes shall we shall we shall Ijust comment on what you’ve already said and then we’ll do the quibble

My Lucid Living Book Is Great But Wrong

yeah because what you said was really interesting first of all yes Lucid living um oh God I’m so proud of that book

it’s just such a shame it’s wrong

I I think what I did was that and through work I managed to distill down the essential message I I

Perennial Philosophy is Wrong? Experiencing “It” in 1 Hour, per Huxley

Most of my books are on what you would call a perennial philosophy approach to spiritual Traditions

drawing out their similarities very much in the spirit of of um alus Huxley and all the people that came after him

and then I really distilled it down to

this is it, and you can get it in an hour, and you can experience it.

And it worked and people really did get it and it took youinto that way of seeing things and it was lovely uh and then gradually uh itbegan to dawn on me that it wasn’t good enough

and it was wrong

and that’s where this new one’s come

so it’s been a radical

it’s been quite a of okay uh not just that one but all of the books

My Books Were Perennial and Good — But Wrong

[the Egodeath theory lately is a bit like that: Marketing It too much as a 1-dimensional over-Focus on Eternalism/ no-free-will, Only; Short-Changes the Balanced Component of Retaining Isaac, Everyday Egoic Thinking/ Shape of Experience incl. during peak mystic window: embrace and include – hard but i have to work hard to RE-ARTICULATE the Egodeath theory & its “Benefits”; What Diff?]

I think they’re good books but they they they articulate and I think what happened was

“I articulated it so well for myself that I could finally see what was wrong with it”

I articulated it so well for myself that I could finally see what was wrong with it

and because a lot of things that we don’t see what’s wrong with something it’s because it’s all a bit mystical

Against the Dogma Cliche that “Transcendent Knowledge is beyond words” [never held by the Egodeath theory]

and a bit oo so just I don’t understand it but that’s becauseI’m not good enough for I don’t understand it because it’s just beyond words

or you know all of that fudge

so you never actually get the chance to disagree with it, because it’s you can’t hold it

so I did get it

and then so that’s that then the

the kids who finally enough I just came across for the first time a couple of days ago haven’t looked into at all

but it gives me a chance to throw out

I’m throwing out a lot of Big Ideas very quickly

but I’m going to do it anyway , what the hell

I think we need to understand and

the psyche as a sense I think

the system has developed senses with which it reads the universe

systems are all in relationship to the universe

Freke STILL Sounds Like Usual “Unity Oneness Nondual Experience” Tripe of Beginner Level

they all read the universe

chemical systems read the universe and respond with you know with an explosion

all that sort ofstuff

relationality is the fundamental nature of the universe

everything is that one thing in relationship to itself as everything else

and we read we’ve learned

we’ve evolved to see, to read light

we’ve evolved to you know respond to Airwaves, to listen

and I think this

this other sigh sensing which is how we can read the hard disk of the universe

we can read the information

and so one of the things that I never asked and I never hear anyone ask is well

Experiencing Oneness[TM]

if you’re experiencing let’s say the Oneness of everything how do you experience that

you can’t see it or touch it

so how do you experience that

or if you experience all of these things anything in spirituality a vision, how are you seeing a vision, and what is it you’re seeing

it’s like we just it’s like well I think

it’s a sense

so when you’re reflecting on your own processing you’re sensing yourself

but I don’t think it’s just I don’t think it because it’s an ecology it’s not just yourself

that’s the easiest thing to sense and bit like the physical senses developed first with closeup touch and then basic sight and then you know and then it evolves

I think

the psyche is is developing as a sense

and what I see is that

some people are really good at doing

you know I’m

I seem to be better than most people for some reason

since I was a kid of of sensing that thing I call God

I I just can find it and not all the time but I can

and I’ve learned how to do it better

some people can’t do that so easily

I can find the Oneness

I don’t experience

I Can Tune into Dead People [= “evolve”?]

I can kind of tune into people who’ve passed on

but not like people

some people I know they can really do it

now there’s a lot of charlatans a lot so that makes it all very difficult

there’s a lot of scientific charlatans too mind you

there’s charlatans everywhere

and then so you get I love this little thumb that keeps coming out the screen the the uh is that so whatI’m suggesting it’s a sense so they are connecting but I I suspect we all are I suspect you are with me right now and if we really paid attention and focused on eachother which is one of the things I do with people online I gather people all around the world and we pay attention to each other and you can really go oh my God I’m actually connecting with you but not physically we’re on the other sideof the world you’re connecting and the when you said about it’s it’s space you

can create imaginal space but you’re connected with everyone who you have ayou in your life they could be on the other side of the world but you’re connected with them just like every ideayou have is connected with another idea that resonates with it everything is it’s connected through meaning anarrative in in the psyche and I think it’s perfectly possible that these kids are doing that but I also think we alldo it a bit and

then some people are really good and I think you know when when we

remember we are sensing the past but like everything else we can sense it badly and we have to understandit and we get it wrong and and some some of us you know I’m I I’m not not got a great memory canfind it sometimes but you know if you give me a clue I can home in on it and oh that I remember but there’s somepeople there’s 65 of them alive at the moment I believe who havehypoa who can remember everything literally everything so yousaid what did in 1975 in the morning what did you have for breakfast oh yes I had poached eggs and then I read thepaper the paper said you know it’s like and they’re right they can remember everything they’re that good to me atsensing the past they can do that I can do it a bitand I think the same with these psychic abilities all the rest of it or walking into a place and just going oh I’m sensing this place well not I’m not sensing it with my biological senses I’m sensing it and going this this place feels amazing or this place feels dark or there’s something wrong here or all of those things

I think we should take them seriously because the psyche is a sense and that’s what those kids are doing

quibble I so

all that resonates a lot with me the the so where I want to quibble is I was trying to parse out because I think I think

I heard the word emergent like seven or eight times in the first you know minute or two of thisdiscussion and I was like okay are we referring to emergence in like the technical “philosophy of mind” sense of like strong emergence of that we’re saying that

physics is the base layer of reality

no I’m not you’re not saying that

no I’m using it as a much more colloquial sense

okay so a lot the way that it’s that

that other sense of has become very popular relatively recently

really what I mean by it is much more like something new’s emerged

that’s all I mean I mean

something new has happened which couldn’t have happened without the thing that happened before it and and sometimes so

it’s the evolutionary process and i

In The evolutionary process there are moments of significant novelty in which a whole new thing is happening

so you know life started you know where did it start like hard to say isn’t it but it did and or whatever it is so that’s all I mean by it

I don’t mean strong emergence, weak emergence, anything like that

I and

I’m certainly not reductionist; the complete opposite.

so so there’s a whole this is a trouble language

A whole group of people who want to use the idea of emergence to shore up reductionism.

I want to use the idea of emergence to completely over o object to e reductionism

and to go what I’m saying is

there is more information in the universe now than there was before.

it cannot be reduced to the state before

the higher levels cannot be reduced absolutely not because they are more emergent they’re more thanthat’s how I’m using the word and and I I know the difficulty and I’m glad you brought it out yeah I I I I myexperience is I’m having trouble making sense of what you’re saying then because as I heard you talk it became more andmore it seemed more and more like that was what you were saying and I

I hope I haven’t confused you

just what do you think I’m saying

well it just seemed

it seemed like you were saying that mind did not exist at the beginning of the universe

yeah no it’s all emerged

yeah I think I’m saying

everything with any qualities whatsoever has emerged in one process of differentiation

Emerging^TM, Evolving^TM, Levels of Emergence^TM

[🤨👎 empty, meaningless, Marketing jargon, like possibilism^TM, eternalism^TM, the Egodeath theory^TM]

and that in that process we can talk about new things emerging

you could say evolving if you prefer just evolve move the word

what’s your ontology then what is the base lay of reality in in your view

that’s that’s what I’m trying to understand

yeah okay what I think we need to grasp is that

the further back the further to more foundational levels we go those levels we need to understand with maths and my guess is that

the Primal levels of emergence or Evolution or whatever we want to call that are mathematical

they’re what we study with maths and

it goes right the way back to the fundamental

and here I’m a bit you know it’s a bit like DSM or cabala or gnosticism or pythagoreanism

which goes oh look these are fundamental relationships that we study with maths

they’re archetypes and they will get fleshed out as all these other qualities that come out

which is why you know the world is full of maths

Fake Math Affectation, like 4D Spacetime Mysticism Sold as psychedelic eternalism — whatever that means 🤷‍♂️ <– probably same thing as Quantum Mysticism (didn’t Parmenides fabricate that myth?)

Sacred Geometry

and why the you know what’s the word um sacred geometry

and and the fact that

this is the Fibonacci sequence and because mathematics is the beginning the first level that’s going to lead to well currently it would be like the quantum level where you’re still not in time

you’re still not in you

Emergent 4D Spacetime

time is going to emerge, space is going to emerge from a mathematical level

but the mathematical level

if you go back and back and back

the simplest one is uh the bit this or that Duality, yin and yang

so you’ve what’s before that well

nothing’s before that

Formless^TM

but what that the yin and yang is is the relationship of something which is formless, so that would be in spiritual terms it would be nonu [nondual?]

or but so

when I say the one when I said earlier I just mean

One^TM, in Relationship^TM as Two^(TM??)

one, not one of one of anything just one

it’s one so

it starts with one but one is in relationship as two

and that’s going to give rise to all of this mathematical stuff and then actually the fact that that

The Universe Emerges^TM from One^TM – Too Complex for You to Understand, Words Cannot Express It [joke]

the universe is going to emerge from that

I won’t go into that that’s too complex the but that so so

my basic ontology

would be there’s something

there is something which exists but is undifferentiated

what is it what’s nothing what qualities does it have

it doesn’t have any qualities and if you look around you now and you have that intuition if you can sense the Oneness of the universe

Freke Continues Making ‘Oneness Unity Nonduality’ the Reference for Religious Experience

[DESPITE HIMSELF HE’S STILL CENTERING FOCUS ON THE “ONENESS UNITY” BEGINNER MODEL OF ALTERED STATE EXPERIENCE]

the fact that it is a universe if you do that now and you go yeah but

what is the Oneness

what

Oneness Makes My Thoughts [= controls my personal control system? could we be actually getting somewhere relevant, here? or is this just an accident like infinite monkeys typing?]

what’s the thing that makes the floor and the air and my arms and my thoughts and everything one

well just that it exists

being so you could say

Oneness^TM of Being^TM (But there’s no quality to it) [i agree: a low-quality utterance, Tim]

there’s a Oneness of being

but there’s nothing I mean

there’s no quality to it

it’s kind of what the I think the

this was what the Buddhist mean when they the

The Isness^TM of Things: An Isness Which Everything Shares, and “It” is developed from “that” [??? What Is It?, asks Watts, & me]

Zen Buddhists talk about the isness of things

it’s like there’s there’s an isness which everything shares

and

it’s developed from that

and

it’s also why I think

Meditation [not Psychedelics]

if you’ve had this experience particularly in meditation

I get this where if you really focus on the ground it’s empty it’s void

it’s like that

it is nothing because it has no qualities

and

that’s where it’s

that’s the whole again the Buddhist thing of the being

yeah

the emptiness the void

but that void is really has become everything

Ken Wilber Yada Vibes: Big Framework, No Engine [-cm]

it’s that formless has evolved into every form

so if you

if you if you shift your attention from The Emptiness to the fullness it’s like it’s all one thing and I’m arising

it’s a the the one thing is as Tim is meeting the one thing as Justin and

that that’s a big shift in how you see yourself because you’re suddenly in real intimate connection with everything

Giveaway Word “Connection” Reveals That this is the “Unity” Paradigm [like Ken Wilber = the “Advaita Meditation Huckster” Paradigm, at Core]

you’re not just this little bubble of skin bag as Alan Watts used to say

you’re you’re you’re

everything is this one thing turning into everything and meeting itself in, but but as you;

not it’s not like it’s a thing

The Ego Tunnel; Philosophy and the Mind Sciences Journal (Thomas Metzinger)

https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/0465020690/ —

I used to have this kind of more of an image that it was like looking through you like you were a tunnel and it was behind

Non-Branching, Snake-Shaped Worldline Frozen in 4D Spacetime Block Mysticism [FDML]

but

I don’t think that.

I think it’s as you you know

it’s Arisen as Justin and there’s Justin he’s on the Leading Edge of the [ __ emergent? evolving?] Universe

this is 13.8 billion years to get to Justin

and he’s right you know it’s like wow

that level of richness that

Levels^TM, Man [compare: in psychedelic eternalism^TM, you end up {rider on donkey on path}; surface level of experience = possibilism-thinking; underlying real level = eternalism-reality; end up w/ qualified possibilism-thinking above eternalism actuality]

we exist on on these different levels

fantastic thanks for the verification

but it is I know

it is pretty radical because the the the Mythic

The Mythic Thing Has Been Around a Long Time – u dont say? 🤯

the Mythic thing has been around for a very very very very very long time so the

The intuition has been

there must be a something

but to get to the point where we go

it’s not like that you have to think in radically different ways so to say you know but what did the one

The One^TM Became the Two

why did the one become the two

it’s a bit like going

does fall like chocolate?

it’s like what there’s a he

there a crazy question

there’s a completely wrong question, because at this level there isn’t any of that

but it will become all of that , which is why we’re here looking back at it

there we go so

great questions yeah

are was that uh anything else Justin are you all set

uh all set I’ll post a couple thoughts in the chat but

please do

great thanks J really great comments let’s go to s tina [?] who’s been most patiently waiting uh and then um

it’s already 1:30 on the Eastern Seaboard um so uh we can start to draw to a close a little bit after that

but if anyone does have any questions still that they’d like to ask if

just go ahead and put up your hand and uh maybe we’ll have some closing thoughts briefly with you and me Tim uh and then call it a day but go aheadstina yeah thank you um I’m in Sweden so it’s half past eight11 s here and uh this book set me off to follow you Tim uh itwas really an important book for starting a process that has been going on for over 20 yearsnow um and I’m working with a collective H and

rupert sheldrake morphic Fields

I’m also very inspired by rupert sheldrick his morphic Fields

so you can say that I’m actually taking the morphic field as a first person perspective

so it’s about we were talking about the group that

we can sense each other what we are together

and what I do is that I sense what I call the Embrace of the group so it’s or the morphic field

so it’s not the individuals it’s the collective

And that is amazing what we can do

so um

you can also sense into the Embrace of humanity Planet universe

so these I mean we can [Ken?] Wilber it will be holl um [holog?]

they are realities from when when we work with them and we

they’re very different and we sense them

I have E. S. P. of the Universe, So Have a Spirituality that’s Grounded in This Reality

and for me that is much more that’s really important because it’s it’s a spirituality that is grounded in this reality

so I don’t have this the Soul byitself in another way but I really see that with us taking those perspectives we are changing what we belong

what we already belong to all this physical biological cultural levels

um so I resonate with with a lot of what you say but

I have a more of an integrated view of these of the at the spiritual subtle pure awareness levels are actually aspects of the whole reality and not

is there is a Oneness

but

There Is Many Onenesses

there is also many Oneness

is all the way if you can um

You can call any hon [?] or morphic field a what experiences it as a Oneness

and it’s also people get it

and um they are there and they are real

so just but so so

I love that I mean I mean I I

I probably have come to see things in a different way now

I don’t think there is any such thing as pure awareness

I think that’s just doesn’t exist

and and I think that was just a way of seeing things that I passed through um but I do think uh I’mI’m certainly seeing everything is integrated

everything you know when I talk about

The Soul Is Part of the One^TM Process^TM Becoming^TM [not wrong, but not very helpful]

the soul doesn’t go off anywhere; it’s all part of the one process becoming it’s just another level of the same process of becoming

and and it and it and

It’s Origined from It, So, Process 😑<-🤨

the biological level is inherent in it [oneness?] because it’s origined from it and and the physical level

and

it’s one thing

it’s all one process

but the stuff that I I want to really focus in on um stina is

the practice you talking about because they sound quite similar to things I’ve been exploring for whatever it is 25years

which is because what

Freke Lexicon: The Psyche Senses, Tune In

to use the language I’ve been developing

I would say

you’re sensing that’s using

that’s what the psyche does

it senses

and you can tune in

one of the things which I do is

We Talk Philosophy on Sundays, to Evolve^TM and Emerge^TM, to E.S.P.-Sense Each Other & Our Established Collective Group (and call that “the divine super-soul”)

I get together every Sunday night (not tomorrow actually but) every other Sunday night with a group of people from all over the world, a small group of people and we either talk philosophy like we’ve done today

or we do these practices which involve things like you’re describing which involve being able to um sense each other and the collective that we form

and then very much what I’m suggesting with um what

we experience as the Divine

let’s say or the

the Super Soul is that Collective

um but in a in a

in a very established and deep way, not like the collective that we’ve formed here today

but like a collective that’s been forming for some time now and which is well established

and we can touch into to it and move away from it and come back to it so in that way I reallyresonate a lot with with what you’re exploring and and like I said the idea of the morphic fields is when I’m

talking about the hard disk of the universe or positivity system that’s very much um that’s Rupert likes thefield metaphor

I don’t mind the field metaphor but I don’t necessarily think we need it because it’s not spatial

um Ithink it’s the the thing it’s it’s

it’s closer to what David Bohm [hidden variables] called the implicate and the explicate

you know that

there something behind

[ie underlying level hidden under the hood]

like now when I’m looking at the screen, it’s like there’s something behind this which is making this happen

and I think

science has been very much about exploring what it is behind this and understanding it

which is why we can now do amazing things

we understand what’s behind it

and then

spirituality is the same but on the level of the psyche

you know you get to see the The Superficial levels of the —

or the individual levels let call them rather than superficial

relatively easily

but even seeing yourself is hard isn’t it

just to see your own

you know I’m 65 and I’m seeing new things about myself all the time probably now more than ever

it’s not easy to even sense your own processing

but you can

and then you can also widen it out

like you’re suggesting we can do it connect with each other, connect with the

the way in which we form a group these are really important things to do I think and for me is the really important thing is the planetary

I think that if you Humanity are going to survive on this planet we need to become

we know intellectually I mean

know all this that we are living on around planet and the system but to really sense it

to sense a deep belonging to the planet

I think that’s that’s so crucial right now

yeah uh so for me that is the emergent level

um yeah

Sense the planetary awareness

the planetary awareness

yeah I mean I I just want say much I love that but

I also want to just reiterate just in case anyone has misunderstood me and I’ve misled anyone when I talk about the level of the imagin [imaginal?]

I it’s not going off anywhere

it’s absolutely arising and it’s

it’s no more than you’re talking to me now

but

the fact that we’re having a conversation in the psyche

We Converse in the Psyche — and Physical & Biological TOO! 🤯👍

really that’s where it’s all happening

doesn’t mean that we’re not physical or biological; we are and and and that

there’s a whole domain which is of that level

doesn’t mean it’s not connected to an influencing all the time

and that

when I talk about the super system what we experience as God it isn’t gone off anywhere I think it’s interacting with this all the time

I think

When We Talk Together, God-Oneness Is All Levels Interacting

the whole thing is interacting

all these levels are interacting

that’s the key

of course

and and

that’s what we and that’s why we need to focus on those things

yeah thank you yeah beautiful

Freke Book The Laughing Jesus

thanks de thanks for reminding me of the Laughing Jesus that’s a long time ago beautiful yeah important book for me at the time

too just in the interest of time so maybe we go to Joe just because he hasn’t asked a question yet

and then if you’ve got a quick question we can go to you

and then we can uh start to come to a close

so go ahead Joe

I Only Talk to Our Sunday ICU Collective

yeah I didn’t actually actually I have questions but I’m not gonna ask them because

I actually attend the ICU meetings every Sunday and I get to ask those questions

but uh a a

Experiential Retreat at SkyMeadow

a large part ofwhat made this happen was the uh attempt to bring an experiential retreat to SkyMeadow so I just wanted to sort of uh

put out a Mini commercial that is stillin the planning it is still my intention to do so and uh uh

Do Philosophy in the Experiential Realm

Tim is very much taking this philosophy into the experiential realm

and uh so that’s whatwe hope to bring to Sky meadow

so back to Nish with a I’m sure a really great question

yeah I’ll just say I’ll just on that point um t

hanks yeah

we’d love to get Tim out here at the sky Meadow sometime

and as you said Joe we’re kind of we’re still kind of planning see how that could happen

we’re also thinking of

I think this is still on the works of doing another one of these I believe in March

so um I’ll have more information on that

but uh yeah

Sky Meadow, various thinkers communities

we’re just really trying uh at Sky Meadow to weave into all these various different um thinkers communities

TheAvenues – Community?

and and uh you know uh TheAvenues where this kind of thought is happening

and um yeah come together and speaking of uh of um what was the word that was used

to to go collectives or uh communities

yeah anyway we’re trying to build that out in a rich way so um yeah

hopefully we can get Tim from across the pond at some point

I I it it probably might be helpful just for folks to understand is that um

most of the focus for most of my life has been on experiential

the

the you know

recently I’ve given myself over the last 10 years

but even then you know I

I call myself a philosopher

but you know I think really I’m a big love junkie

I just want us to come in into that beautiful beautiful communion with each other and which you experiences this enormous love

because that’s the point of all the philosophy

VAGUE, “love is the point of Philosophy” – Love of Transcendent Knowledge, I should hope [cm]

for me that it supports that and helps us understand why that’s so important so I I I I

The stuff we do experientially together is the heart and soul of it

you know that’s

the that’s hugely important

Yeah all right go ahead again Nish andthen we’ll uh we’ll come to a close thank you I’ll ask the question but if it’s going to take too long we can leaveit for another day um

if you’re talking about the imaginal realm as something that is that emerges and if the imaginal realm is the key to understanding um for example near-death experiences or or or rebirth

and so on

/”Emer

Is “Emergence” a Magic Token Word in Place of Comprehension?

does that mean that these after death or afterlife experiences are only accessible to sentient beings who have reached a certain level of emergence as opposed to being a default for everybody?

yeah great question um

my own guess

all of this is my own guess

really you know all of it’s like

what’s the most plausible thing that I can arrive at given what I’ve experienced?

and what I know would be that certainly

all human beings are well established now in the psyche

[might be context: lowest = body, mid-level= psyche/mind; highest is Spirit –cm]

and that’s probably been the case for a long time

beyond that I I I’m not sure but um

that would be my intuition

I think it’s kind of something I think the Ithink

Key Dogma/ Jargon: “Evolution” (magic word)

the process of evolution has just moved on to a new level like it did with life from matter

say a whole new level and that

“Cycle of Rebirth”

the the cycle of you know like rebirth and all that

it’s just

the latest way of evolving because the biological level is fantastic moved really relatively fast because of life and death

because if you got death you keep getting you know reproduction you get rid of all the old ones and you fill it with lots of new ones

it’s a fantastic way to evolve species and that’s what’s happened

but it’s a terrible way to evolve individuals because they just keep dying

and I think what’s happened is that

as we’ve evolved it’s now about the individual

the the

it’s the indivindidual that’s evolving

and that’s why the it’s worked out a way like it worked out a way to how to be alive

Main Theme: Do Not Lose the Individual (or devmt of the indiv.) During Egodeath Enlightenment

it’s worked out a way how to not lose the individual

and let the individual keep moving

that would be my guess

and that I I would guess that’s true of what

anyone who’s developed that has that level of individuality

which I think is certainly everyone I’ve ever met so be my my my guess

thank you very much Tim thank you it’s been a real Delight

been some fantastic questions guys

it’s been so lovely I can see you all on the screen it’s

it’s like being in the room with you which is just great

yeah these have been really amazing questions um

this was delightful thank you everyone for contributing your your ideas and your questions

this is um just what I thought what I hoped it would be

and just a couple of final thoughts then

well one I’ll just say for myself and for you know

what these things are

again to mention Sky Meadow again

I just love when I encounter a new thinker who is engaging with stuff I’m engaging in

but also maybe going in different directions proposing ideas I never thought of

presenting models in a different way than I’d organized them

where I’ve found organized before

and so that to me is really stimulating and generative

and uh yeah

Tim has been one of those thinkers and so there’s so much that this brings up for me that raises a whole new set of questions

uh you know some of which have even been proposed in here

and uh

I’m still wrestling Tim with your work and your ideas

but I think that that’s part of what’s so fun about this is seeing these things from A New Perspective

and hopefully we can you know again bring these multiple ideas and perspectives together and try to have a more flourishing Community conversation that’s kind of tackling uh these ideas from these different angles and having that kind of uh intellectual foment thatis is so rich

so that’s a big part of the mission of Sky meadow

and I think that

the work that Tim is doing is directly related to that

thank you Tim for again just the time for your work

Tim’s Podbook

um one last thing I definitely do want to just have you speak to briefly is your current work uh is the Podbook

say a little bit about that um and what you’re up to and uh yeah yeah

thank you Brendan for making this happen

and Joe who who was also very involved in making this happen

um uh if uh hopefully we’ll we’ll get the chance to do it again we can go deeper we can spread out into different areas I think

having these conversations with people who are moved to in this direction is is really important so it’s been hanging out with you uh

if you um want to do more of this with me before we we get together again through BrendanI like I said

I do this every Sunday so if you go to my website timfreke.com

http://timfreke.com

because it’s such a weird name you will find me

um and uh you

ICU Sunday Meetings

you can come along to the ICU and pop in of a Sundayevening it’s the evening here so it’s uh earlier in America like it’s evening nowfor me um and we have people literally from all over the world

but it’s a small small enough group that we can really connect like this

and and and again like you were saying stina you know it

people have formed into a collective and it astonishes me that when

we sit and meditate at the beginning

it’s just like so it’s so strong it just wow how what’s going on here something’s happening so there’s that the other thing which um I would love you to engage with if you are interested is um that

Tim Freke Video Podbook on YouTube, His Latest 8 Years’ Work/ Idea Development

I have this podbook coming out it will be released as video on YouTube

it will be free I’m going to give it away it’s been eight years’ work just about every day

and um I just want to get it out there

I’m recording it literally yesterday, the day before

and

I hope it will come out um in February uh it’s going to be soon so if you’re interested in that please

or my

uh that’s the best way

[I] CU you’ll definitely get about hear about it then

but also you can

subscribe on YouTube or is will be available as an audio podcast as well but it will be video really

uh so that’s what I’m up to andum it’s the the attraction for me is

I can take you I can take you through the ideas like I did today

but I can take it through okay

get this idea

and my aim is that I’m Loos it enough that you can then judge it for yourself you’ve got it

you go

okay I see what he say saying

what do I think of that

and

how does that relate to my experience

so I’m working as hard as I can to get it across with the same with with that Lucidity

awesome yeah and I’m really looking forward to that because as you’ve said you have changed and evolved in your own thinking on on these things

and I both really respect that when people can be like yeah

“I did this whole thing, but now actually I think that’s all wrong”; learning and updating

yeah I did this whole thing but now actually I think that’s all wrong

like that shows learning and updating and it’s uh uh commendable

uh H

but yeah so

Latest Update Patch to Tim Freke’s OS

I’m looking forward to the most recent um uh you know update patch to Tim freaks uh operating system

funny enough Brendan I’ve got a video coming out probably I think next Friday

it’ll be in my newsletter and on YouTube

having a conversation with somebody who has known me for a very long time going through what the hell happened

how did you change your mind

like what was the journey that has ended up here

so yeah well I’m really looking forward to yeah seeing where you’re at with all this and going through that and would love to have you on the menam modern podcast[?] to talk about that when that comes out

but all right well why don’t we call this

there

this is amazing

thanks again Tim so much uh

again thanks Joe thank youfor uh everyone for all of your wonderful questions

and and what you brought into this and uh

stay tuned to the you know to the general space

because I’ll also post things in terms of this recording and uh

our follow-up conversation that will be happening in March

and other things happening so um yeah looking forward to all the things thank you so much Godspeed take care everyone till next time

English (auto-generated) All From Brendan Graham Dempsey

/ end of video transcript

Cognitive Phenomenology of Mind Manifestation

By Author, not by Cybermonk. For scholarly commentary and markup, only; not for publication.

Contents:

Introduction
Analogy and the description of experience
From analogy to cognitive phenomenology
Mind manifestation and transformation of belief networks
References
Biography
Motivation for this webpage

Introduction

written by Author, for markup by Cybermonk

Psychedelic experiences typically involve intense temporary alterations in perception, and commonly lead to radical and permanent transformations in belief.

The LSD experience was described by Watts (1, p.44) as: “revelations of the secret workings of the brain, of the associative and patterning processes, the ordering systems which carry out all our sensing and thinking”,

similarly Grof (2, p.38) described the LSD experience as: “complex revelatory insights into the nature of existence…typically accompanied by a sense of certainty that this knowledge is ultimately more relevant and “real” than the perceptions and beliefs we share in everyday life.”

In this essay I will be examining the themes that are contained in descriptions of psychedelic tripping such as these.

I will present a generalised phenomenological model which relates psychedelic experience to the brain’s associative and patterning process, by examining the most standard and prominent features of such experiences and inferring general principles from them.

These standard features of tripping are the alterations in visual perception, and the strong tendency for transformation/reformation of core belief structures (‘life-changing’ experiences) during the course of psychedelic exploration.

My aim is to examine these features of psychedelic phenomenology

(that is, the subjective mental content of psychedelic trip experiences)

for the purposes of highlighting the underlying alterations in cognitive processing that are responsible for the psychedelic effect, and thereby to capture the original insight behind the label ‘psychedelic’ (or ‘mind-revealing’).

—

A major theme in what follows is the phenomenological comparison of the ordinary (non-intoxicated) state of consciousness with the non-ordinary psychedelic state of consciousness, for the purposes of highlighting the specific peculiarities of the latter.

During a psychedelic trip session, the mind (or at least, certain major aspects of the mind) becomes explicitly manifested such that it is made available for conscious inspection; by implication then, the mind is not manifested in ordinary, sober consciousness.

The question arises, therefore, of what exactly is meant by the ‘mind’ in this specific context, and what it means to say that the mind becomes temporarily ‘manifested’ in the psychedelic state of consciousness;

what exactly is the thing that can be clearly perceived during intense psychedelic tripping, which is hidden during ordinary experience.

In what follows I will offer a substantive answer to this question.

—

This essay is intended as a basic conceptual model of psychedelic experiencing, using the general approach of phenomenology (the study of conscious appearances).

It should be interpreted first and foremost as an approximation for the phenomenological content of experience, any metaphysical assertions are secondary to this main aim.

There are a few books dealing explicitly with the phenomenology of drug-induced altered states, these include Huxley’s (3) ‘Doors of perception’ and Shanon’s (4) ‘Antipodes of the Mind’.

Also, the literature in psychiatric phenomenology provides some useful concepts which can be applied to the drug-induced experiences, especially the writing of Sass (5 & 6) and Stanghellini (7).

Analogy and the description of experience

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Analogy is a very useful tool for understanding the cognitive dynamics of psychedelic tripping; likening mental phenomena to physical situations and occurrences elucidates the structure of the perceptual alteration.

I will now briefly run through several of the most pertinent analogies and explain how they can be applied to psychedelic altered-state phenomenology.

Plato’s (8) famous ‘cave allegory’ likens ordinary perception to staring at shadows on the back wall of a cave; a perspective that most people are fully immersed in most of the time.

It is only the philosopher who is privileged to get a glimpse of reality from the higher-dimensional perspective, when he turns his head around to see the light at the mouth of the cave and discovers that the shadows are actually flat lower-dimensional projections of a deeper, hidden actual reality.

Plato’s suggestion is that a person who had never seen beyond the shadows would come to believe that the mere shadows constitute actual reality itself (as opposed to a lower-dimensional projection of actual reality), the altered perspective experienced by the philosopher presents a radical challenge to that belief.

—

In a similar vein, ordinary perception can be likened to to staring at reflections in the surface of a perfectly still pool of water (the mind) where the surface of the pool is invisible.

The reflections remain perfectly solid and convincing/realistic so long as the surface of the water/mind is undisturbed, the psychedelic trip-effect is like causing a splash in the water so that the surface is distorted and becomes visible;

the reflections then ripple, undulate and fragment, and reveal themselves to be mere reflections as opposed to being the actual things that they reflect.

Albert Hoffman (9), the discoverer of LSD, described how during his bicycle ride home after his first deliberate LSD self-administration: “Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror”.

The same as in Plato’s example, a person who had only ever seen the reflections, and who had never experienced the surface-manifesting psychedelic ‘splash’ effect, would believe in the concrete reality of the reflections, and in the illusion of direct perceptual access to concrete reality.

—

Jackson (10) has written about the psychological effect of radically new experience; he constructs a thought-experiment involving a character ‘Fred’ who possesses the ability to perceive one additional colour (a subdivision of red) that nobody else can see.

This serves as an analogy for psychedelic tripping, because the discovery of the psychedelic perspective provides new information that is not available in the ordinary state of consciousness.

Jackson suggests that Fred would be unable to communicate his experience to anyone who had not seen the extra colour; in much the same way, a tripper cannot communicate meaningfully about his psychedelic experiences to someone who had never had the experience.

Verbal trip reports cannot fully convey what it is like to trip, to truly know the experience a person has to have it themselves.

It could be argued from a behaviouristic point of view that what one learns on discovering psychedelic tripping is simply an ability to recall and describe the experiences, a person who had never had the experience, will be unable to recall and describe it.

Hoffman (11) has similarly likened the discovery of psychedelic tripping to an adolescent’s discovery of the experience of sexual climax.

—

Whether psychedelics cleanse the doors of perception or ripple the surface of consciousness, the value of these analogies lies in the overall picture they provide of how the psychedelic effect works to reveal the operational structures of the mind.

Analogies such as these serve to model and reflect the two core effects of psychedelic tripping; the temporary alteration in perception, and the permanent transformation of belief structures.

From analogy to cognitive phenomenology

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The various structural analogies can be translated into the language of philosophy of mind.

According to Marr’s (12) theory of visual perception, the 2-dimensional array of coloured light information on the surface of the eyes is translated by the mind into a complex, multi-levelled mental representation of the 3-dimensional physical environment.

Our external environment is illuminated by light which is reflected off of the surfaces of physical objects, some of the reflected light hits the surface of our eyes, and this 2-dimensional pattern of light of the surface of the eyes is processed and translated into a 3-dimensional mental image of the surrounding environment.

Fodor (13) makes a similar claim in his theory on mental modularity, according to which the brain contains dedicated modules for processing the information that is received as input from the body’s sensory organs; the output of these modules is the detailed mental image of the physical environment.

It is the mental image which is directly revealed to consciousness, so our ordinary conscious perception is inherently representational, we perceive 3-dimensional physical reality indirectly via mental symbols.

Hoffman (14) uses the terms ‘explicit representationalism’ and ‘dissociated cognition’ to describe the psychedelic perceptual/cognitive mode;

perception is representational at all times, but in the ordinary perceptual modality the mental representations behave so predictably and consistently (- they are so tangibly realistic) that they are tacitly conflated (or associated) with the mind-independent realities that they represent.

—

Hoffman (14) suggests that during a psychedelic trip the mind adopts the metaperceptive point of view, from this vantage point the distinction between the subjective mental representations and objective physical reality is explicitly revealed to the mind;

physical objects look less solid and realistic during a trip, they cease to appear as mind-independent objective entities and take on a cartoon-like character.

A psychedelic trip is induced by altering the brain’s endogenous chemistry via externally introduced chemicals, yet the altered visual effects are perceived as actual qualities of external objects (along with their shape, colour etc.).

Huxley (15, p.12) conveyed this idea in his description of his first mescaline trip, by describing how his trousers appeared to him in his altered state as follows:

“Those folds in the trousers-what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the grey flannel-how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous!. . . the folds of my grey flannels were charged with ‘is-ness’.”

Note how Huxley directly attributes these fantastic qualities to his actual trousers, and not to his own perception of his trousers.

—

The physical surfaces of solid objects are commonly observed to flow, undulate and ripple like the surface of a liquid when psychedelic chemicals are introduced into the brain;

it follows logically from this that what the mind normally holds to be external, mind-independent concrete existence, is actually a deceptively detailed mental appearance.

There is no alternative way to account for the observation that an alteration of brain chemistry causes alterations in external reality other than by postulating that what we refer to as ‘external reality’ is in fact internal/mental in origin;

psychedelic visual alterations combined with basic reasoning conclusively demonstrate the principle of representationalism.

During a psychedelic trip, each person can observe for themselves that an alteration of internal neurochemistry results in a tangible alteration in the perceptual qualities of the external world, this naturally leads an inquiring mind to question the origin of perceptual phenomena, and the metaphysical status of the subject/object distinction.

This is why the temporary perceptual alteration can result in a permanent transformation of the mind’s conceptual framework; the psychedelic effect challenges our most basic assumptions about the nature of perception.

—

The phenomenologist Husserl (16) held that the ordinary (natural, habitual) manner in which the mind perceives reality is shaped by implicit background assumptions that give a coherent structure to our experience

(this idea is much in line with the general Kantian philosophical framework),

when these assumptions are made explicit and bracketed off by a process of private philosophical reflection which he called the phenomenological epoche, the mind’s ‘sphere of ownness’ is revealed, the raw subjective datastream prior to the mind’s conceptualising activity.

The psychiatrist Depraz (17) has likened Husserl’s phenomenological epoche to the process of psychotic mental dis-integration in schizophrenic patients,

suggesting that such experiences constitute a “phenomenological exploration of consciousness”, and that schizophrenia consists essentially in an “enhanced aptitude to perform the epoche”.

Freud (18, p.90) anticipated the comparison of psychosis and mind-manifestation when he compared the mind to a crystal, and used this comparison to suggest that observation of psychotic/schizoid mental processes can shed light on the structure of the sane mind.

According to Freud’s analogy a whole, undamaged crystal contains a complex internal structure which remains invisible so long as the crystal remains whole and undamaged.

However when a crystal shatters, the shape of the resulting shards of broken crystal reveal this (previously hidden) internal structure.

Similarly, the internal structure of the mind is invisible so long as it retains its wholeness and integrity; the mental shattering/fragmentation which occurs during periods of psychosis reveals its underlying structure in the “lines of cleavage” along which it falls apart.

According to Freud, the madman possesses a somewhat privileged perspective compared to a sane man because of his ability to perceive the hidden mental structures which are hidden to the sane man’s perspective.

This analogy of Freud’s is readily applicable to the phenomenological model of drug induced mind manifestation that I am outlining here.

—

The psychiatrist Osmond (19), who was one of the earliest scientific investigators of LSD and who is responsible for creating the word ‘psychedelic’, observed that the mental dynamics involved in schizophrenic psychosis have crucial similarities to psychedelic tripping.

It was for this reason that LSD was first labelled as ‘psychotomimetic’ (psychosis mimicking), and only later re-labelled ‘psychedelic’.

So Depraz’ (17) insight about the comparison of Husserl’s epoche to schizophrenic mental dis-integration can be extended to shed light on psychedelic mental alteration.

The heightened perspective of transcendental subjectivity, which is a new field of awareness that is revealed after exercising the epoche

(and, if Depraz’ comparison is valid, also during periods of schizophrenic psychosis)

is equivalent to the perspective of explicit representationalism that is revealed in a psychedelic trip;

the core implicit assumption that is made explicit and bracketed off is the assumption that consciousness is directly in contact with external objects, or equivalently, the assumption of straightforward identity between mental representations and their referents.

Sass (6) and Stanghellini (7) both employ the term ‘hyperreflexivity’ to describe the core peculiarity of the schizophrenic patient’s subjective experiences during periods of psychosis, and this term can be used equivalently to describe the temporary cognitive alteration of the psychedelic trip experience.

For Sass (6, p.37) cognitive hyperreflexivity contrasts with ordinary cognition because of its intensely inward-pointing orientation, such that: “the ego disengages from normal forms of involvement with nature and society, often taking itself, or its own experiences, as its own object”.

Similarly Stanghellini (7, p.165) suggests that in the hyperreflexive mind: “the ‘I’ breaks down into an experiencing I-subject contemplating an experienced I-object” such that: “the act of perception itself turns out to be an explicit intelligible object”.

Again here we see a clear indication of the general idea that altered state experience involves a specific kind of dissociation in the mind between symbol and referent, a cognitive process of representation which normally operates silently in the background is brought intensely into the foreground of awareness.

—

With this model of psychedelic experiencing in mind, it is worth pointing out that the word ‘hallucinogen’ which is sometimes used to denote psychedelic drugs is misleading, insofar as it implies that the effect of the drug is to induce hallucinations that are not present in the ordinary state of consciousness.

What is actually happening in a psychedelic trip is that a certain hallucinatory (or illusory, mistaken) aspect of our ordinary experience

(our tacit conflation of the mind-dependent internal perceptual image with the mind-independent external world)

becomes explicitly apparent, which is merely implicit (and therefore typically taken for granted and not noticed) during ordinary experience.

In his exhaustive compendium of phenomenological alterations that are observed in ayahuasca sessions, Shanon (4, p.205) includes:

“the assesment, very common with ayahuasca, that what is seen and thought during the course of intoxication defines the real, whereas the world that is ordinarily perceived is actually an illusion.”.

Similarly Watts (1, p.15) likens psychedelia to the transformations of consciousness that are undertaken in Taoism and Zen, which he says is:

“more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease…not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions”.

Psychedelic drugs are often referred to as ‘teachers’ (particularly the plant-based drugs such as ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms), so this can be understood as the core lesson that they teach,

– they reveal the fundamental cognitive operation of fusing together representation and referent, this is the sense in which ‘mind’ becomes ‘manifested’ during a trip.

—

Hoffman (20) states that the representational nature of mind is obscured in our ordinary perceptual modality by the high degree of stability and consistency in the way that mental representations behave

(for example, solid objects remain firmly solid), which creates the strong impression that mental phenomena are concretely existing (and therefore non-mental) entities,

and that consciousness directly perceives mind-independent reality so that perception is not mediated by mental representations; this is the real meaning of a ‘hallucination’ insofar as it applies to hallucinogenic drugs.

The hallucinatory aspect of perception is exposed by the psychedelic trip-effect because the ordinary stability and consistency of the representations is noticeably diminished during a trip, solid objects appear much less solid, physical reality takes on a fluid appearance.

Mind manifestation and transformation of belief networks

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In addition to the temporary perceptual alterations observed during psychedelic trip sessions, another important aspect of psychedelic phenomenology is a kind of radical psychological restructuring;

an [really, really, really] intense trip can be a life-transforming experience which leads to a major overhaul of a person’s internal framework of beliefs (Hoffman (21) calls this framework the mental worldmodel).

Thagard (22) has comprehensively modelled the process of psychological paradigm transformation;

when new information comes to light that cannot be accounted for or explained by an established belief network, the entire network must undergo revision in order to accommodate the new information.

For example, someone who had lived their entire life in a black-and-white environment would believe implicitly that there are no other colours since they have no way of perceiving them.

Such a person would experience a drastic disproof of that implicit belief, if they are suddenly exposed to the world of colour for the first time (like Jackson’s (10) thought-experiment character Mary, who is suddenly shown a red rose after spending a lifetime in black-and-white).

This is comparable to the mental transformation that is undergone when a person becomes acquainted with psychedelia;

the central difference between the pre and post psychedelic belief configurations, is that the new configuration accommodates the possibility of psychedelic experience

(it accommodates the perceptual dissociation between symbol and referent).

—

The epistemological dynamics that occur during the process of waking up from a vivid dream provide a close analogy for psychedelic mental transformation;

when fully immersed in a dream world one is not aware that one is dreaming, so the contents of dream-consciousness are taken to be simply real, the subject is not aware that his surrounding environment is a mentally projected and imaginary.

After waking up, when reflecting back on the dream, the mental contents are immediately re-interpreted as unreal, imaginary mental projections in light of the new experience of waking consciousness (“it was just a dream”).

Similarly, upon perceiving directly the symbol/referent distinction in the psychedelic state of consciousness, the phenomenal content of ordinary consciousness is reinterpreted in the light of the new information that is provided by the heightened psychedelic perspective.

Every psychedelic trip lasts for a certain duration then ends as the chemicals are metabolised by the body, so the psychedelic perspective which reveals manifest phenomena as projected mental representations is only experienced on a temporary basis,

but if a person is able to fully grasp and remember the psychedelic insights after the trip ends (and become generally acquainted with the intense altered experiential modality), then the mind is permanently transformed.

—

The psychedelic belief revision is held in place by the memory of the transformative psychedelic experience, this memory provides a constant reminder which prevents the old pre-psychedelic set of beliefs/assumptions from re-establishing itself.

The existence of the altered-state modality of dissociated/hyperreflexive cognition presents a fundamental overrider to pre-established belief networks, which forces an overhaul of those networks.

The axiomatic basis of the pre-psychedelic, experientially naïve mental worldmodel (essentially, the belief in straightforward identity between mental representations and their referents) is critically undermined by transformative psychedelic experience.

Per Thagard (22) this undermining of a metaphysical model necessitates a systematic restructuring of the model, adding crucial qualifiers to foundational assumptions;

in this case the qualifiers concern the existence of an experience which seems to disprove the assumed identity of representation and referent.

—

References

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1. Watts A. The Joyous Cosmology; Adventures in the chemistry of consciousness. Pantheon Books; 1962

2. Grof S. The Holotropic Mind; The three levels of human consciousness and how they shape our lives. San Francisco Harper; 1993

3. Huxley A. The Doors of Perception: And Heaven and Hell. Thinking Ink 2003

4. Shanon B. The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience. Oxford University Press; 2003

5. Sass L. The paradoxes of delusion; Wittgenstein, Schreber and the schizophrenic mind. Cornell university press; 1994

6. Sass L. Madness and modernism. Basic books; 1992

7. Stanghellini G. Disembodied spirits and deanimated bodies; the psychopathology of common sense. Oxford university press; 2004

8.Plato. Cooper J editor. The complete works. Hackett publishing. 1997

9. Inventor of LSD Albert Hoffman’s first trip. The Guardian [internet]. 2008 1^st May. Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/01/medicalresearch

10. Jackson F. Epiphenomenal Qualia. The Philosophical Quarterly 1982 April. 32(127): 127-136

11. Hoffman M. Determinism as Enlightenment [internet]. [place unknown]1985-2007. Available from: http://www.egodeath.com/DeterminismEnlightenment.htm

12. Marr A. Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Company; 1983

13. Fodor J. The modularity of mind. MIT press; 1983

14. Hoffman M. The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death [internet]. [place unknown]1985-2007. Available from http://www.egodeath.com/mobile.htm

15. Huxley A. The Doors of Perception. Flamingo; 1977

16. Husserl E. Cartesian Meditations. Kluwer academic publishers; 1999

17. Depraz N. Putting the epoché into practice: schizophrenic experience as illustrating the phenomenological exploration of consciousness. In Fulford B, Morris K, Sadler J, Stanghellini G editors. Nature and narrative, an introduction to the philosophy of psychiatry. Oxford University press; 2003

18. Freud S. New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. Penguin, 1988

19. Obituary; Doctor Humphrey Osmond. The Telegraph [internet]. 2004 16th Feb. Available from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1454436/Dr-Humphry-Osmond.html

20. Hoffman M. Mental Construct Processing [internet]. 1985-2007. available from http://www.egodeath.com/mcp.htm

21.Hoffman M. The Egoic and Transcendent Mental Worldmodels [internet]. 1985-2007. Available from: http://www.egodeath.com/egoictranscendentmentalmodels.htm

22.Thagard P. Conceptual Revolutions. Princeton University press; 1992

Biography

Author is a philosopher and psychonautical explorer, he graduated from college with PhD in Knowledge, hosted and produced the Podcast, and has given presentations on psychedelic phenomenology at universities.

Motivation for this webpage

What made me think about this excellent, useful, relevant article is this non-excellent article; I probably like Kant and find Continental Phen’y worthless and irrelevant despite Houot’s writings claiming that this sort of Phen’y is relevant:

Phenomenology for Psychedelic Researchers: A Review of Current Methods & Practices (Houot, 2021) – I considered making a page containing that article, but seems worthless.

I would only make such a page to confirm that that approach is worthless and cannot hold a candle to the present article, which is related to the Egodeath theory.

Houot has sure not succeeded in the slightest persuading me of his claims that such Phen’y is important for psychonauts.

The present Phen’y article is important for psychonauts.

This article is by Author, not by Cybermonk.

For scholarly commentary and markup, only; not for publication.

Not a backup; for markup.

I read this aloud on the Egodeath Mystery Show, and have read a few times.

It is an ideal, perfect treatment, though I can probably extend and highlight some points.

Article not found by me at Academia.edu now.

This page is not for accurate clone backup of article as its primary purpose.

https://egodeaththeory.org/?s=%22breaking+convention%22

My Questions for Houot at Psychedelic Church Book Club

Michael Hoffman, 9:24 pm Mar. 28, 2025

Contents:

Esotericism in Amsterdam:

Q: Did You Study with Wouter Hanegraaff?
Q: Do Academics at Amsterdam Go to Smartshops?

Science Explaining Religion:

Q: How Broad Is Your Conception of “Science” and “Religion” (Mysticism, Esotericism): Can the Science approach, broadly, Explain that which Religion is trying to get at?
Q: Underneath the Noise and Confusion that Is Religion, Mysticism, and Mythology, Is There Valuable Transcendent Knowledge, or Mental Model Transformation, Buried, and Indirectly Expressed?
Q: Is there Some Type of Transcendent Knowledge or Enlightenment that Science Can and Should Explain?
Q: Is there Treasure Buried under the Mess and Confusion that’s Religion, Mysticism, and Mythology?
Q: Should Science and Engineering and Cognitive Science Strive to Explain the Transcendent Knowledge that’s Poorly Conveyed by Religion, Mysticism, Mythology, and Esotericism?
Q: Is Transcendent Knowledge Worth the Attention of Science?
Q: Are You Allergic to Religion? What Kind of Science Approach Fits with What Kind of Religion Approach?
Q: Do You Contribute any Insight or Analysis on Any Sort of Religous Transcendent Revelation in Any Way?
Q: What Can People Do to Overcome the Rift Between Psychedelic Scientists vs. Psychedelic Mystics?

Shipwreck Questions:

Q: How Do We Avoid Shipwreck in a Storm of Control Instability in the Altered State?
Q: Is the Pilot or Steersman of a Ship Have Stable, Autonomous Control of their Steering, in the Altered State?
Q: Metal Songs Such as No One at the Bridge by Rush, Reports Stormy Risk of Shipwreck – What Is Your Solution to Shipwreck in a Storm of Control Instability in the Altered State?

Eternalism Questions:

Q: Is Ramesh Balsekar Correct and Insightful that Enlightenment Is Knowledge of No-Free-Will?
Q: Is the Experience of No-free-will a Mystical Revelation?
Q: As a Scientist, Is Freewill the Case?
Q: Is Personal Control Monolithic, Autonomous Control that Selects from Possibilities that Are Available? Or, Is Personal Control Limited, 2-Level, Dependent Control?
Q: Is the future open, or closed? Do you hold to Possibilism (open future), or Eternalism (closed, pre-existing future)?

Control Stability Questions:

Q: Does a Rational Psychonaut Have Stable Control by Controlling Their Own Source of Thoughts, as an Autonomous Agent?
Q: Does a Person Control Their Own Source of Thoughts, and Create their Own Future?
Q: What Is Your Technology and Advice for Someone Who Is Terrified to Look at Their Source of Control-Thoughts for Fear of Monstrous Threatening Unavoidable Thoughts? [todo: move up w/ control stability]

Q: Do You Reject the Same Popular Ideas of Enlightenment as Tim Freke? (Emergent Evolutionary Spirituality)

Surrenderism:

Q: Underneath the Idea of Surrenderism, Is There a Real and Important Dynamic?
Q: Do You Have an Explanation of the Dynamics of Mystical Surrender?
Q: Is Science and Engineering Able to form an Explanatory Model of the Dynamics of Mystical Surrender?
Q: Why Doesn’t the Book Have a Section on Surrenderism, Given that That’s the Central Topic in Your Masters’ Dissertation and in your article The Psychonaut’s Ship?

Q: How serious are you on page 10 “Don’t read this book if you used any existing approach to Psychedelics?” Are we supposed to read your book, or not?
Q: When It’s Revealed that You Cannot Control Your Source of Control Thoughts, But Thoughts Arise Unstoppably and Are Unbound in the Psychedelic State, How Can The Personal Control System Avoid Panic Seizure and Restore Stable Control?
Q: What Technology Discovery Are You Withholding in the Book, Page __?
Q: How to package and deliver a psychedelic discovery, after the discovery? Do your writings only aim to get people started toward discovering, or is it aiming to cover end-to-end?
Q: Have you made any Psychedelic discoveries, or will you focus on articulating an approach and mentality opposed to therapy?
Q: Psychedelics focus awareness on inner workings of mind, so why does the book narrowly use model of ships exploring the external, physical world?
Q: What are some specific useful, relevant technologies provided to give people stable control while on Psilocybin? A mindset?
Commentary
The Irony in this Page Title: “Psychedelic “Church” Concept Causes Allergic Seizure Reaction in Houot the “Naturalist, Rational Psychonaut” Who Is Against “Anyone Esoteric or Mystical or Spiritual or Religious or Transcendent or Woo”
Corpse, Stable Building Protected by Cloth Washed Clean
Why Creating a Page Focused on Formulating Questions for the Author
Increase Your Control Agency Harder and Harder Until It Explodes in Climactic Control Transformation
⚖️💥☸️
Metal Lyrics about Transformative Crisis of Control
No One at the Bridge (Rush, 1975)
S.A.T.O. (e.g. Sailing the Acid Trip Ocean) (Ozzy Osbourne, 1981)
Heaven Can Wait (Iron Maiden, 1986)
See Also
Dionysus, the Pilot Who Honors Dionysus and Lives, and the Captain Who Doesn’t Honor Dionysus and Dies

Q: Did You Study with Wouter Hanegraaff?

Q: Do Academics at Amsterdam Go to Smartshops?

Q: How Broad Is Your Conception of “Science” and “Religion” (Mysticism, Esotericism): Can the Science approach, broadly, Explain that which Religion is trying to get at?

Q: Underneath the Noise and Confusion that Is Religion, Mysticism, and Mythology, Is There Valuable Transcendent Knowledge, or Mental Model Transformation, Buried, and Indirectly Expressed?

Q: Is there Some Type of Transcendent Knowledge or Enlightenment that Science Can and Should Explain?

Q: Is there Treasure Buried under the Mess and Confusion that’s Religion, Mysticism, and Mythology?

We Agree on Pro-Science, Pro-Engineering.

We agree on Anti- the Mystical/ Mythical/ Religious Style of Expression.

Do We Disagree whether there Is Treasure of Enlightenment and Mental model transformation, Buried Underneath the Noise and Junk & Confusion Overlaid by Religion?

The Science and Engineering approach to forming an explanatory framework is the best approach to explaining anything, and is able to efficiently explain the Transcendent Knowledge “treasure” that is expressed in a confused, garbled way by religion, mysticism, mythology, esotericism, and medieval art motifs.

Q: Should Science and Engineering and Cognitive Science Strive to Explain the Transcendent Knowledge that’s Poorly Conveyed by Religion, Mysticism, Mythology, and Esotericism?

Q: Is Transcendent Knowledge Worth the Attention of Science?

Q: Does Alien Entity Contact Serve a Religious Function within the Rational Psychonaut Science Explorer Discoverer Approach?

Q: Is this an “Elite Evolutionary Spirituality” Approach, the “Rational Psychonaut Science Explorer Discoverer” Approach?

Requiring Explorers to be Fit and Atheist Rational, While Rejecting (in all senses) anything Religious, Mystical, Esoteric, Spiritual.

Rational, Scientific, Fit, Mature, Fit to be an explorer; vs.
Irrational, Immature, Mentally Ill

Elitist Eugenics-Like Prideful Evolutionism

Is Tim Freke’s attempt at “evolutionary spirituality / emergent spirituality” like this, or not?

Perhaps such evolutionary spirituality fans attach themselves to Tim Freke.

I don’t care for Freke’s focus in Soul Story on survival of the soul after literal bodily death.

I embrace the potential of Science, WITHOUT scorched-earth dismissal of religion, sprituality, mysticism, mythology – I just think that the Sceiecne & esp. Engineering approach to explanatory useful framework to produce a useful technology for everyone, to contribute to the collective shared knowleddge base. I WANT EVERYONE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT RELIGIOUS MYTH IS ACTUALLY REFLECTING.

I cringe at the tone or framing that Houot uses, that only “fit” people are suitable to do Rational Science Discovery Exploration.

I agree that this approach is superior:

Rational Science discovery exploration <– superior approach, to figure out…
Religion, sprituality, mysticism, mythology <– the referent to be figured out.

Jan 1988: Ken Wilber says that the nature of ego transcendence is X. But I say, the scientifically clear and engineering-useful explanatory framework is, instead,

Block-universe eternalism
Psychedelic loose cognition; loose cognitive association binding
Mental model transformation per the Way of Zen by Alan Watts: instant, quick, binary switch of mental models.
To have non-dysfunctional cross-time control. So that one can “plan and do” as expected, NOTHING MORE THAN THAT – not super-respecting enlightenment; rather, I never put enlightenment on a pedestal; instead, I had a disrespectful but PRAGMATIC AND MODEST valuation of enlightenment, Transcendent Knowledge.

Jules Evans – Evolutionary spirituality as a frame for psychedelic experiences

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGzEWLZHTQ –

Video title:
Jules Evans – Evolutionary spirituality as a frame for psychedelic experiences
ch: Exeter Psychedelics Group
Nov. 1, 2023
Talk and Q+A with Exeter Research Psychedelic Colloquium.

Desc. of video:

“One of the dominant cultural frames for psychedelics in western culture over last 130 years has been evolutionary spirituality.

“This tradition suggests human evolution is not finished and can be guided towards the creation of higher beings through such techniques as psychedelics and eugenics or genetic modification.

“But is everyone evolving into a new species, or just an elite? Jules will discuss the tradition of evolutionary spirituality, raise the ethical implications of this tradition – its tendency to spiritual narcissism, contempt for the less-evolved masses, Social Darwinism and Malthusianism, spiritual eugenics, and illiberal utopian politics—and suggest responses to these limitations.”

Comments about Video

Jan Irvin warned about this, with Huxley as Dr. Evil, contempt for the masses.

I’m too autistic to use this approach. In 1985 I was just a buggy person trying to repair their malfunctioning personal control system, and then give that explanation to everyone.

That’s it. No other narrative. I’m not a narrative guy, other than that.

In 1985, my father instructed me on leading edge human potential, self-help, transpersonal psychology.

After my block-universe eternalism breakthrough in Jan 1988, my friends had books by Leary, which I found had no appeal and no relevance.

I didn’t cross the street at Stanford in 1991 to bother going to the big psychedelics Bridge conference – that approach was not relevant enough to my project of writing-up my explanatory model of what ego transcendence is really about AND WHY WE CANNOT HAVE POSI-CONTROL ACROSS TIME.

My discovery of eternalism and its 100% total ego death cancellation of a certain sense of monolithic, autonomous control, was the opposite of personal grandiosity.

I am personally grand as an explainer of why 2-level, dependent control is the case, humbling-to-death King Ego.

When I intended to learn what ego transcendence is really about, in order to repair my dysfunctional cross-time control.

dysfunctional cross-time control
dctc

Q: Are You Allergic to Religion? What Kind of Science Approach Fits with What Kind of Religion Approach?

Q: Do You Contribute any Insight or Analysis on Any Sort of Religous Transcendent Revelation in Any Way?

Q: What Can People Do to Overcome the Rift Between Psychedelic Scientists vs. Psychedelic Mystics?

Crop by Michael Hoffman
“Field of Mushrooms Canterbury Window blue cap.jpg” 35 KB 11:02 pm Mar. 28, 2025
{cut right trunk} (U line bottom right) = YI form

Q: How Do We Avoid Shipwreck in a Storm of Control Instability in the Altered State?

Q: Is the Pilot or Steersman of a Ship Have Stable, Autonomous Control of their Steering, in the Altered State?

Q: Metal Songs Such as No One at the Bridge by Rush, Reports Stormy Risk of Shipwreck – What Is Your Solution to Shipwreck in a Storm of Control Instability in the Altered State?

See appendix below:
Metal Lyrics about Transformative Crisis of Control

Q: Is Ramesh Balsekar Correct and Insightful that Enlightenment Is Knowledge of No-Free-Will?

Q: Is the Experience of No-free-will a Mystical Revelation?

Q: As a Scientist, Is Freewill the Case?

Q: Is Personal Control Monolithic, Autonomous Control that Selects from Possibilities that Are Available? Or, Is Personal Control Limited, 2-Level, Dependent Control?

Q: Is the future open, or closed? Do you hold to Possibilism (open future), or Eternalism (closed, pre-existing future)?

Q: Does a Rational Psychonaut Have Stable Control by Controlling Their Own Source of Thoughts, as an Autonomous Agent?

Q: Does a Person Control Their Own Source of Thoughts, and Create their Own Future?

Q: What Is Your Technology and Advice for Someone Who Is Terrified to Look at Their Source of Control-Thoughts for Fear of Monstrous Threatening Unavoidable Thoughts?

Q: Do You Reject the Same Popular Ideas of Enlightenment as Tim Freke? (Emergent Evolutionary Spirituality)

Tim Freke recently is trying to reject pop spirituality concepts such as

Nonduality; unity; oneness.
Ego is illusion. The self doesn’t exist.
Separate self is an illusion.
The goal of enlightenment is to get rid of the ego.

Q: Underneath the Idea of Surrenderism, Is There a Real and Important Dynamic?

Q: Do You Have an Explanation of the Dynamics of Mystical Surrender?

Q: Is Science and Engineering Able to form an Explanatory Model of the Dynamics of Mystical Surrender?

Q: Why Doesn’t the Book Have a Section on Surrenderism, Given that That’s the Central Topic in Your Masters’ Dissertation and in your article The Psychonaut’s Ship?

Q: How serious are you on page 10 “Don’t read this book if you used any existing approach to Psychedelics?” Are we supposed to read your book, or not?

Please put this book down if you’ve never ingested psychedelics or if you take them for therapeutic, recreational, religious, spiritual growth, personal growth, cognitive enhancement, creativity-inspirational, or self-actualizing purposes. It’s not for you … With that said, my message will not resonate with everyone.
p. 10, Rise of the Psychonaut: Maps for Amateurs, Nonscientists and Explorers in the Psychedelic Age of Discovery (Houot, 2025)

Rise of the Psychonaut: Maps for Amateurs, Nonscientists and Explorers in the Psychedelic Age of Discovery (Houot, 2025) https://egodeaththeory.org/2024/12/24/rise-of-the-psychonaut-houot-2025/ & https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DPSJGMFR

Q: When It’s Revealed that You Cannot Control Your Source of Control Thoughts, But Thoughts Arise Unstoppably and Are Unbound in the Psychedelic State, How Can The Personal Control System Avoid Panic Seizure and Restore Stable Control?

Q: What Technology Discovery Are You Withholding in the Book, Page __?

todo: figure out the p. #

Q: How to package and deliver a psychedelic discovery, after the discovery? Do your writings only aim to get people started toward discovering, or is it aiming to cover end-to-end?

Q: Have you made any Psychedelic discoveries, or will you focus on articulating an approach and mentality opposed to therapy?

Q: Psychedelics focus awareness on inner workings of mind, so why does the book narrowly use model of ships exploring the external, physical world?

Q: What are some specific useful, relevant technologies provided to give people stable control while on Psilocybin? A mindset?

Commentary

The Irony in this Page Title: “Psychedelic “Church” Concept Causes Allergic Seizure Reaction in Houot the “Naturalist, Rational Psychonaut” Who Is Against “Anyone Esoteric or Mystical or Spiritual or Religious or Transcendent or Woo”

Corpse, Stable Building Protected by Cloth Washed Clean

Why Creating a Page Focused on Formulating Questions for the Author

Thanks to RL for asking me the question of me asking Ooh-Oh questions.

A. M. Houot (Ooh-Oh)

My questions and this page are not just about the book. I treat Houot’s entire corpus: diss + 2 articles + book.

The book lacks – incongruously – Houot’s fav topic, disparagement of mystics’ ‘surrenderism”.

See Michelle Janikian’s book for crude folk surrenderism writeup, her book is good.

Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: An Informative, Easy-to-Use Guide to Understanding Magic Mushrooms—From Tips and Trips to Microdosing and Psychedelic Therapy
(Guides to Psychedelics & More)
Michelle Janikian, September 23, 2021
https://www.amazon.com/Psilocybin-Mushroom-Companion-Easy-Mushrooms/dp/1646043901/ —

Blurb:

“Learn. Prepare. Trip. Transform!

“Discover the transformational power of psilocybin mushroom with this all-encompassing guide to harnessing magic mushrooms safely and effectively.

“With so much misinformation surrounding magic mushrooms out there, it can be hard to separate fact from fiction.

“This is where Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion comes in to help.

“In this book, you’ll find a comprehensive yet friendly guide to everything there is to know about magic mushrooms.

“Learn how to plan safe, effective trips with easy-to-follow step-by-step advice.

“Discover how to train a guide to take care of those on psychedelic voyages, as well as how to access the transformative nature of these experiences.

“Even learn how microdosing can improve your mood, cognitive functioning, creativity, physical stamina, and more.

“With the most up-to-date research, Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion will put magic mushrooms into perspective, dispel myths and urban legends, and open your mind to the benefits of psychedelic tripping.”

/ end blurb Janikian book

Increase Your Control Agency Harder and Harder Until It Explodes in Climactic Control Transformation

⚖️💥☸️

…. i wonder…. Houot in book says he’s withholding something.

LOL there’s my Q1: WHAT ARE YOU WITHHOLDING FROM US?

I bet something about surrenderism and WE MUST INCREASE OUR EGOIC SELF CONTROL POWER:

STAND ON LEFT FOOT HARDER!

UNTIL BLOW UP TO SMITHEREENS IN A FIRE PIT OF CYBERNETIC CONTROL SEIZURE DEATH FAILURE revealing there is no power there at all.

Metal Lyrics about Transformative Crisis of Control

No One at the Bridge (Rush, 1975)

No One at the Bridge (Rush, 1975)
channel: Wraxtiorre’s Mess
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70BgSKTBh9s —

https://www.rush.com/songs/the-fountain-of-lamneth/

Lyrics by Neil Peart:

III. No One At the Bridge

Crying back to consciousness
The coldness grips my skin
The sky is pitching violently
Drawn by shrieking winds
Seaspray blurs my vision
Waves roll by so fast
Save my ship of freedom
I’m lashed helpless to the mast

Call out for direction
And there’s no one there to steer
Shout out for salvation
But there’s no one there to hear
Cry out supplication
For the maelstrom is near
Scream out desperation
But no one cares to hear

Remembering when first I held
The wheel in my own hands
I took the helm so eagerly
And sailed for distant lands

But now the sea’s too heavy
And I just don’t understand
Why must my crew desert me
When I need a guiding hand

— Rush

S.A.T.O. (e.g. Sailing the Acid Trip Ocean) (Ozzy Osbourne, 1981)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGoQ6AZYfMc —

https://www.google.com/search?q=s.a.t.o.+lyrics
http://egodeath.com/sablyrics.htm#xtocid229130 — Egodeath interpretation

Sailing the Acid-Trip Ocean
Lyrics by Bob Daisley —

Heaven Can Wait (Iron Maiden, 1986)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKiwU6l6cUY —

Lyrics – Improved Transcription by Michael Hoffman April 12, 2025, for scholarly study.

Can’t understand what is happening to me
This isn’t real, this is only a dream
But I never have felt, no, I never have felt this way before

I’m looking down on my body below
I lie asleep in the midst of a dream
Is it now, could it be, the – Angel of Death has come for me?

I can’t believe that really my time has come
I don’t feel ready, there’s so much left undone
And it’s my soul, and I’m not gonna let it get away [loose cognitive experience of soul (egoic control agency) vanishing]

Heaven can wait
Heaven can wait
Heaven can wait
Heaven can wait ’til another day

I have a lust for the Earth below
And Hell itself is my only foe
‘Cause I’ve no fear of dying; I’ll –
Go when I’m good and ready

I snatch a glimpse of the lights eternal rays
I see a tunnel, I stand amazed
At all of the people standing there in front of me

Into the paths of rightness I’ll be led
Is this the place where the living join the dead?
I wish I knew this was only just a nightmare [not just a temporary Mystery Religion terror trip initiation awe; produces mental model maturation: permanent modification of conscious foundation of source of control thoughts]

Take my hand, I’ll lead you to the promised land
Take my hand, I’ll give you immortality
Eternal youth, I’ll take you to the other side
To see the truth, the path for you is decided [non-branching worldline in block universe 4D spacetime per eternalism and Minkowski; {snake frozen in rock}]

My body tingles, I feel so strange [acid effect]
I feel so tired, I feel so drained
And I’m wondering if I’ll ever be the same again [yes and no, after the foundation of control-thought source is re-conceived]

Is this in limbo or Heaven or Hell?
Maybe I’m going down there as well
I can’t accept my soul will drift forever

I feel myself floating back down to Earth
So could this be the hour of my rebirth
Or have I died or will I wake from dreaming?

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Stephen/ Percy/ Harris

Key Lyrics about Psychedelic Eternalism

https://egodeathyahoogroup.wordpress.com/2021/01/09/egodeath-yahoo-group-digest-105/#message5359 — lists several songs:

Destiny planned out
Speculation of the wise
— Blizzard of Ozz, “Believer”

To see the truth:
The path for you is decided
— Iron Maiden, “Heaven Can Wait”

All preordained, a prisoner in chains
A victim of venomous fate
— Rush, “Freewill”

I’ve been stricken by fate
Wrapped up tight, cannot move, can’t break free
Hand of doom has a tight grip on me
— Metallica, “Trapped Under Ice”

/ end of lyric

📘 –> 🗑
by order of Houot 🤷‍♂️

also Houot: i’m here to help you even if you are uneducated. Incoherent approach. Imagine him making instructional video: you are not allowed to hear my advocacy if you don’t already fully agree with the approach I advocate.

Test of Whether Cybermonk Is so Negative

Have I had the attitude:

Please do not study the Egodeath theory if you’ve never ingested psychedelics or if you take them for therapeutic, recreational, religious, spiritual growth, personal growth, cognitive enhancement, creativity-inspirational, or self-actualizing purposes. It’s not for you.

With that said, my message will not resonate with everyone.

Bifurcation in the Field and Book, Egged on by Houot & James Kent, matt j, c letheby–: Houot Makes it Personal and Entrenched Sides Fighting Each Other – Yet Tries to Welcome the Uneducated – INCOHERENT, self contradiction strategies

Houot did not invent the spilt. He eggs it on to exacerbate it, p. 10.

The page 10 disaster reflects the perpetuation of war between junk “science” vs junk “religion” approaches, but he makes it personal: the scientists vs the religionists. if you —

error 2: he classifies cognitive enhancement with stupid mystic shaman bad approach fWR WTF doesn’t even divide sensibly. trip is bad, explore is good. but personalizes: trip metaphro users are bad, go away; explorer metaphor users are good.

I advocate 1 approach of 100, therefore, I tell 99 % of PEOPLE: do not read my book.

To describe my approach I am advocating – , I shall identify the 150% (( his categs don’t make sense) of people who should not read my book.

I am not advocating this approach to everyone; I am ONLY advocating this approach to the 1% of people – after I drove off incoherently defined set of 150% of ppl — who already agree with me.

SUCH PERSUASION TECHNIQUE!

this keyboard is litrally falling apart under my fingers, mac butterfly garbage worst keyboard ever, too noisy for the classroom, too – embarr.

The Mysticism Wars – aggressive Matt Johnson and Chris Letheby when Letheby is not tripping and telling us “only mind exists”

bifurc in Letheby’s head

The ridiculous extremist materilaist nsci scinegi scientist materialist rationalists vs the woo, wooly headed mystics – extremist charaicature.

They Want to Fight: If You Are in the Spirituality Shaman Group-Trip, Mystic, or Cognitive Enhancement crowd, Sacred, Divine, or any other approach, DO NOT READ MY BOOK, YOU ARE THE ENEMY

quote p 10 insane list of bad people/approaches that must not be used ~

then says “that approach is ok, ” – but do not read this book, you are the enemy.

The Psychedelic War Between Science vs. Religion 🤜💥🤛 -ok, A. M. Whooahhhh “Ego Death & Dionysus are Stupid”

Thank you for the opportunity for the Egodeath theory to be the bridge that you failed to build. I am learning from and leveraging Houot’s error and failure to integrate the two “incompatible” approaches or realms of concern.

My page:
Moving Past Mysticism: Theory of Psychedelic Eternalism Provides Scientific Basis, Superseding “Mysticism, Meditation, & Psychotherapy” Framework
Includes section about article:
How to End the Mysticism Wars in Psychedelic Science (Letheby 2024)

Alan Houot says there’s no right way to use psychedelics, and yet, also says the opposite, contradicting himself, not presenting a reconciled package that’s integrated.

p 10: 99% of readers, do not read my book. later, he is reconciliatory, “we should open mind re religion” – CONTRADICTING HIMSELF.

Clumsy, incoherent, inconsistent.

James Kent treated my Myth decoding as garbage anathema against his anti-psychedelic, demonization of religion/myth/ psychedelics.

Transcendent Knowledge podcast with Max Freakout & Cyberdisciple:

My Emails with James Kent about Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason (2010)

I emailed James Kent again the other day a few years ago (vs. in 2006 when I reviewed Kent’s PIT book draft for him):

Me: “Hey Kent, check out my decoding of the real referent of religious myth!”

Kent: “Myth? Yuck! Religion is stupidity.”

Thus was born my quip, “Psychedelics make people closed-minded.”

I hate mystic writings mode, but I do not declare war in that bifurcated way.

I criticize Cog Sci as much as Mysticism.

I criticize the WAY science is done, and the WAY religion is done.

I don’t stupidly, in lazy low IQ way, blanket glorify / dismissal or dumbly take pre-fabricated sides:

“SCIENCE IS GOOD, RELIGION IS BAD”
or
“Religion is good; Science is bad.”

Search this site for “Psychedelic Information Theory”:
https://egodeaththeory.org/?s=%22Psychedelic+Information+Theory%22

PIT (James Kent, 2010)

keyboard shortcut:

Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason (James Kent, 2010) https://www.amazon.com/Psychedelic-Information-Theory-Shamanism-Reason/dp/1453760172/
jk10

Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason
James Kent, October 5, 2010
https://www.amazon.com/Psychedelic-Information-Theory-Shamanism-Reason/dp/1453760172/ –

Blurb: sounds like the typical “Cognitive Neuroscience Minus Cognitive” approach:

“Psychedelic Information Theory is a formal analysis of the physical mechanisms underlying hallucination, shamanic ritual, and expanded states of consciousness.”

[no telling what anyone means by ‘consciousness’; not my cog cybernetic phen’y]

“Written by James L. Kent, this text was researched for over 20 years and includes over 200 references and 31 images related to the latest science in the diverse fields of pharmacology, shamanism, and perception.

“As a succinct yet comprehensive formal analysis of the nonlinear dynamics of hallucination and shamanic ritual, Psychedelic Information Theory is destined to become the modern textbook on psychedelic phenomena.

“Chapters include information on

the physiology of perception,
types of visual hallucination,
psychedelic pharmacology,
psychedelic neuroplasticity,
chaos theory,
shamanic therapy,
shamanic sorcery, and
group mind phenomena related to psychedelic consciousness.

“Psychedelic Information Theory will prove, no doubt, to be an important work primarily because it provides researchers, in both the sciences and humanities, with numerous new avenues down which to investigate.

“PIT provides us with a serious, and in many respects successful, recalibration of the different psychedelic knowledge bases.

In great respect to the author, I believe PIT will attract both plaudits and criticism with equal fervour and, in doing so, help proliferate serious psychedelic research for some time to come.”

– Rob Dickens, PsyPressUK.com Review, December 2010

“In his new book, Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason, James Kent has attempted to describe both the experience and underlying mechanisms of consciousness, in the language of classical wave mechanics, with terms like neural oscillators, periodic drivers, wave entrainment, resonance and coherence.

“His book offers the first steps in developing a more refined and quantifiable theory and terminology of psychedelic action.

“It suggests many rich opportunities for further research that are bound to reveal some pragmatic and novel applications.

“Not since “The Invisible Landscape,” by the McKenna brothers, have I found a book so original and propitious.”

– Jedi Mind Traveler, Evolver.net Interview, January 2011

“James L. Kent has proven himself to be the ‘Mythbuster‘ of the New Psychedelic Age.

“His book, Psychedelic Information Theory is the everyman’s guide to inner consciousness, unraveling the scientific foundations of altered states.

“PIT challenged my views on the psychedelic experience: I might not agree with some of the conclusions, but I have a firmer grip on the basics because of it.

“Kent helps outline the mechanics of the mind, but his reductionist approach also leaves room for further mysteries to grow.”- Rak Razam, author of Aya: A Shamanic Odyssey, November 2010

“Kent’s clear trail through volumes of research gave me a solid understanding of how rod and cone vision, phosphenes, the visual information processing rate, and the brain’s pattern-recognition function all come together or come apart to modulate hallucinatory states.

“Kent deserves a place next to Grof on the psychonaut’s, scientist’s, and psychologist’s bookshelf.”

– Sheldon Norberg, author of Healing Houses, Erowid.org Review, October 2010

/ end blurb for PIT

“Either You are Religious, or Secular and Explorative”

Houot writes:

“Of course, we’ll see some people who take psychedelics for recreational, religious, and therapeutic reasons convert to the more secular common explorative motive proposed here.”

“When I say secular psychonaut, what I mean is that your religious beliefs or any other strongly held belief system does not spill over into your explorative use of psychedelics.”

“I Wouldn’t Dismiss Religion, or I’d Be Dogmatic; I’m Open-Minded (on this page)”

“Atheism, or a disbelief that a God or God’s exist, is for me just as dogmatic as mainstream religion.

“I approach psychedelics as an agnostic, that is, someone who does not know either way, but is open to considering all possibilities.

“While my approach and I think any explorers approach to psychedelics should lean secular, I am at least open to the idea that that which I encounter just might be religious or turn out to be communication with God, gods, angels, or demons.

[Page 91]

“Terrence McKenna says: “I call myself an explorer rather than a scientist, because the area that I’m looking at contains insufficient data to support even the dream of being a science.” …”

[page 92 top]

McK:

“The mindset that I always bring to it is simply exploratory and Baconian–the mapping and gathering of facts.”

— footnote 23 : McKenna 1991, page 36.

1991 book: The archaic revival: speculations on psychedelic mushrooms, the Amazon, virtual reality, UFOs, evolution, shamanism, the rebirth of the goddess, and the end of history.

[Page 94]

Houot writes:

“Most ordinary folks won’t know how to operate let alone interpret the results of fancy laboratory equipment.

“They can, however, enter visionary places, look around, and tell the rest of us what that realm is like: how the experience unfolded, what was possible in that realm, what kinds of things they saw, what were their entities, and if so , what did they look like, what did they say, what did they want?”

It’s just angel of God saying sacrifice your only son as an offering on altar of sticks, fire, blade, to pass through the gateway:

todo: put side by side w/ St Martin Entry Jerusalem > finger shapes – if not done somewhere already:

“We don’t know what these substances are fully capable of because little research has been done on their visionary effects in a rigorous way.

“We are at the beginning of the psychedelic Renaissance, and the same can be said regarding exploratory research of psychedelics visions.

“Ditch the Stupid Religion, Loser”

“The shift in mindset from recreational, religious, or therapeutic to explorative and scientifically-minded is as much conceptual as it is methodical.

“Ask yourself what you want to get out of psychedelics, for that determines the frame of mind with which you enter these experiences.”

“My Boxed-in Motive Is Correct, Scientific, and Open Minded; Your Boxed-in Motive Is Wrong, Religious, and Closed Minded”

“My vision for the future of psychedelic research is to send astronaut-like explorers out into visionary realms, free from religious, therapeutic, or other boxed-in motives and to engage in pure exploration of these states with open minds.”

“I want to see the exploration, more explicit, direct, and becoming an additional focus of psychedelic science now and in the future.

“I want to see more people embrace the psychonaut explorer mindset as an alternative to the other motive-inspired mindsets people have long had for taking psychedelics.

“I want people to come back with priceless observational data about their journeys to make future users travels safer, more predictable, and as a result, to reduce fear of these experiences.

“I want modern psychedelic users to think about where the future of psychedelic use and research will lead.

“I want you to think about how you can contribute to our collective understanding of these other worldly dimensions in meaningful ways.”

/ end condensed excerpts from
Rise of the Arrogant Psychonaut by A. M.
Whoooooo-oooaahhh! I can’t believe you wrote that!!

Rational Psychonauts Avoid Anything that Sounds Esoteric or Religious

Sounds Like James Kent’s Simple-Minded/ Intellectually Lazy, Scorched-Earth Dismissal

p 87:

Houot writes:

“Rational psychonauts distance themselves from ordinary, psychedelic users, and psychonauts.

” Their science-based approach is thinking rationally and skeptically to understand and interpret psychedelic experiences.

“They avoid anything that sounds esoteric, religious or dogmatic.” – dummy Houot: what if I am a theorist successfully delivering an explanatory model explaining the actual nature of religious myth and religious transcendent experience? In that case, using “Science”, I explain myth & religion – not “avoid”. Your word ‘avoid’ is ambiguous, avoid in what sense/way? You are writing statements about religion here, shouldn’t you avoid that topic, because you are being irrational? where do you draw your line? Not articulate enough, “avoid anything that soundds religious”.

Houot writes:

“Rational psychonauts intellectualize their subjective, psychedelic experiences, visions, and the cognitive and physiological mechanisms underlying the production of visions, thinking scientifically and philosophically about the phenomenon and trying to figure out what’s going on overall.

“Researchers [pay attention to ] recreational users versus psychonauts, but they overlook rational psychonauts and their motives.

“Reddit members [of the /RationalPsychonaut forum] subscribe to the rational psychonaut credo :

“A community for sensible discussion of the science of altered states.

“For people interested in exploring in our realms without subscribing to the woo surrounding the topic.”

[page 88]

“Psychedelics cause some people to become mentally unstable or make them believe they met God, they are God, or they’re a messiah with a message.”

[which does sound like the author, Houot.]

“In accordance with rational psychonaut principles, my highly rational outlook in addition to my scientific and philosophical training grounds me when venturing into visionary states elicited by psychedelics.”

Translation: Hubris: I retain full control of my intentions, because I am rational unlike lesser people.

[Page 89]

“I don’t think that people who take psychedelics for recreational, religious or therapeutic motives are irrational.

“Theologians, gurus, and monks, for example, can appear extremely logical concerning religious and religious and spiritual belief systems.

“I defend [read: disparage] other people’s reasons for taking psychedelics and the ways in which they make sense of them.

“The rational psychonaut approach is essentially what I would like to see more of, but we can do better.”

Houot here equates religious = irrational:

“Secular psychonaut is in line with a non-religious approach to psychedelics which includes undertones of rationality

The widespread secularism found in science and academic disciplines inspired this idea of a secular approach since science and religion butted heads 500 years ago”

Houot uses false dichotomy of unimaginative ‘science’ – conception of ‘science vs. religion’.

That low-grade, poor-quality opposition & false dich got rid of – per Wouter Hanegraaff – esotericism & Psilocybin (entheogenic esotericism) in the dust-up, 1687 Newton Princip, threw discarded psychedelic esotericism.

Not that the Egodeath theory = entheogenic esotericism

The Egodeath theory REPLACES entheogenic esotericism, and replaces common-core mysticism and perennialism, as a communication style and indeterminate grab-bag, messy muddled OBSCURANTISM.

The Egodeath theory IS THE ENEMY OF OBSCURANTISM.

“A Secular Psychonaut Wouldn’t Want to Explore Religious Realms”

Houot writes:

“I like the term secular psychonaut but what if someone religiously inclined wants to explore “religious realms” or “religious experiences“?

“I doubt that this would happen, but who knows, everybody is different.”

[Page 90]

“People can explore psychedelic realms and be religious; yet I don’t consider people who already practice a particular belief system to be explorative because they found what works for them and they’re unlikely to change if indeed they’re genuine believers.”

Believer, by the band Blizzard of Ozz, lyrics by whatsisname: bassist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6U-id_iUwQ —

I believe in transformation from possibilism to eternalism.

Houston We Have a Problem: Disrespects Readers

Houot would never talk down to the audience of his dissertation and the two professional article to peers, after that.

But switching to his imagined audience of little people, he is 100% self-defeating. Therefore he needs an editor, when trying to write for a popular audience.

To remember how to pronounce “Houot”:
“Do not read this book if you ever used any of these purposes for psychedelics:”
Reaction: WHOOOOOAAAHHH! 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️
Whoooo-oooooh!
Who-Oh
“Ooh-Oh” <–

I am looking forward to the 2nd Edition of this book with page 10 violently torn out by a professional editor, and removing all indicators of “I am talking down to you” that are scattered throughout the book.

An author could not erect a bigger barrier for their own success. Take gun, aim at foot, pull trigger.

Rise of the Churlish, Arrogant, Hubristic Psychonaut

“Do not read this book if you ever used any of these purposes for psychedelics: [lists every known purpose].”

“Hey everyone in the world, go away, you are not worthy of my removing of your ignorance.”

— Houot, entire page 10, & scattered throughout book

Did Houot take writing lessons from the lying, duplicitous, censorious, total jerk Wasson, p. 180, SOMA?

This is just one example; see my 2006 article for more examples of butthead, rude, total jerk, pompous ass Wasson:
Wasson and Allegro on the Tree of Knowledge as Amanita

Con artist Wasson tries to bully people into denying mushroom-trees, which Wasson plainly knows of course are mushrooms, per Ruck Committee’s leak, “Wasson’s conclusion” in “Daturas for the Virgin” p. 56.

Houot is unaccustomed to writing for the unwashed masses of uneducated who lack an advanced degree.

He MAKES SURE to explicitly let everyone know:

“I am talking down to you. I will inform you for the first time. You should start thinking scientifically and rationally. I will teach you how.”

Are Houot’s Ibogaine podcasts so insulting, explicitly talking down to the audience?

Michael Pollan, Expert Writer on Psychedelic Science: “Don’t write if you know the answer”

Houot needs to take writing lessons from Michael Pollan, on how to write for a mass popular audience.

https://michaelpollan.com/about/ –

“In 2003, Pollan was appointed the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism

“and the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism.

“In 2017, he was appointed Professor of the Practice of Non-fiction at Harvard and the university’s first Lewis Chan Lecturer in the Arts.

“In 2020, along with Dacher Keltner and others, he co-founded the
UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

“The center conducts research using psychedelics to investigate cognition, perception and emotion and their biological bases in the human brain.

“In addition to teaching, he lectures widely on … psychedelic science.”

The Churlish, Offensive Online Tone of “I Am Superior: I am a Naturalist, Atheist, Rationalist”

‘Churlish’ means rude, boorish, lacking in civility or graciousness, unfriendly, unpleasant.

If I post a book review in format below, the first Con would be warning:

Houot tells everyone to not read his book, and he insults the hell out of everyone and talks down like a mo-fo, belittling the reader.

The first thing a professional editor would do is burn page 10 with {fire}: p 10.

I blame the atheist poor P.R. style and the “I am a Rationalist, I am superior” rude internet tone, that he channels. Do not write a book with the worst tone of online smug agressive self-proud “naturalist, atheist, rationalist” tone.

That is the repellent hurdle you have to be charitable toward.

Houot demands that you be charitable toward his hamfisted rude self-defeating attacking of all audiences.

Rise of the Arrogant Psychonaut

Could you talk DOWN any more, oh great master [and eager to present yourself as Great Master over the little minions].

Joke idea: post a page that talks down to some imagined little followers of the Egodeath theory , like Whoo-oooahh talks down to his fantasized little audience – and it IS little, since p. 10 at start shooed all the filthy dirty types of readers, “Put this book down, IT’S NOT FOR THE LIKES OF YOU.”

my Marketing dept advises me to leverage Whooooaaahhh’s error in my favor:

The Egodeath theory is superior because it welcomes all of the little people, it is welcoming to all of the little, irrational, addled-mind followers of my great self.

The Egodeath Theory is Warmly Welcoming to all Little, Unworthy, Muddle-Headed Regular People

I will teach you, my little readers, how to start thinking and how to start being rational, in a more friendly way of stooping and lowering myself to deign to remove your ignorance, than Houot’s writing style.

He picks up this adversarial, us-vs.-them attitude up from the Reddit self-proud and eager to let you know, Reddit forum “RationalPsychonaut” reddit group. (idk the lingo)

Houot’s poor writing tone reminds me of the online “basement” (socially unskilled) atheist community (which no longer exists since Richard Carrier single-handedly blew it up in a couple conferences some years ago), the death knell, “the new atheists” who killed-off atheism, it’s now history.

Carrier single-handedly killed the atheism community by dragging-in toxic “new atheism”. I revisited a few times, unclear what happened – an infiltration of alien agendas, coopting and then killing the host.

Deathly fatal parasitism; New Atheism destroyed atheism in the course of trying to coopt and take over and steer in some completely other direction.

Dislikeable tone, of the Rational Psychonauts: they should be mad at Whoooooaaahhhh! for poorly representing their loudly belittling attitude.

We Rational Psychonauts are better than you, and we’re eager to trumpet our attitude.

Houot’s Rational Psychonaut God-Complex & “RationalPsychonaut” BAGGAGE – What Are We Signing onto Here, Mystery Package Deal – HARD PASS

“A messiah with a message”, Houot accuses – look in the mirror, Whoo-ooaaah!

I Advise You, Houot, Stop Overusing Personal Pronouns in Your Advocacy to Me

Tip: Avoid pronouns. we, us, our, you, me, I — be careful with these words!

You didn’t address professionals with “you” in your two post-dissertation articles.

This book uses a clumsy, awkward, over-personal approach that you are not practiced at, and it flops and backfires, talking down to your readers, many of whom can lecture you.

“Me, I, you” – it’s aggression.

Oooh-Oww really lets his disrespect for the audience, and his self-aggrandizement show through LOUD AND CLEAR by overuse of “I” and “you”.

He’s trying to ADVOCATE his approach by INSULTING the readership directly. How’s that gonna work?

Is there any possibility you could have a professional editor rush a revised 2nd edition? Well no, take a lot of time to fix this framing.

What Page # Is “If You Use any Metaphor Other than {Sailing Ship Explorer of External Planet or Space Exploration}, Put This Book Down, It’s Not for You”?

Pronounced WHOO-OOOAAHH!

p. 10

Incredible, garbled, insulting, self-contradictory, disaster.

No editor on Earth would approve this framing.

🤦‍♂️

I can’t believe what I’m reading.

This is the most adversarial, reader-attacking passage I have ever read.

Then, in case you mistook him as saying “this book is for everyone”, after he’s gunned down 150% of the total possible readership groups, he cautions:

“With that said, my message will not resonate with everyone.”

Oh thanks, I must have misread the entire page above as saying “This book articulates an approach that’s useful and inviting for all people who have emphasized any approach.”

I thought that above the page said that this book will resonate with everyone. Thanks for clarify my misreading.

Pronunciation of A. M. Houot: Ooh Oh; “If You Are Human, Put this Book Down, It’s Not for You” –> WHOOOOOOAAHHH!! –> Ooh-Oh; A. M. Ooh-Oh

[March 22, 2025]

Ooh-Oh: “If you use any metaphor / motive other than my narrow pet metaphor {external world-exploration in a ship}, then PUT THIS BOOK DOWN – IT’S NOT FOR YOU. –>

Every reader gasps: WHOOOOOOAAHHHH! –> Ooh-Oh.

For this page of the book, Houot BADLY needs an editor / P.R. person – what an awful, immature, self-defeating, ill-advised construction! Bad move! Terrible P. R.

Definitely strike that passage and entirely reframe it, in rev 2 of book.

Self-defeating Houot. His own worst enemy.

Also Ooh-Oh: “I slightly question these other metaphors/approaches, they are dogmatic“

LOL! Pot, kettle, black.

He outright demonizes the divine; Transcendent Knowledge; myth as analogy, and then calls other approaches / other writers “dogmatic”.

Who’s dogmatic, Houot?!

Foolish dismissal out of hand, of ANY AND ALL myth-type approaches, as a sweeping class generalization. Immature. Brittle thinking. Black-and-white FALSE DICHOTOMY, intellectually lazy.

It’s lazy and easy for Psychedelic Information Theory author James Kent to blanket dismissal of any and all myth or divine type approaches.

See Transcendent Knowledge Podcast (Max Freakout in discussion with Cyberdisciple) episodes reacting to James Kent podcast series:
https://egodeaththeory.org/2020/11/07/transcendent-knowledge-podcast-episodes/#Episode-22

lol Houot just said “be playful, fun, interesting” – Mr. Flat Affect, social-skills-challenged, STEM-based critic poor at P R; churlish, clumsy, and self-contradictory.

Spring Mysteries Festival 39, April 17-20, 2025, Seattle

An ancient Greek Mysteries festival. I’ve met some of the participants at my church.

Rumored: Dr. Secret & the Evil M. Hoffman will be there:
Carl Ruck & Mark Hoffman.

I am not familiar with this long-running festival. My site isn’t one to announce events, but there are exceptions – my psychedelic church members told me about this event.

https://www.springmysteries.com —

“Since 1985, Aquarian Tabernacle Church has been continuing the Eleusinian Mysteries originally held in Ancient Greece.

“These mysteries, held every year in honor of Demeter and Persephone, explore universal concepts and truths from the perspective of the seeker of hidden knowledge.

“Our Priests and Priestesses spend 3-4 months preparing for the festival, working with the energies of the Gods and rehearsing the ritual drama that is presented over 4 days for hundreds of people each Easter Weekend.

“Though the main portions of the event focus on Greek deities, there are many workshops and other groups that bring a plethora of alternate ways to explore, including the general mysteries of women, men and those who identify as a mixture of both energies.

“There is also a vendors space, with many often-requested items and trinkets to take home, and plenty of space for conversations or introspective moments.

“Everyone who attends will come away transformed and with wonderful memories of their time in Eleusis.”

https://www.youtube.com/@witchcrafttv.online

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Spring+Mysteries+Festival%22

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Spring+Mysteries+Festival

Amanita Workshops by David Samas

https://www.springmysteries.com/workshops-2023

“Amanita Muscaria: The Witches’ Magick” by David Samas – leading expert.

Stream: Festival Fun Show – Spring Mysteries Festival

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_bpwJj-LyI —

Streamed live on Mar 15, 2025

Description:

🎥✨ Get ready for an enchanting time on the Festival Fun Show, streaming exclusively on Witchcraft TV! 🌙

Join the charismatic A.C. Fisher-Aldag as she welcomes a truly magical guest—the esteemed Arch-Priestess Belladonna Laveau of the Aquarian Tabernacle Church of Wicca (USA).

Together, they’ll dive into the heart of contemporary Wicca, exploring the sacred traditions, spiritual insights, and transformative work of the ATC and all about the upcoming Spring Mysteries Festival.

This is more than just an interview—it’s a celebration of wisdom, community, and the journey toward empowerment through spiritual practice.

Opportunity to learn from one of Wicca’s most inspiring leaders and advocates. 💫

https://witchcrafttv.online/

#WitchcraftTV

#BelladonnaLaveau

#MagicAwaits

#FestivalFunShow

#AquarianTabernacleChurch

#WiccaWisdom

#witchcrafttv

The Psychonaut’s Ship: Pairing Technologies with Psychedelics to Augment User Agency (Houot, 2022)

Michael Hoffman – Study version, condensed, for scholarly purposes, not for publishing; markup from POV of the Egodeath theory

_{Site Map: Alan Houot}

Contents:

Motivation of this Page
Citation and Link
In Honor of the God Dionysus
The Psychonaut’s Ship: Pairing Technologies with Psychedelics to Augment User Agency (22)
- Prefatory (1 p.)
- Introduction (1.5)
- 1. Mystic Fear and Shaman Control (2.5)
- 2. Surrenderism for Some, but Not for All (2.3)
- 3. Secularization of Experience (4)
- 4. Augmenting Agency and Control with Prostheses (5)
- Conclusion (2)
- Notes (2)
See Also

Motivation of this Page

Not intended to be a clean page; intended as notes and commentary page.

todo: remove non key phrases. bold the key phrases. add my commentary.

Study / markup commentary notepad page. NOT to be archive copy of article.

62 hits on ‘surrender’

For scholarly study only, not for publication.

Relevant to the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism.

Citation and Link

https://www.academia.edu/78214256/The_Psychonauts_Ship_Pairing_Technologies_with_Psychedelics_to_Augment_User_Agency

In Honor of the God Dionysus

Dionysus made me dedicate this page to him.

In honor of Dionysus, by pilot Cybermonk.

https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/01/07/idea-development-23/#Pilot-Helmsman-Steersman-Begged-Dionysus – Find 32 hits on ‘dionysus’

https://egodeaththeory.org/?s=dionysus+pirates – see another idea development page too maybe.

Due to fluke, I got this before it was avail Feb 2, 2025; i got it Dec 23, 2024. march 20 2025 i also bought $25 audiobook, which is great format; good content; good voczn, good tech usage.

Strangely the book lacks surrenderism critique and big claim of shamans having control stability during Psilocybin, tho Houot focused on that pair of topics in 2019 Masters dissertation & article Psyc Ship.

The Psychonaut’s Ship

Pairing Technologies with Psychedelics to Augment User Agency

A. M. Houot

Prefatory

written by Houot

Modern psychedelic users are commonly advised to surrender to altered states of consciousness.

[surrender to what?
Michelle Janikian’s book uses this same strange construction.
More like: lower-level personal control system (child-thinking;
monolithic, autonomous control)
is made to surrender to
2-level, dependent control;
the overpowered female mind is made to surrender to the male;
FEMALE:
the control thought-receiver
ctr
the helpless thought-receiver
htr
the helpless control-thought receiver
hctr
MALE:
hidden source of control-thoughts
hsct
the control-thought inserter
cti
the uncontrollable source of control-thoughts
usct]

Once users consider the possibility that ‘surrenderism’ is a necessary prerequisite—though not an exclusive approach—coupled with the idea that psychedelic experiences might not be religious or supernatural, the idea emerges that pairing technologies with psychedelics is a viable methodology to comport oneself during psychedelic states.

Shamans display signs of control and mastery upon entering altered states, partly because of intentionally crafted techniques and technologies that assist them.

It is argued that modern psychedelic users of modern technologies may augment the level of control over their experiences, that is to say, making use of prostheses to maintain balance during intoxicated states.

[f134 stand on right foot to maintain balance and avoid control instability
Great Canterbury Psalter:

f145 stand on right foot to maintain balance and avoid control instability:

f77 stand on right foot to maintain balance and avoid control instability:

prostheses – crutch to have stability while incorrectly stand on left foot

stand on left foot = rely on egoic possibilism-thinking –> control instability

stand on right foot = rely on eternalism-thinking. –> control stability

crutch could indicate washed-clean, qualified possibilism-thinking; left foot touches stable column base.

/ end Michael Hoffman images]

Page 2 — A M HOUOT [left page header]
Psychedelic Press XXXV [left page footer]

The understanding of the concept psychonaut or sailor of the mind is analogously expanded to include the psychonaut’s ship, comparable to nautical technologies used by sailors .

The example of the psychonaut’s ship provides the platform upon which to reflect future applications and utilities of psychedelic technologies .

If psychedelic users are like sailors of the mind, then, what is their ship? What follows is an inquiry into how modern psychedelic users can apply technologies like their shaman counterparts to increase agency during psychedelic experiences.

Introduction

written by Houot

The commonly held supposition that modern users have little to no agency during psychedelic experiences needs revision .

[transformation of mental model of personal control system/ personal control agency]

Recommendations to passively surrender to the experience, i.e., ‘surrenderism’,1 is of particular interest when it comes to modern users’ fears and concerns of psychedelic experiences.

[the experience of the threat of catastrophic loss of control, due to relying on monolithic, autonomous control]

Experts recommend modern users surrender to psychedelic states, and users unquestioningly heed such advice.

[the personal control system is made to surrender to 2-level, dependent control – the underlying reality]

Alternative approaches as to how one comports oneself in altered states of consciousness are available .

The following is an examination and expansion of one such overlooked approach, that is, using technology [VAGUE] during psychedelic experiences.

I contemplate how pairing modern technology with psychedelic states may provide augmented user agency compared to the current, dominant surrenderism model.

In Section 1, I consider one of many possible reasons why modern users would want to pair technology with psychedelic experiences, namely, to curb fear of the unknown.

[dread of ego dissolution? no; of: the hidden, uncontrollable source of control-thoughts]

VAGUE, VAGUE, VAGUE

I argue elsewhere that modern psychedelic users need not only interpret their experiences from the mystic’s fear and surrender perspective but also might consider adopting

THE PSYCHONAUT’S SHIP [right page header] Page 3
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shamanic principles of control and mastery of altered states through the use of techniques and technologies [VAGUE].2

In Section 2, I defend the premise of surrendering to [TO WHAT?] psychedelics, however, for particular subsets of users and motives; for example, the inexperienced, the inadequately prepared or trained, or preventing harm to self or others.

In Section 3, I highlight the tendency of ancient peoples to interpret that which they did not understand or control as somehow being religious or supernatural.

Simply because present-day people do not adequately comprehend psychedelic experiences does not qualify these experiences as sacred.

I invite readers to consider historical examples when science and technology could eventually better explain natural phenomena than divine beings or gods.

Additionally, many people take the notion of surrender for granted, but I ask why modern psychedelic users must surrender; why should surrender be given automatically; and why taking into consideration some level of control of experiences is not treated?

In a move away from surrenderism, ayahuasca-drinking Santo Daime religious members incorporate rituals and codified frameworks, attempting to constrain the psychedelically unconstrained mind.

[good phrase]

These sociocultural-specific constraints are a step in the direction I propose .

Finally, I develop ideas to integrate purpose-built psychedelic technologies, or prostheses [DAMN IT MAN, THIS IS AS VAGUE AS “THE TRADITIONAL METHODS OF THE MYSTICS”], to constrain or channel the intoxicated mind, aiming to increase user agency [UNTIL FUZZY WUZZY LOVING CUP EXPLOSION CLIMAX OF NEW BIRTH] during psychedelic experiences.

1. Mystic Fear and Shaman Control

written by Houot

In previous research, I analyze ways in which modern users might conceptualize the psychedelic experience that counters the current fear-laden discourse on drugs.3

Since many modern societies and individuals fear [FEAR OF WHAT? the experience of the threat of catastrophic loss of control] the experiences psychedelics elicit, I explore the likely roots [hidden underlying snake in basket; the hidden, uncontrollable source of control-thoughts] of

4 A M HOUOT Psychedelic Press XXXV

these fears, and once known, ask how modern technology [VAGUE AF] might be used to somehow steer or control psychedelic experiences .

For that which one controls no matter the degree, one increases one’s agency [try harder, egoic control foundation! until you are dead king hung on tree, ram caught in thicket] during the experience, therefore, theoretically minimizing one’s fear of the once-held fear object.

Early researchers such as Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) turned to Far Eastern and Indian religions and philosophies in the 1950s–1970s, notably mysticism, in an effort to make sense of psychedelic effects on modern users’ subjectivity.

Depending on their religious inclination mystics may speak of love and devotion [2-level, dependent control; “relational”] when ‘melting away’ and merging [beginner unity] with the Other, or they might speak of fear and the unavoidable surrender to some divine being(s).4

Mystics surrender to a claimed divine being or presence, suggesting that whatever or whomever they surrender to is in charge; the Other is in control for as long as the mystic remains in the altered state.5 Psychedelics alter consciousness as well, leaving modern users with similar experiences and questions, hence the analogous comparisons to mysticism .

In continuing this line of reasoning, I argue that modern users find themselves in at least three types of ‘master/subject relations’: master/slave, host (master)/guest, and teacher (master)/student.6 In each case, users relinquish control of their being, thereby assuming the role of slave, guest, or student when in psychedelic-induced states .

A modified framework based on former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘there are known knowns’ comment is used to get at modern psychedelic users’ ultimate fear [the experience of the threat of catastrophic loss of control due to the hidden, uncontrollable source of control-thoughts] , drilling down from knowns to unknowns, from which I develop a new qualitative framework to explain notions of self in a surrenderism paradigm regarding the assessment of ‘complete’ [not mystical; just Stacean] mystical experiences, and ask whether there is another way

THE PSYCHONAUT’S SHIP 5 Psychedelic Press XXXV

for modern users to increase their agency [until the climax transformation is reached] during experiences.7

From this perspective, I turn to a spiritual practice that is farther removed from modern society and culture, namely, shamanism, appreciating how shamans’ notions of control and mastery (claimed by modern academics) of drug and nondrug altered states can inform modern users’ conceptualizations of psychedelic use and self-comportment.

Shamans use techniques and technologies [SOUNDS LIKE VAGUE B S] (broadly construed) such as song lyrics [like Ride the Lighting by Metallica? Little Dolls by Ozzy? Twilight Zone by Rush?] and melodies, dances, rattles, and drums [shaman Neil Peart], particularly a technique proposed by psychologist Richard Noll called ‘mental imagery cultivation’ [image of the experience of the threat of catastrophic loss of control], through which novices learn to develop the vividness of visions with the intent to control them.8 [how do “YOU” control the intent that YOU receive from the uncontrollable source of control-thoughts?]

Shamans not only have means to enter into altered states of consciousness; they also have systems in place apparently[???] to control their experiences.

Shamans do not speak about altered states in terms of fear and surrender as mystics and modern psychedelic users do; conversely, they display control and mastery.

In reframing the perception of the psychedelic experience to one that moves away from surrenderism [f u, gods! shaking fist] and which addresses fear, I conclude that modern psychedelic users might fare well to use ‘mysticism to explain’ while simultaneously using ‘shamanism to control’ their experiences.9

As expert shamans have manifold [“many” is b s like “there are many ways of Psilocybin experience without drugs”, tho none work well enough] techniques and technologies to enter into and exercise some control of altered states or of themselves in altered states,

likewise modern psychedelic users can do the same through the use of what I call ‘symbolico-technological relations’, in other words, pairing symbol with technology:

Psychedelics, symbols, and technologies used together reveal new applications, resulting in a wrestled-free symbolicotechnological third function. [sounds bull shiite]

Coupling symbol with technology creates avenues of new experiences, experiences malleable by

6 A M HOUOT Psychedelic Press XXXV

the user depending on the co-equal symbolico-technological relation and how each co-shapes the created third function.10

I say further that psychedelic technologies in general have considerable potential to act as ‘prostheses’ or crutches that afford a kind of balancing act when psychedelic users experience non-ordinary mental and perceptual conditions.11

[f177: stand on right foot to maintain balance and avoid control instability:

I realize now that I limited my scope of ‘psychedelic technology’ to symbolico-technologies only; in actuality, they are but a subset of what a psychedelic technology can be.

I flesh out the discussion about why and how to pair modern technology with psychedelic experiences in my previous work.

However, I shall expand on my arguments by detailing the obvious need for surrenderism, the eventual need to abandon surrenderism, and propose additional utilities for pairing technologies with psychedelics.

I define and discuss psychedelic technology in detail in Section 4.

2. Surrenderism for Some, but Not for All

written by Houot

Experts in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and harm reduction contexts have asserted the notion of surrender since at least the 1960s.12

It is no wonder that current Psychedelic Renaissance researchers, chiefly focusing on psychedelics’ therapeutic use, would advise modern users, especially their clinical study participants, to surrender [to what?].

Advising surrender in research contexts minimizes risk to everyone involved and ensures there are nil or few mishaps during the research process; an unpredictable, ‘freaked out’ participant is bad for business, so to speak.

In addition, we can safely assume that psychedelic-naïve and -experienced participants are far from exerting shamanic standards of control.

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While I disagree with such a blanketed recommendation for modern users, I point out appropriate instances when individuals should practice surrender: (i) user inexperience; (ii) inadequate preparation and training; and (iii) surrender is better than potentially harming oneself or others. [smell of hubris]

Author of the book on ayahuasca phenomenology, The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience, psychologist Benny Shanon identifies three levels of cleansing that ayahuasca induces: bodily, psychological, and spiritual in this progression .

For Shanon, the ayahuasca drinker would find it difficult to ascend to heightened dimensions of experience if one did not first overcome personal [in the sense of, personal control system] psychological issues.13

Thus, surrender is a good strategy for novices who have little to no experience with psychedelics or still have personal issues to deal with.

[that’s the wrong sense of ‘personal’; personal control system ; the egoic personal control system – not unique to one’s history]

Once these issues have been worked out and the user no longer takes psychedelics for therapeutic or personal growth motives, one can work on ‘spiritual’ cleansing, before, or in parallel, attempting to control the experience through and with technology .

Second, and closely tied to the point above, users would be advised to adopt a surrender position if inadequately prepared or trained in psychedelic experiences .

The majority of modern users are not trained at all to handle these experiences compared to the intensive training shamans receive .

The motive for taking psychedelics is also an important factor: while many shamans are first and foremost chosen to be shamans,14 they enter altered states on behalf of members of their community in addition to gaining insight and knowledge from other realms to ensure their community’s survival.15

The trends du jour for taking psychedelics among modern users, as a result of recently rediscovering or rebranding psychedelics, are personal and spiritual growth,16 and addiction interruption.17

Users desperate to personally

8 A M HOUOT Psychedelic Press XXXV

and spiritually grow or become well would likely try anything such as ingesting a psychedelic even though they might lack adequate preparation .

Once again, surrender turns out to be good advice for someone unprepared or ill-trained to operate with an intoxicated mind.

[“surrender” is WAY too vague, folk talk]

Practice through repetition offers users a feasible way out of surrenderism .

Psychedelic psychotherapist Duncan Blewett, who worked with Humphrey Osmond in Canada in the 1950s, hints at this:

‘Self-surrender is not an event that occurs only once, but must be repeated as additional repressed material [B S Psychology baloney] is released.

Each repetition becomes easier because of the positive reinforcement given by each previous self-surrender’.18

For Blewett, repeated self-surrender to psychedelics becomes easier as one accustoms to them and jointly attends to their own personal and repressed issues (similar to Shanon’s views) .

Evidently, there exists the possibility and even likelihood that one need not endlessly surrender to the psychedelic as experiences become ‘easier’ .

Such initial surrenderist maneuvers serve as necessary stepping-stones toward increased agency of one’s subsequent experiences.

[I can agree if elaborate and differentiate two different senses – as it stands, TOO VAGUE]

Third, surrendering to the experience is better than, for example, physically or mentally breaking down, therefore potentially harming oneself or others:

‘Surrender can be considered a form of passive control, in that surrendering to the experience is a better alternative than resisting the oncoming altered state, which could lead to bad experiences’.19

The very act of surrendering, knowing that one should surrender, either from one’s intuition or a clinician’s recommendation, is a form of control because the experiencer is regulating that part of their self that might resist, or react to, the temporary bodily and mental changes.

[REALLY must control transformation, not binary have or don’t have control]

While surrender can be considered a soft form of control, it is not the sort of control I illustrate in later sections .

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3. Secularization of Experience

written by Houot

The second commonly held attitude that must change for a revision in the way modern users consider psychedelic experiences, ultimately leading to a new or parallel paradigm, is the secularization of experience .

In his book, Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals, religious scholar Huston Smith comments on the sacred, surrender, and control .

He is quite right when he says that that which we wield greater control or comprehension over leads to demystification .

For example, humans do not control the weather, but meteorologists today better understand it than polytheistic humans did thousands of years ago who attributed weather events to one of the gods.20 Of course, we do not know for certain whether weather gods exist, maybe they do, but I imagine most people would consult meteorological science and technology experts to explain climatic happenings .

Smith goes on to question whether (total) control is even wanted, that surrendering to some of life’s experiences has its virtues and not doing so could lead to cynicism: Not only is the notion of total control contradictory, it isn’t even attractive .

To enter a friendship, to say nothing of marriage, with intent to control it is to soil the prospect from the start .

Life calls for balancing the rewards of control with gifts that come to us through openness and surrender .

The more we resolve to have things our own way, the more closed we become to the virtues in alternative ways .

If we cannot perceive the virtue inherent in the capacity to surrender – to surrender to another person in love, or to obligation in the sense of feeling its claims upon us— cynicism awaits us.21

10 A M HOUOT Psychedelic Press XXXV

I too shun the idea of trying to dominate friends and romantic partners and agree with the unattractiveness of ‘total control’ over life’s circumstances .

Let us backtrack for a moment and instead refrain from speaking in absolutes .

What about some form of partial control, not when it comes to people, but other features of reality? Why must some lived experiences remain a mystery? Why would not seeing Smith’s virtue in surrender lead to cynicism? On the contrary, I find the prospect of giving more agency to psychedelic users through technological means optimistic and positive .

‘Intent to control’ need not lead to ‘soiling’ experiences .

The definition of to soil is ‘to stain or defile morally—corrupt; to make unclean especially superficially—dirty’.22 Intent to control psychedelic experiences that are commonly considered to have religious or supernatural overtones does not indicate psychedelic technology users want to morally defile or make unclean such experiences .

Humans have always controlled aspects of their lives and surroundings in partial and agreeable ways; psychedelic experiences are nonexempt from suchlike pursuits .

Smith’s position sounds like a desperate effort to dissuade probative people from questioning their lived experiences and reality, reminiscent of religious leaders coping with Copernican angst .

As mentioned in the preceding section, repeated self-surrender is important for user acclimatization to altered states .

In a similar way, members of the syncretic ayahuasca religion called Santo Daime incorporate ritualistic and cultural cues to constrain the unconstrained mind .

Lifshitz, Sheiner and Kirmayer23 report how Santo Daime members structure their religious-psychedelic practices: men and women segregate in rows expanding outward from a central table where senior members sit, members recite prayers, sing hymns, coordinate dances, meditate silently while seated, and their interpretation of

THE PSYCHONAUT’S SHIP 11 Psychedelic Press XXXV

visions contribute to an ‘…ordering of ritual time and space structures the psychedelic experience along multiple modalities .

On a pragmatic level, it provides the framework and repeatability required for regular religious practice, and codifies Santo Daime’.24 Seen from the religious/healing perspective of Santo Daime, Lifshitz et al .

say, ‘Thus, promoting healing with psychedelics likely requires constraining the unconstrained mind through symbolic situational cues and embodied rituals that emphasize the potential to move from maladaptive patterns toward constructive states and behaviours’.25 Although my views about the claimed inherent religious feel to psychedelics and those of Santo Daime practitioners differ, I commend them and indigenous users for their codified frameworks that attempt to constrain or give order to the psychedelic experience .

At this juncture, I address the following possible objection to my argumentation thus far .

Shamans and Santo Daime members ostensibly already use techniques and technologies to control aspects of their psychedelic experiences in religious contexts .

One might ask why the abandonment of religious/supernatural connotations would be necessary to modern technology use that increases user agency during psychedelic experiences .

Neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris says scientists aim to be: …dispassionate, to really give ourselves the best chance to glean what is true .

… I come here with an open mind wanting to understand the phenomena but with a motivation to try to study it .

I think if you just leave it [psychedelics] in this enchanting space, then you might be motivated not to even study it.26 A secular approach stands a greater chance at advancing knowledge of psychedelic states .

The religiously inclined or the ‘enchanted’

12 A M HOUOT Psychedelic Press XXXV

may stop short of probing deeper into experiences for any number of reasons, whereas people with more of a secularist mindset will likely ask questions and conduct experiments that contradict indigenous and mainstream religious dogma .

Psychiatrist Matthew W Johnson recognizes the fallibility in using nonempirical frameworks in psychedelic medicine and research contexts and discloses multiple dangers regarding the use of religious references by psychedelic scientists and clinicians .

‘It is important to operate instead from a secular framework that is nonetheless open to working with patients or participant [sic] of any religious/spiritual background’.27

As tempting as it may be for some clinicians to introduce religious and spiritual belief systems to help study participants find meaning from their experiences and about their lives, these placeholders and the icons that represent them should be avoided, according to Johnson, because they not only precondition psychedelic users to have a specific experience, but they also alienate participants who might be atheist or practice another religion whose religious symbolism is absent from the study environment .

In short, preconditioning experiences and alienating study participants leads to bad science and practice, not to mention ethical concerns .

Surrenderism is a necessary step in one’s evolving psychedelic journeying process; however, it is not the only way to comport oneself as I hope is beginning to become clear .

Additionally, once one accepts the possibility that altered states of consciousness—including those psychedelic-induced—are not religious or sacred, one would no longer resort to unconditional surrender as mystics do and as modern researchers recommend .

As one gains enough experience through repeat exposure and the initial transcendental luster subsides, repeat users might realize that otherworldly phenomena afforded by psychedelics

THE PSYCHONAUT’S SHIP 13 Psychedelic Press XXXV

are indeed highly curious other dimensions, yet without the religiosacral connotations .

In the next and final section, I argue for technology use during psychedelic states that moves beyond but also compliments the abovementioned ritualistic and symbolic signaling.

4. Augmenting Agency and Control with Prostheses

written by Houot

Ernst Jünger, German author and friend of Albert Hofmann, coined the term psychonaut (from the German, psychonauten)28 to mean ‘psychedelic astronaut, explorer of the inner cosmos’.29

While the astronaut-explorer-of-psychedelic-spaces description aptly references these experiences, we should also inspect the meaning of the suffix nautès .

In this sense, psycho-naut means ‘sailor of the mind’ or ‘navigator of the psyche’, referring to individuals wanting to explore their minds by means of any kind of consciousness alteration.30 The resultant substantive form then is psychonautics, or ‘(the art of) “sailing the mind” or “navigating the psyche”’.31

If psychedelic users are like sailors of the mind, then, what is their ship? How does one turn sailing the psychedelic-intoxicated mind or navigating the psychedelic-intoxicated psyche into a predictable and controllable art form? Psychonautic technology from rituals and symbolico-cultural cues to the pairing of technologies with psychedelics is an overlooked topic in modern psychedelic discourse .

The sailor on their ship does not leave port hoping that the tide will take them to their desired destination .

No; the sailor commands a transportation device made for a specific purpose .

The ship undoubtedly is subject to waves, weather, creatures beneath the water’s surface, etc .

Nevertheless, the experienced sailor knows how to use their technology

14 A M HOUOT Psychedelic Press XXXV

to steer through the unknown, that which they cannot control, and toward their destination .

They use technology to go from one point to a predetermined other, and their ship is suited to deal with many natural events en route .

The same can be said about the sailor of psychedelic worlds .

Whereas both surrenderists and psychedelic technology users might start with an intention to guide them through the experience, surrenderists basically leap into the ocean of altered consciousness expecting the tide to take them to their destination, an action predicated on hope and submission .

This is folly .

Modern users would do better to think about using a sort of ship, some technical or technological accoutrement that can improve the journey’s steadiness and at their volition .

One must ask whether one is a passive passenger (e.g., surrender) or a course-charting captain utilizing seaworthy technology (e.g., control) .

In demarcating the boundary between science and technology, philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg says: ‘Science and technology share a similar type of rationality based on empirical observation and knowledge of natural causality, but technology is concerned with usefulness rather than truth .

Where science seeks to know, technology seeks to control.’32 No one knows for certain the metaphysical status of psychedelic states; we can infer however, according to Feenberg, there is an inherent element of control regarding the essence and usefulness of technology .

Just as modern-day instruments help natural scientists learn more about reality, technologies offering greater control and therefore agency to psychedelic users would also likely help answer experiencers’ and scientists’ knowledge or truth claims about psychedelic phenomena .

I have previously defined my concept of psychedelic ‘symbolicotechnology’, 33 but fell short of defining what ‘psychedelic technology’

THE PSYCHONAUT’S SHIP 15 Psychedelic Press XXXV

is.

Here, I define psychedelic technology as follows: a humanmade technique or technology that pairs with psychedelic states of consciousness for the purpose of documentation, data collection, and/ or to control aspects of the experience for purposes of navigating, coshaping, directing one’s experience, etc., resulting in augmented user agency.34

In other words, psychedelic technology broadly speaking is any technique or technology paired with psychedelics that gives users greater insight, control, and/or agency over their experiences.

There are at least two types of psychedelic technology: passive and active.

Psychedelic technology is passive when that which is being overseen is the documentation, collection, and analysis of data from one’s experience.

For example, physiological testing equipment can be used to pick up signals or biomarkers from psychedelics’ effects on users .

Note that high-tech research devices such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were not designed with psychedelics in mind but are used by psychedelic researchers .

Furthermore, other modern technologies and passive psychedelic technologies certainly will assist in developing purpose-specific active psychedelic technologies .

Psychedelic technologies are passive when they are in the background to collect or monitor data in some capacity, and usually would not be purpose-built for psychedelic experiences, although the latter is possible .

Active psychedelic technology is a means to increase control of experiences through navigating, co-shaping, or directing .

Within the category of active psychedelic technology, we can further differentiate between hard and soft control .

I define hard control as controlling everything about the experience, that is, the experiencer wields absolute control .

Since this is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, if ever, soft control is what trained psychedelic technology users can do:

16 A M HOUOT Psychedelic Press XXXV

they are able to navigate, shape, and determine how their experience unfolds depending on their expertise with psychedelics and their skill in using paired psychedelic technologies .

As mentioned earlier, such skill requires one moving beyond the prerequisite surrender phase of one’s psychedelic journeying evolution .

Passive psychedelic technology can become active if, when monitoring vital signs, the researcher directs the experiencer to take specific anticipatory actions, for example, to raise or lower blood pressure, heart beats per minute, directing the drug user’s attention, changing position of the body, introducing an idea or object during the experience, etc .

Therefore, psychedelic technologies are active when they are in the foreground to steer experiences, and presumably will be purpose-built for psychedelic experiences .

Not necessarily a prosthesis to stabilize one’s visionary experience but rather a documentation tool can be found in Qualia Research Institute’s Tracer Replication Tool .

This psychedelic technology was designed to ‘collect quantitative data about psychedelic tracers’.35 The internet browser-based tool works as follows .

The participant observes a bouncing blue ball on their computer screen while in an intoxicated state .

Once the visionary experience subsides, they toggle the tool’s settings to reconstruct what the tracer looked like as it was superimposed upon the default blue ball in addition to providing information such as drug type, dosage, how many hours into the intoxicated state they used the tool, and how many hours after the experience they documented their tracer .

The Tracer Replication Tool is a simple technology purposely built to document a specific aspect of psychedelic perception .

As usergenerated reports filter in, we may make more sense of what happens to visual perception depending on drug type and dosage and we will be able to literally show such representations to others .

While one’s unique physiology and cognition shape each person’s subjective experience,

THE PSYCHONAUT’S SHIP 17 Psychedelic Press XXXV

the above technology may reveal that drug, dosage, age, mood, culture, or any number of standalone or combined factors may lead to consistent and predictable tracer phenomena .

I offer another practical way to think about psychedelic technology .

Aikido is a Japanese martial art that teaches the importance of defensive maneuvering by using the attacker’s own movements to subdue him .

The attacked conserves energy by flowing with, not against, the attacker: ‘Aikido is performed by blending with the motion of the attacker and redirecting the force of the attack rather than opposing it head-on .

… The goal of Aikido training is not perfection of a step or skill, but rather improving one’s character according to the rules of nature’.36 In this way, the attacker expends more energy and thus is more at risk of tiring themself out, making themself susceptible to the impassable defensive offense of the attacked; the attacker must work harder to bring down their opponent .

According to the survival response known as fight-or-flight (-orfreeze), psychedelic technology use would be considered as a form of ‘fight’ because it is certainly not flight or freeze .

However, it is not fighting per se, rather an active and anticipatory defensive-like maneuver, a form of flowing with one’s precarious environment with the help of technological accoutrements designed for psychedelic states .

Sailors know the limits and capabilities of their technologies and have expertise in navigating their ships around adverse weather events or, if need be, to sail through waves head on .

Sailors do not try to control the weather but instead know how to work with it by getting the most out of their nautical technology .

The ship is purposefully built for moving atop the uncertainty and randomness of waves: it has a keel to stabilize, sails to propel, a rudder to steer .

Active psychedelic technologies would have comparable features that enable users to gain some level of control over the uncertainty and randomness of visionary phenomena and worlds .

18 A M HOUOT Psychedelic Press XXXV

Whatever the intoxicated mind shows experiencers, one must face it and accept what comes; one must confront whatever presents itself or that which needs to be revealed .

(One day, perhaps, technologies will be capable of inducing specific/desired visionary content as well.) Sailors cannot control approaching waves and storms; they skillfully maneuver their vessel with or around them .

Similarly, modern psychedelic technologies may enable users to direct their experiences with greater control irrespective of that which presents itself to consciousness .

Conclusion

written by Houot

Historical evidence suggests humans sacralize that which they do not comprehend nor control .

In accordance with the mystic’s views, surrendering implies that the psychedelic user foregoes whatever agency they may have .

History teaches that there might not be anything religious or supernatural about psychedelic-induced states; likely, these spaces merely are different dimensions of reality upon which, because of naivete and lack of knowledge, people put such placeholders .

The surrenderism model within psychedelia is a prerequisite for inexperienced, untrained, or novice users and should not be abandoned any time soon .

However, sustained belief in letting go or giving oneself over to the experience concretizes the feeling that one could not possibly understand these realms .

I contend that surrenderism may have damaging downstream effects insofar as experiencers relinquish pursuits of experiential sense-making .

Academics and amateurs must eventually transcend surrenderism and religious/supernatural connotations in favor of new methods to have any chance at making epistemic gains pertaining to the visionary, otherworldly content afforded by psychedelics .

THE PSYCHONAUT’S SHIP 19 Psychedelic Press XXXV

Recognizing surrenderism’s usefulness as a means, but not exclusively as an end, and welcoming prospects of having more agency, prepares the psychedelic user for new types of experience .

Any form of constraining the psychedelic mind, from rituals and symbols to psychedelic technologies, helps users manage visionary experiences .

In addition to controlling their voyage, curbing fear37 is but one reason why one would want to use technology during their psychedelic experiences; other reasons include navigating, co-shaping, communicating, and determining the experience .

The purpose, design, and function of a psychedelic technology will depend on one’s worldview, the type of knowledge one seeks, and what aspect of the experience one wishes to stabilize or document .

Humans will continue to find ways of incorporating technology with psychedelic experiences .

Psychedelic experiences have already been modified by shamanic technologies and ritualistic and symbolic cues found in the Santo Daime religion, and will continue to be by modern users and their technologies .

We must begin thinking how modern technology will shape psychedelic experiences for any user, no matter their cultural conditioning .

Pairing deliberately designed modern technologies with psychedelics is not only the future, it is the next evolutionary step in psychedelic drug use .

It is going to happen, and so we must consider how it will happen, how technology will be used before, during, and after psychedelic experiences, and for what purposes? Passive psychedelic technologies already exist and are being used in academic research .

What encourages me is what the future may bring regarding active psychedelic technologies .

I do not know what they will be, but their development and use are indeed possible .

Admittedly, I argue for something that does not yet exist, and cannot exist until

20 A M HOUOT Psychedelic Press XXXV

people secularize their psychedelic experiences, outgrow their tendencies toward surrenderism, and seriously consider the possibility of pairing modern technology with these dimensions of non-ordinary experience for the purposes of augmented control, agency, and mastery, and hopefully, newfound knowledge as a result .

Notes

written by Houot

1 Houot AM (2019) .

Toward a Philosophy of Psychedelic Technology: An Exploration of Fear, Otherness, and Control, Master’s thesis, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands .

https://essay.utwente.nl/77339/ 2 Houot (2019) .

3 Houot (2019) .

4 Stace WT (1960) .

Mysticism and Philosophy .

London: MacMillan and Co., Limited .

5 Stace (1960) .

6 Houot (2019, pp 17–20) .

7 Houot (2019) .

8 Houot (2019, pp 39–40); Noll R (1985) ‘Mental Imagery Cultivation as a Cultural Phenomenon: The Role of Visions in Shamanism’, Current Anthropology, 26(4), pp 443–461 .

9 Houot (2019, p 49) .

10 Houot (2019, pp 44–45) .

11 Houot (2019, p 50) .

12 Masters REL and Houston J (1966) .

The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience .

New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc.; Blewett D (1970) .

‘The Psychedelics and Group Therapy’ in Aaronson B and Osmond H (eds) Psychedelics: The Uses and Implications of Hallucinogenic Drugs .

Garden City, NY: Anchor Books; Leary T, Metzner R and Alpert R (2007/1964) .

The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead .

New York: Citadel Press; Johnson MW, Richards WA and Griffiths RR (2008) .

‘Human Hallucinogen Research: Guidelines for Safety’, Journal of Psychopharmacology, 22(6), pp 603–620; Girón S (2013) .

‘Working with Trauma: Psychedelic Harm Reduction and Transpersonal Psychotherapy’, MAPS Bulletin, 23(3), 2013 Annual Report, pp 47–49 .

13 Shanon B (2002) .

The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience .

Oxford University Press, p 307 .

THE PSYCHONAUT’S SHIP 21 Psychedelic Press XXXV 14 Krippner S (2000) .

‘The Epistemology and Technologies of Shamanic States of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7(11–12), pp 93–118 .

15 Walsh R (1991) .

‘Shamanic Cosmology: Psychological Examination of the Shaman’s Worldview’, ReVision 13(2), pp 86–100; Walsh R (1995) .

‘Phenomenological Mapping: A Method for Describing and Comparing States of Consciousness’, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 27, pp 25–56 .

16 Móró L, Simon K, Bárd I and Racz J (2011) .

‘Voice of the Psychonauts: Coping, Life Purpose, and Spirituality in Psychedelic Drug Users’, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 43(3), pp 188–198 .

17 Winkelman M (2014) .

‘Psychedelics as Medicines for Substance Abuse Rehabilitation: Evaluating Treatments with LSD, Peyote, Ibogaine and Ayahuasca’, Current Drug Abuse Reviews, 7(2), pp 101–116 .

18 Blewett D (1970) .

‘The Psychedelics and Group Therapy’ in Aaronson B and Osmond H (eds) Psychedelics: The Uses and Implications of Hallucinogenic Drugs .

Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, p 348 .

19 Houot (2019, p 49) .

20 Smith H (2000) .

Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals .

New York: Tarcher/ Putnam, p 138 .

21 Smith (2000, pp 137–138) .

22 Merriam-Webster (n.d.) Soil .

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ soil (retrieved 17/3/2021) .

23 Lifshitz M, Sheiner E and Kirmayer LJ (2018) .

‘Cultural Neurophenomenology of Psychedelic Thought: Guiding the ‘Unconstrained’ Mind Through Ritual Context’ in Fox KCR and Christoff K (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought: Mind-Wandering, Creativity, and Dreaming .

Oxford University Press .

24 Lifshitz, Sheiner and Kirmayer (2018, pp 585–586) .

25 Lifshitz, Sheiner and Kirmayer (2018, p 576) .

26 Davis E (2018) ‘How to Think about Weird Beings’ in Luke D and Spowers R (eds) DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule .

Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, p 152 .

27 Johnson MW (2020) ‘Consciousness, Religion, and Gurus: Pitfalls of Psychedelic Medicine’, ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science .

https:// dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsptsci.0c00198 28 Ott J (2001) ‘Pharmañopo—Psychonautics: Human Intranasal, Sublingual, Intrarectal, Pulmonary and Oral Pharmacology of Bufotenine’, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 33(3), pp 273–281 .

29 Sjöstedt-Hughes P (n.d.) The Psychedelic Influence on Philosophy .

https:// highexistence.com/hidden-psychedelic-influence-philosophy-plato-nietzschepsychonauts- thoughts/ (retrieved 17/3/2021) .

30 Blom JD (2010) A Dictionary of Hallucinations .

New York: Springer Science & Business Media, p 434 .

22 A M HOUOT Psychedelic Press XXXV 31 Blom (2010, p 434); Ott (2001) .

32 Feenberg A (2006) ‘What Is Philosophy of Technology?’ in Dakers JR (ed) Defining Technological Literacy: Towards an Epistemological Framework .

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p 5 (my italics) .

33 Houot (2019) .

34 When speaking specifically about psychedelics, the term ‘psychonautic technology’ should be avoided because it refers to techniques and technologies used during any form of consciousness alteration such as meditation, yoga, other pharmaceuticals, etc .

35 Wu L, Gomez Emilsson A and Zuckerman A (2020) QRI Psychophysics Toolkit – Tracer .

Qualia Research Institute .

https://qualiaresearchinstitute .

github.io/psychophysics/ (retrieved 9/12/2020) .

36 Aikikai Foundation (n.d.) What is Aikido? > About Aikido .

http://www.aikikai .

or.jp/eng/aikido/about.html (retrieved 17/3/2021) .

37 Houot (2019) .

/ written by Houot

What Did I Discover? Can We Have Stable Control in the Psychedelic State? Dionysus and the Pirates

Contents:

Motivation for this Page
How Much Does the Egodeath Theory Utilize the Concept of {death}?
Outline All Headings of Houot Book Rise of the Psychonaut
Read Aloud The Psychonauts Ship: What Are Cyb Dyns of “Surrender” in Janikian’s Folk Tech Book? Shamans Have Full Control — O RLY IZZAT SO??
What Did I Discover? For Houot Context
Salvation Salesman Gordon . . . . Wasson Shows Us That Christianity equals deceiving and lying to people and censorship
Dionysus and the Pirates
Secret Names of Scholars: Policy: Every Writer Gets Only Two Names: First & Last
Errata in URL of WordPress copy of 2007 Main Article
Effect Index semi-404, Josie Kins – is this site toast/history, or what? Must Check Archive.org of effectindex.com
TRANSPERSONAL STATES
Granting Advanced Degrees in Transcendent Knowledge per the Egodeath theory per Cybermonk
Justified Rectified Purified Egoic Control Thinking
Cubensis Nonbranching Horses & Balancing on Right Leg (Image f177)
See Also

Motivation for this Page

Rough mobile draft, because need to create several pages. but hard to manage todos. gotta get them started. Started cleaning up on desktop.

YI form discovered yesterday, Crop by Michael Hoffman

Yesterday March 25, 2025, I realized that this mushroom-tree has YI branching form discovered yesterday. I got this picture a long time ago like maybe 2003.

I contributed this instance of mushroom imagery in Christian art to the Brown virtual db of all mushroom imagery in Christian art (whatever’s meant by “catalog” given that Browns proposal was no-go, no one has time). Brown should’ve proposed a database, not a committee.

My book review of Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity, by Wouter Hanegraaff, 2022:

Darth Hanegraaff’s Alderaanization of the Fixed Stars

How Much Does the Egodeath Theory Utilize the Concept of {death}?

Find ‘death’ in my two main theory-spec articles:

Death Quotes:

Seeing the illusory aspects of this mental representation and feeling the absence of the accustomed sense of personal solidity can be experienced as death, as literal cessation of personal existence, because the naive mind strongly identifies with the projected image and the sense.
Conceiving of the world as a fixed spacetime block leads to the astonishing potential of experiencing ego death, because the logic of ego’s control power is coherently disrupted.
There are multiple [INSUFFICIENT] triggers for the dissociative cognitive state, including psychedelics, ~~meditation, schizophrenia, sensory deprivation, hyperventilation, temporal-lobe epilepsy, UFO abduction, and near-death experiences~~.
Acid-rock mysticism vividly alludes to and resonates with ego death and the dissociative cognition that leads up to it.
The peak experience of ego death can be rationally explained, whether or not its logic, perceptions, and hypotheses are valid.

The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death (Hoffman, 2007 main article) http://egodeath.com/EntheogenTheoryOfReligion.htm & https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/the-entheogen-theory-of-religion-and-ego-death-2006-main-article/
mh07
death – __ hits

Death Quotes:

Outline All Headings of Houot Book Rise of the Psychonaut

big todos: voice input all headings of Rise of the Psychonaut.

Needed for a book study page,

in my book review i will mention i have posted an outline of headings. voice efficient to enter headings

sections: which are the most relevant for the Egodeath theory? fav sections of book?

for my church book club intelligent discussion

copy here my Mission: to equip Loose Cognitive Science to endure Psilocybin and pass thru the gate to explore loose cognition realm wv w basic dynamics of control votrtex climax already on doily on silver platter for them:

Neo inserts chip in brain: the Egodeath theory, incl religious mythic motif analogies {mushrooms}, {branching}, {handedness}, and {stability} motifs –

instantly neo is able to explore loose cognition scientifically, already having the basic knowledge, CYBERNETIC WISDOM, the cybernetic communication transmission THE MESSAGE OF THE mushroom-trees ARTISTS, the dynamics of SURRENDER.

Know already the cheap trick of stand on right foot

cheap trick song https://youtu.be/T_Km11HNzUY?si=YhTKetnGvhVXBfcf

Read Aloud The Psychonauts Ship: What Are Cyb Dyns of “Surrender” in Janikian’s Folk Tech Book? Shamans Have Full Control — O RLY IZZAT SO??

Stupid mystics couldn’t figure out personal control system on Psilocybin

but somehow shamans achieved FULL ACIVE CONTROL.😑

it be ultra fast to copy his article into a page where i can get hands on it to analyze and critique how Houot is foolish. In what way Houot wise recomm?

Shamans are rational scientists who achieved what muddle headed mystics failed to try to achieve. Show the way wise Houot.

Houot ‘s major interest is surrenderism – why only barely mentioned in book Rise of the Psychonaut??

I STEM-explain “surr” – Houot ‘s fav topic ; he says shamans have full active control and he says they have ACTIVE CONTROL but mystics suck because they do passive surrenderism.

other big anticipated todo: read aloud voice recording Houot article The Psychonaut’s Ship which i already read on paper but merely 1 time every line.

What Did I Discover? For Houot Context

for reviewing Rise of the Psychonaut , the Egodeath theory is an example of a discovery.

Frame the Egodeath theory within Houot’s context as an illustrative example

religious myth depicts by analogy transformation from possibilism to eternalism and Psilocybin transformation of personal control system

same w mushroom-trees genre motifs {mushrooms}, {branching}, {handedness}, and {stability} motifs

Classical Antiquity aims at heimarmene, via Psilocybin transformation

Late Antiquity aims a little above Fate.

loose cognition block-universe eternalism personal control system transformation, NOT Ken Wilber’s beginners’ unity, is what ego transcendence is REALLY about per jan 1988 when put the pieces together – Ramesh Balsekar and Watts were closer than Wilber to figuring out core wisdom.

Wisdom core knowledge was botched by

common-core mysticism and perennialism attempt w sht-tonne of BAGGAGE noise obscuring wisdom more than revealing and usefully conveying and delivering wisdom.

you agree w common-core mysticism and perennialism? ok , therefore you agree w my every whim, a slave of the Egodeath theory & iceberg of hidden agendas like The Banker for the Pope, Gordon . . . .🔍🧐🤔 Wasson INFINITE CONFLICT OF INTEREST, the Pope Wasson says – on roller derby team The Salvation Salesmen-

are you going to believe the meditation hucksters — Zen master Brad? meditation is way more potent than 12g dried cubensis trust me

are you going to believe the salvation salesmen , lying Fraud pope Gordon . . . .🔍🧐🤔 Wasson the lying Pinocchio liar?

Salvation Salesman Gordon . . . .🔍🧐🤔 Wasson Shows Us That Christianity equals deceiving and lying to people and censorship

so commendable, we must defend, like the Art Historian Ronald Huggins’ Foraging Wrong article ,

We must go to bat to defend and run cover for Gordon . . . .🔍🧐🤔 Wasson and applaud and support his deceiving, lying, Fraud scholarship obstruction and excuse him.

This is the kind of people that deny mushroom imagery in Christian art.

pope Gordon says that if you assert mushroom imagery in Christian art, then you are a blundering ignoramus.

What a wonderful Christian, Wasson the deceiver.

what does Logos Media jan irvin have to say about these Christian values of Truth from Gordon . . . .🔍🧐🤔 Wasson ??

Evil Archons of this passing Age

when he tells you that Christianity means lying to people, it is quite clear from Gordon Lawson that Christianity means deceiving and lying to people.

Thanks a hell of a lot , oh wise “father of Ethnomycology”. INFINITE CONFLICT OF INTEREST –

Pope Wasson 🤥 has achieved levels of conflict of interest not even thought possible.

Dionysus and the Pirates

In my emails exchg w Houot, i claimed the best writing on nautical analogy myth of Dionysus & pirates is my site but that writing is hidden in idea development page 23:
https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/01/07/idea-development-23/#Pilot-Helmsman-Steersman-Begged-Dionysus – Find 32 hits on ‘dionysus’

For Houot’s benefit – (Cyberdisciple scoffs at BENEFIT) — i am considering making a page dedicated to honoring — –, Dionysus. As a pilot of Egodeath, honoring Dionysus. To honor the god is to not claim to be foundation source of one’s own control power; ivy disproves that; ssw sna {snake frozen in rock} ;

snake-shaped worldline frozen in rock
sswfr
sswfir

snake-shaped worldline
ssw

I advised A. M. Houot (WHOAH!; “Ooh-Oh”) to study several writeups of this myth cybernetic nautical – tho not a myth of scientific exploration & disco?

Secret Names of Scholars: Policy: Every Writer Gets Only Two Names: First & Last

SECRET – DO NOT TELL ANYONE: it’s Alan Houot

Alan Houot
amh

A. M. Houot

Egodeath Policy: everyone gets 2 names: first, last. That’s it. eg:

Dr. Professor Jose Bob Alfredo Gonzalez Celdran the Great –> Jose Celdran

Esteemed, Learned, Learned! Dr. Professor Jerry M. Brown the Third –>
Jerry Brown

I hate the early 2oth C convention – unhelpful – that I stupidly parrotted in the 2006 & 2007 articles:

Wasson and Allegro on the Tree of Knowledge as Amanita (Hoffman, 2006), http://egodeath.com/WassonEdenTree.htm

& mh07 main article, “J. I. Smith” – stupid, give us the damn first name ffs.

How does it help anyone to write J Z Smith instead of Johnathan Smith?

Errata in URL of WordPress copy of 2007 Main Article

“2006” should be “2007”; recently I determined that body of article was written 2006 but DIDN’T REACH ITS FINAL FORM until Sep. 2007:

The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death (Hoffman, 2007) – https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/the-entheogen-theory-of-religion-and-ego-death-2006-main-article/ – failed to copy the Intro from home page into article until Sep 2007.

The day after that, I found (like Josie Kins did recently, in article “Perception of Eternalism” in EffectIndex.com) the correct word, ‘eternalism’ instead of the wrong word, ‘determinism’ – fail.

Effect Index semi-404, Josie Kins – is this site toast/history, or what? Must Check Archive.org of effectindex.com

Archive.org of effectindex.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/effectindex.com
eg: 2024/09/14 —
https://web.archive.org/web/20240914113026/http://www.effectindex.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20240914113026mp_/http://www.effectindex.com/effects/perception-of-eternalism
https://web.archive.org/web/20240914113026mp_/http://www.effectindex.com/effects/perception-of-predeterminism – blank drats foiled again

alt path strategy: https://www.youtube.com/@josikinz

https://www.effectindex.com/effects/perception-of-eternalism 404

yet this works:

https://www.effectindex.com/people/josie

then nav from there to:
https://www.effectindex.com/effects/perception-of-eternalism
i don’t get it they look identical – am i seeing my own cached copy?

TRANSPERSONAL STATES

Ego death
Existential self-realization
Perception of eternalism
Perception of interdependent opposites
Perception of predeterminism – blank for me at the moment WTF
Perception of self-design
Spirituality enhancement
Unity and interconnectedness

The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death (Hoffman, 2007)
mh07

The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death (Hoffman, 2007) at http://egodeath.com/EntheogenTheoryOfReligion.htm & https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/the-entheogen-theory-of-religion-and-ego-death-2006-main-article/
mh07l

Granting Advanced Degrees in Transcendent Knowledge per the Egodeath theory per Cybermonk

— except for Max Freakout & Cyberdisciple & the other, skizzo guy who re-pointed me to Jan Irvin’s great work, who have the ultra rare honorary(?) (sounds like an insult; they earned PhD fair & square) degree, PhD in Transcendent Knowledge: they are strictly to be addressed as:

Esteemed Dr. Freakout, PhD TK

I cannot grant more PhDs, b/c:

no time to vet ppl
no one is worthy earned it as Cyberdisciple & Sir Freakout , but even if they did, no time to vet ppl.

idea: I am ok w idea of granting more PhD degrees in Transcendent Knowledge per the Egodeath theory.

In principle, every high school student takes 1 semester class to learn the Egodeath theory, and advanced degrees are granted in Masters’ in Transcendent Knowledge; PhD in Psychedelic Eternalism.

Night Fever Surrender to Psilocybin transformation – paste bk club summaries of my mission statement

WHAT LOOKS LIKE dread Dittrich’s Dread DED dimension, dread ETCLOC — the experience of the threat of catastrophic loss of control, on the ego, childish side of the gate, is transformation of ctrl: a 2-level relationshio w God the puppetmaster

we are not to be hubristic self assured control agents yet nor are we to avoid massive Kafei sized Max Freakout 3 Reallys high , Eight Reallys High:

God wants creatures to be rly high to know Him as Source of control, yet not hubristic self assured

like shamans right form of full active control , not egoic possibilism-premised control

in the peak state and afterwards we must utilize possibility thinking ego, egoic like possibilism-thinking , freewill thinking , BUT qualified possibilism-thinking

Justified Rectified Purified Egoic Control Thinking

2-level, dependent control

monolithic, autonomous control is now washed: known to be only virtual

use the branching model false virtual illusory local egoic POV but modded.

do not RELY on egoic premise re the foundation source of ctrl

to have stable ctrl, Use egoic freewill looking self control, but yet with a transformed, cleaned, redeemed, rectified, washed, washed clean foundation a new understanding of our source of control.

Our basis foundation is changed, although the visible upper layer of self control looks like it is free will premed but yet transformed foundation understood

image f 177 Great Canterbury Psalter

Cubensis Nonbranching Horses & Balancing on Right Leg (Image f177)

https://youtu.be/c65yR7FWJsM?si=t8t4mYcpxsKTSS7A

The Official Brown Database of Mushroom Imagery in Christian Art

Michael Hoffman, 9:30 p.m., March 25, 2025

Contents:

Motivation for this Post
Official Relevant Definitions of the Negative and Positive Positions
Quotes about the Database and Committee from Brown 2016
Section about the Database and Committee from Brown 2019
INTERDISCIPLINARY COMMITTEE ON PSYCHEDELIC GOSPELS
- Call for an interdisciplinary committee
Ruck’s “Social Drama Narrative” Tail Wagging the “Presence of Mushrooms” Dog
- Forbidden Word List: mainstream, cult, secretly, oppression, hidden, secret cult, surreptitiously slipped in, communities, cults, groups, sects, heretical; “psychoactive mushrooms”, umbrella wildcard terms
- The Habitual Attempt to Limit Entheogens, by 1st-gen entheogen scholarship
The Database Includes the Accompanying Motifs of the Mushroom-Trees Genre: {mushrooms}, {branching}, {handedness}, and {stability} Motifs
“Mushroom Imagery”, not “Images of Mushrooms”
Wasson’s paradox
See Also

Motivation for this Post

Crop by Michael Hoffman.
Discovery of the day: That it’s a YI mushroom-tree in Lot window, March 25, 2025

this page IS the db, vs:
this site IS the db, vs:
this page describes and articulates and embodies the CONCEPT of the Brown db
this page serves as a concrete link; this page URL “is” the Brown [virtual] db.

Brown 2019: 0 hits on “database”, 1 hit on “catalog”: cataloguing – a verb.

Brown focuses on Committee and action too much, not concrete enough collection.

It’s easy to have a database.

Having a collection and doing collection, acting in a committee, is too hard, not happening.

‘database’ is more powerful than ‘catalog’.

I need to inspect and markup Browns’ description of the db, J Brown told me the present site is as close to their db proposed db as anything. that this site is the closest thing to their proposed db.

Browns’ writeup focuses more on the committee – which idea failed, no one has time to commit to that — than on the db.

This page addresses somehow those needs. after studying and summ’ing what Browns propose.

Official Relevant Definitions of the Negative and Positive Positions

https://egodeaththeory.org/2024/11/23/deniers-logical-fallacies-pilzbaum-mushroom-tree-debate/#Affirmers-Assertion

https://egodeaththeory.org/2024/11/23/deniers-logical-fallacies-pilzbaum-mushroom-tree-debate/#Deniers-Assertion

Deniers’ Logical Fallacies in the Pilzbaum (Mushroom Trees) Debate

Quotes about the Database and Committee from Brown 2016

Section about the Database and Committee from Brown 2019

14 hits on “committee” – all of them in section “INTERDISCIPLINARY COMMITTEE ON PSYCHEDELIC GOSPELS” (good news, a relief)

formatting: all the entire section, plain text, 1 sentence per paragraph.

todo: add bold, maybe delete some.

Browns write:

INTERDISCIPLINARY COMMITTEE ON PSYCHEDELIC GOSPELS

We have revisited the Wasson– Allegro controversy, presented iconographic evidence of entheogens in Christian art, and examined critiques of the psychedelic gospels theory.

In this context, we can now address Wasson’s paradox and the need for an Interdisciplinary Committee on the Psychedelic Gospels.

Call for an interdisciplinary committee

Samorini (1998 ) closes his survey of “ mushroom-trees” in Christian art by stating that “we may confidently conclude from what has emerged that justifications do exist for serious and unprejudiced ethnomycological study of early Christian culture, and it is our hope that such studies will take place” (p. 107).

Given the conflicting interpretations of entheogenic mushroom images in Christian art, and the controversial implications of the psychedelic gospels theory, there is an obvious need to establish sound methodologies and objective criteria for a rigorous, unbiased evaluation of this iconographic evidence.

Achieving this goal will require more than a de rigueur appeal for “additional studies.”

For this reason, we call for the establishment of an international Interdisciplinary Committee on the Psychedelic Gospels (Committee).

[should call for database, or define virtual database]

This Committee could be housed at a major university or museum and co-chaired by an ethnobotanist and church historian with relevant credentials.

It would be charged with collecting, cataloging, and curating potential psychoactive images in Christian art from around the world, and evaluating them for the presence of evidence indicating that they represent entheogenic species.

Toward this end, the Committee would integrate research methodologies from

anthropology (fieldwork),
art history (iconography, iconology),
church history (textual analysis),
ethnobotany (cultural uses of mushrooms),
mycology (fungus identification), and theology (exegesis).

[the Egodeath theory/ the Mytheme theory; the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism – this is THE way to explain branches/ ramification, as demanded by Panofsky-Huggins as their MAIN objection to the mushroom interp.]

The Committee would establish criteria for peer-review evaluation of critical questions.

Are the images clear and unambiguous enough to facilitate a definitive identifi cation of the genus and species of psychoactive mushroom?

[not just isolated mushroom motif; the genre is actually intending to … artists of the mushroom-trees genre do not intend to send msg “mushroom”; their actual msg is conveyed by the combination of {mushrooms}, {branching}, {handedness}, and {stability} motifs; to describe psychedelic eternalism; mental model transformation from possibilism to eternalism]

Or if the mushrooms shown are stylized mushrooms (such as “mushroom trees”), are there artistic traditions of interpretation that contribute to determining that they were intended to depict entheogenic species?

Does the art tradition and history surrounding the image enhance the determination of the intent to represent psychoactive mushrooms or other entheogens?

Are there relevant texts and/or other historical documents that corroborate these findings?

Unlike the political infighting that delayed publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls for decades, the workings of the Committee must be transparent.

The Judeo-Christian art images and religious texts in question should be made available online for public viewing and comment.

It is through this interdisciplinary peer-review process that the theory of the psychedelic gospels can be independently confirmed (or refuted) by the Committee, and thereby potentially gain credence in scientific and theological circles as well as among thought leaders, policy makers and the mainstream media.

/ end of section from Brown & Brown 2019

Entheogens in Christian art: Wasson, Allegro, and the Psychedelic Gospels. Jerry Brown & Julie Brown (2019). Journal of Psychedelic Studies, Volume 3: Issue 2, pp. 142–163. https://doi.org/10.1556/2054.2019.019 – https://www.academia.edu/40412411/Entheogens_in_Christian_art_Wasson_Allegro_and_the_Psychedelic_Gospels

https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/01/07/panofskys-letters-to-wasson-transcribed/

Ruck Committee? we have a counter-committee!

The business of the Ruck Committee is wrong-agenda-driven:

Ritual retelling of tabu social drama narrative of suppression; strive to prevent real Christianity & mass of all people from having The Mushroom (kiddie Amanita) by laboring to construct a barrier wall between Amanita and society at large in Europe history.

The important thing is the morality tale not psychedelics, for Ruck Committee; 1st-generation entheogen scholarship (the Secret Amanita paradigm).

The Brown database is specifically 2nd-generation entheogen scholarship (the Explicit Psilocybin paradigm).

WE DO NOT PERMIT “SECRECY” NARRATIVE TAIL WAGGING THE PSYCHEDELIC EVIDENCE DOG.

THIS DB SIMPLY SAYS “MUSHROOM IS PRESENT” OR MUSHROOM IS USED, NOT “Secret Christian Amanita Cult”, the Amanita Primacy Fallacy, spinning a social drama narrative.

We do not use Browns’ word ‘secret’, nor ‘mainstream’.

Reject “oppressor vs oppressed” narrative driving entheogen scholarship, as was done by the Allegro-Ruck paradigm, for Allegro’s reason/motive/ agenda, nor Ruck Committee’s reason/ motivation / agenda/ project of wrapping around each piece of evidence a jail of framing that art piece as an “alien heretical invasion even into the very heart of the Institutional Big Bad Church”

— a social drama narrative which REPLACES & neutralizes every piece of mushroom imagery in Christian art, striving to keep it separate from the mass of Christendom population & practice by fabricating and concocting out of thin air, “heretical sects, members-only, strong walls”, “displayed blatantly in their places of worship”.

Citation: The Holy Mushroom, p. 104 Irvin objects to such premise.

Against the Assumption of Suppression of Psychedelics in Pre-Modernity (Cyberdisciple 2020)

p. 14 of “Conjuring Eden”, Ruck et al, Entheos 1, 2001:

p. 15 of “Conjuring Eden”, Ruck et al, Entheos 1, 2001: littered with words serving to isolate and restrict “The Mushroom” to imagined “groups” and construct a barrier wall.

I recently highlighted all the words that are abused to carry this premise of “barrier wall” – drawing a line w/ The Mushroom on one side of Ruck paradigm’s line, and Lacking The Mushroom on the other side of the Great Ruckian Barrier Wall:

Conjuring Eden: Art and the Entheogenic Vision of Paradise (Hoffman, Ruck & Staples, Entheos 1, 2001)

Forbidden Word List: mainstream, cult, secretly, oppression, hidden, secret cult, surreptitiously slipped in, communities, cults, groups, sects, heretical; “psychoactive mushrooms”, umbrella wildcard terms

No More Writing About Mushrooms, Entheogens, Classic Psychedelics, Visionary Plants, Plant Teachers, or Psychoactive Plants and Substances

Forbidden Word List for Effective Theory Construction in Psychedelics History and Psychedelic Pseudo Science

The Habitual Attempt to Limit Entheogens, by 1st-gen entheogen scholarship

but when irvin 2008 criticized Ruck’s attempt to limit The Mushroom to mysticism and heretical sects, and to do that, Irvin cited AstroSham 1, Irvin then had to himself hasten to delete his own effort in AstroSham 1 2006 to attempt to limit The Mushroom to “kings, priests, and the elite” – removed from AstroSham 2 2009.

p. 56 of “Daturas for the Virgin”, Ruck et al, Entheos 2, 2001

The Database Includes the Accompanying Motifs of the Mushroom-Trees Genre: {mushrooms}, {branching}, {handedness}, and {stability} Motifs

One way to define the Brown db is: the galleries from Irvin + Michael Hoffman + J Rush + Browns + Samorini = a virtual db.

The db must include {mushrooms}, {branching}, {handedness}, and {stability} motifs supplementing and surrounding and accompanying mushroom imagery in Christian art.

“Mushroom Imagery”, not “Images of Mushrooms”

MICA = mushroom imagery in Christian art

MICA = mushrooms in Christian art <– brittle; we are not saying “it is a mushroom”.

We are saying “it is mushroom features fragments imagery”.

b/c the dirty strategy of Ronald Huggins is “the image on the scale of entire tree does not match A mushroom, therefore, so, not a mushroom.”

But if we are intelliegent MICA Affirmers , we are not saying that “it is a mushroom” – idiotic brittle talk. Low IQ. Irrelvant.

Huggins’ Foraging Wrong article uses dirty opportunity to say “the whole image doesn’t exacly match A mushroom, so, not a mushroom, so, no mushroom imagery in Christian art.”

It is crucial for the good guys, us MICA Affirmers, to explicitly control the definitions of the neg & pos position.

Forget Hugs’ defs; forget the MICA Deniers’ stupid position slip-n-slide definition shell games.

Only use my, relevant & productive, STABLE definitions of the two position.

Huggins: *I* am dictating to *you* what YOUR position is.

*I* am the one who is proactively strawmanning YOU.

*I* control the terms of debate; not you.

I reject the debate positions & concerns & framings as expressed by MICA Deniers.

Huggins’ Fake “Criteria to Decide” Is Actually a Sheer Decree of “Mushroom Features Don’t Count”

Left to Huggins , we have trash quality of pseudo arg’n like Huggins writing:

“Panofsky lets us articulate criteria to decide whetehre it is a tree or it is a mushroom” – brain dead pseudo-argument masking a sheer arbitrary decree.

What Huggins then does is list these so-called “critieria”; LEARNED, LEARNED!, so learned, a long list of criteria (a posturing put-on, pretense):

if it has branch
if it looks like tree
if it has any tree features
if …
if …

Then, I dictate (says Huggins), arb’ly, that all mushroom-trees mean tree, not mushroom.

Countering Huggins’ bunk non-arg w/ its opposite:

But Huggins, *I* counter-dictate:

The mushroom features fragmentary aspects of mushroom-trees “RULES OUT” (Huggins’ stupid term thrown about as if a real arg) tree.

To throw Huggins bunk arg’n back in his face,

The mushroom features rule out tree.

⚔️

Touche, Huggins. By your own bunk junk arg.

Oh but let me frame that the same stupid way as Huggins builds up in the paragraph in the Conclusion section of Huggins’ Foraging Wrong article:

Panofsky’s argument allows us to articulate criteria to decide for a given image whether it is a tree or it is a mushroom:

If the image has any mushroom-shaped caps, then it is a mushroom, not a tree.
If the image has any mushroom-colored, blue stem, then it is a mushroom, not a tree.
If the image has any branch that is shaped like a mushroom, then it is a mushroom, not a tree.

TOUCHE! LOL ⚔️

GARBAGE ARG’N FROM MICA Deniers, TYPICAL.

I’m as good as Ronald Huggins at “articulating criteria to decide”, equally arb’ly. What posturing.

Is this supposed to be argumentation, Huggins? “articulating criteria to decide”?

Criteria to decide whether a mushroom-tree is a mushroom or a tree: the tree features count, but the mushroom features don’t count – Because I Say So

Criteria to decide whether a mushroom-tree is a mushroom or a tree: the mushroom features count, but the tree features don’t count – Because I Say So

You mean, criteria to issue a blanket proclamation that in every instance, given mushroom features + tree features – ie, what you art historians call mushroom-trees – YOUR term —

You art historians, MICA Deniers, proclaim that the tree features count, but the mushroom features don’t count – because you proclaim so, without any basis other than, “branches need to be explained.”

Which is DONE.

In fact, we know that mushroom-trees cannot possibly mean trees, b/c they have mushroom features.

Mushroom-trees definitely do not and cannot mean trees, and in fact mushroom-trees do not ultimately mean trees.

In fact, mushroom-trees more mean literal mushrooms than they mean literal trees.

Mushroom-trees ultimately mean experience of non-branching from Psilocybin.

Mushroom-trees do not ultimately mean tree OR mushroom.

So, a FALSE DILEMMA FALLACY thanks to big-brain Huggins and the scoundrel MICA Deniers who apologized for, ie defend – Wasson’s fraudulent, obstructionist behavior, on the excuse that:

“Wasson didn’t prevent MICA Affirmers from affirming mushroom imagery in Christian art, publishing such assertions post-Wasson.

“So, academic fraud and obstructionism: THIS IS FINE”, says Huggins.

Penalty: I charge Huggins as responsible for Wasson’s fraud.

Huggins must disavow, let’s see Hug disavow:

I demand that Huggins RETRACTS his defense of Wasson’s bullying tactics & duplicity, which Irvin complains about, as reported by Huggins’ Foraging Wrong article.

The good thing from Panofsky-Huggins is, they inquire of us MICA Affirmers: Must explain branches. DONE.

… … That’s his so-called “enables us to articulate criteria to decide whether it is a tree or it is a mushroom”.

Huggins’ “articulate criteria to decide” is pure bullsh*t!

The Panofsky-Huggins argument REALLY is:

“Until MICA Affirmers explain branches, we are not convinced.”

Solved. Done. See present site;

Branches — and you are blind to more important non-branching motif — means the peak Psilocybin experience of mental model transformation from possibilism to eternalism .

That is why we MICA Affirmers reject any position definition games from the MICA Deniers, and we take charge of both positions definitions.

HERE is the specific postition we argue against and disprove, and, here is the position that we hold.

Not like Ruck says on p. 56 of “Daturas for the Virgin”, Ruck et al, Entheos 2, 2001 , “they are mushrooms and nothing else” – a poor statement of the MICA Affirmers position.

MICA Affirmers do NOT say mushroom-trees are “mushrooms and nothing else”, like Ruck Committee 2001 says on p. 56 “Daturas for the Virgin”.

See my page for the sane, relevant, two position definitions (for & against), at 3 levels of detail.

Ignore the stupid, shifting, shell-game position definitions from MICA Deniers such as “decide if it is a tree of it is a mushroom” – irrelvant brain-dead fallacious arg’n FALSE DILEMMA.

The usual lack of concern — as usual, as typical:

Characteristic of MICA Deniers is they don’t care about good arg’n.

MICA Deniers stoop and are ok with being associated with obviously bad arg’n.

MICA Deniers are ok w/ being known for bad arg’n and heap of fallacious arg’n, all of the fallacies all at once.

They’re fine putting that forth and associating themselves w/ fallacious arg’n: they solve that by doing more of it, which is really, arg’n from prejudice:

If I’m a MICA Denier and my lips are moving, that is to be taken as “valid arg’n”, given the un-level playing field of extreme bias against MICA Affirmers.

Just throw at the wall, more and more junk arg’n, none valid, but that’s ok.

“articulate criteria to decide” — GTFO! what b.s.! not even an arg!

It’s just a dictate , sweeping, that NO mushroom-trees are “a mushroom”, disguised and foisted as if an arg, but actually it is just a decree:

Huggins’ Conclusion paragraph is really just a position statement repeated: “My position is that mushroom-trees are not a mushroom but are instead a tree.”

But Huggins pretends to be “articulating criteria to decide whether YADA YADA, BS, BS” – typical fallacious arg’n from MICA Deniers that they are notorious for.

If MICA Affirmers are characteristically notorious for (rightly) ignoring art historians,

MICA Deniers are characteristically notorious for shamelessly putting forth Bad Arg’n that amount to arg’n from prejudice.

MICA Deniers only have 1 good point:

MICA Deniers have only 1 valid objection to mushroom imagery in Christian art: the MICA Affirmers must explain the branches motif of mushroom-trees. DONE.

Deniers’ Logical Fallacies in the Pilzbaum (Mushroom Trees) Debate

Wasson’s paradox

(moved out from Interdisc. section – awesome but tangential)

Browns write:

In our book, we state that “In our opinion Wasson’s greatest paradox was this: the discrepancy between his zealous exploration of a controversial theory about the role of entheogens in early religion and his reluctance to pursue this theory past the portals of the church and into the hallowed halls of Christianity” (Brown & Brown, 2016, p. 7).

This paradox is especially poignant in the case of the Eden fresco at Plaincourault.

Here, Samorini (1998 ) remarks that “It is therefore quite strange that the father of ethnomycology stopped before the lapidary appraisal of an art historian and did not, instead follow the trail of additional ‘mushroom-tree’ representations in Roman and Christian art as he might have done or scheduled” (p. 31).

Given his reputation as an indefatigable seeker of sacred mushrooms, why did Wasson not travel a mere 6 miles west of Plaincourault to Saint Savin (Figure 5 ) or 50 miles east to SaintMartin’ s (Figure 8 ) where he would have undoubtedly discovered additional examples of entheogens in Christian art? Several explanations of this egregious oversight have been suggested.

Samorini (1998 ) proposes that Wasson’ s reluctance grew out of a realistic concern that acknowledging any evidence in support of “ Allegro’ s sensational thesis” would deal “a serious blow to the new science of ethnomycology of entheogenic mushrooms” (p. 32).

Early in our research, we wondered if as the son of an Episcopalian minister, Wasson felt “a filial allegiance to his father and a loyalty to the church” (Brown & Brown, 2016 , p. 7).

While these may be contributing factors, we later uncovered a more compelling explanation.

During our 2012 visit to the Vatican Museum in Rome, we were inspired to Google the words “ Wasson, Vatican” which immediately produced several search items including one that said “Wasson was an account manager to the Pope and Vatican for J.P. Morgan” (Irvin, 2012 ).

Wasson joined the Wall Street investment banking firm of J.P. Morgan in 1934, where he helped develop the new fi eld of banking public relations.

Upon further research, we found that Wasson’ s direct financial involvement with the Vatican was confi rmed by DeWitt Peterkin, a retired J.P. Morgan, Vice President.

In an interview for The Sacred Mushroom Seeker , a book of essays in tribute to Wasson, Peterkin reveals that “Unbeknown to most people, we were for many years one of the bankers for the Vatican . . .

And Gordon used to have private audiences with the Pope”

(Riedlinger, 1997b , p. 51).

Wasson never mentions his role as a Vatican banker in his writings.

This role provides a clear fi nancial motive for Wasson’ s reluctance to explore entheogens in Christian art.

This may have been reinforced by a legally binding confi dentiality and non-disclosure agreement between banker (J.P. Morgan) and client (the Vatican), given that such agreements are common in the investment banking field.

Regardless of motive, due to Wasson’ s preeminent position as a leading authority on the study of entheogens and religion, this lack of disclosure was especially damaging to the nascent field of ethnomycology.

In effect, Wasson’s lack of transparency combined with his relentless personal and professional attacks on Allegro stymied widespread scholarly inquiry into the study of entheogens and Christianity for nearly half a century.

/ end of section by Browns, moved out from Interdisc. section

	cyberdisciple on Historians on Drugs: Towards a…
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Intro

The Name of the Theory, and the descriptive elaborative sentence to disambig it

Which Came First: Infinitely better than “CybTrans.com” domain name Egodeath.com, or, calling it “Egodeath theory” eg 1996/1997? when did I first write “Egodeath theory”? Ans: Not in 1997; by 2001 June.

“The Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence” [descriptive, except missing ‘eternalism’ & ‘psychedelic’] (1988) = “the Egodeath theory” (2001?)

the [Cybernetic + Psychedelic + Eternalism] Theory of Ego Transcendence

the [Analogy + Cybernetic + Psychedelic + Eternalism] Theory of X

the [Analogy Psychedelic Eternalism Cybernetic] Theory of X

the [Analogy Psychedelic Eternalism Cybernetic] Theory

The Analogy Psychedelic Eternalism Cybernetics Theory

X = Ego Transcendence

The Theory of Psychedelic Hyper-Eternalism

The Theory of Psychedelic (Hyper-) Eternalism

Psychedelic Hyper-Eternalism

The Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Eternalism

The Theory of Psychedelic Eternalism

The Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Hyper-Eternalism

The Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Eternalism (which is Hyper-Eternalism, ie Qualified Possibilism)

The Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Possibilism [too much marketing lie??]

Egodeath Theory Emphasizing Qualified Possibilism Instead of Eternalism: “Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Hyper-Eternalism“

Beginner Possibilism Guy; Beginner Eternalism Guy; Advanced Hyper-Eternalism Guy

1997 Psyche Level (Soul Level) version of the Egodeath theory = 2-level; end-state = brute eternalism; You must agree with me that no-free-will is the case; you must conduct all your thinking in a no-free-will way

Does Middle Platonism have an aspect of hyper-heimarmene? todo: confirm

Confirmed Astral Ascent Mysticism per Egodeath Theory: Name of hyper-eternalism sphere (beyond eternalism) is Pleroma, = precession of the equinoxes

Sledge Video “What is the Demiurge? Pt 4 Why the Demiurge is Necessary for Salvation”

“Pneumatic”, “Spiritual”, Hyper-Transcendent Version of Egodeath Theory = Accurate Useful Description of Actual Resulting Mental Model = Qualified Possibilism, More than Brute/ Simple Eternalism

Search Web: pleroma cosmic heimarmene

The Egodeath Theory Had Religious Re-Marketing Rebirth During March 2025 Due to Prepping to Communicate it to my Psychedelic Church

Factors that caused me to shift emphasis/ framing of the Egodeath theory from “You end up with Eternalism” to “You end up with Qualified Possibilism” in March 2025; Well-Formed Transcendent “Compatibilism“

Valentinus: Unsheathed Sword of Intelligence (Litwa, Feb. 2025)

“On Self-control” fragment, Now Known to be by Valentinus. Litwa: Valentinus Unsheathed “On Self-control” book

It Was DMT. 😑

Bullsh!t Is Bullsh!t: False Tepidness Is Hardly Truer than False Denial of Entheogens

“We Figured Out How Hermetists Had Intense Altered States: Through Entheogenic Practices in the Wide Sense! 🏆” – Wouter Hanegraaff & Justin Sledge, Posturing Academics

“We Figured Out How Hermetists Had Intense Altered States: Through Non-Drug Entheogens! 🏆” – Wouter Hanegraaff & Justin Sledge, Posturing Academics

From Total Denial to Insistent Assertion Along with Strenuous Minimizing of Entheogens: “I boldly insist that ancients definitely used entheogenic practices (but it was almost always non-drug entheogenic practices)” – Countersignal Yourself Harder

Desc from Video

Featured places

Embassy of the Free Mind

Museum

Quick paste from idea development page 26: Related Comments

My Wussy Half-Truth in 1997 like the traditional methods of the mystics are non-drug entheogens

“Dizzy Doesn’t Count”

keyboard shortcut for my 2004 “Entheogenic Esotericism” post

When You Think of Psychedelics Extremism, Think Egodeath theory

🍄👑 King of the Ardent Advocates

Transcription (with timestamps)

Transcription without Timestamps

Proof that going over the same ideas again makes progress in network connections per Paul Thagard’s model of iterative revision of connections between ideas to develop and refine and revise a theory.

The phrase “theory revision” is core to his model of scientific theory, replacement and development and modification.

Proof that spiraling is huge progress

Video: Part 2: The Evolution of my Ideas about Spirituality (Apr. 18, 2025)

My Comment on the Video

Soul Story: Evolution and The Purpose of Life (Freke, 2017)

Video: WHAT’S WRONG WITH NON-DUAL SPIRITUALITY : PART 1 (Freke, 2022)

Video: WHAT’S WRONG WITH NON-DUAL SPIRITUALITY : PART 2 (with biscuits) (Freke, 2022)

Video: Q&A on ‘What’s Wrong with NonDual Spirituality’ (Freke, 2022)

Summarize Points from Timothy Freke interview at YouTube

Deep Awake: Wake Up To Oneness and Celebrate Your Individuality(Tim Freke, 2016)

Timothy Freke Rejects Non-Duality & “Ego/ self is iillusion, Rejects “Minkows

and I believe I can prove that by pasting the transcription here –

In looking for a new direction, he is directionless

Timothy Freke Is Not Helping People Use Psilocybin

🗣️🎙️🤖💦🔫💥🔨🤬

Voice Dictation Cannot Handle the Word ‘Motif’

Highly effective to compare the new direction that Timothy Freke in evolutionary spirituality

Wish to integrate Voice Dictation with Keyboard shortcuts

In What Specific Way Is Recent-Freke a Mixed Bag?

Per the Egodeath theory, Ultimate Truth is, possibilism practical mental model + revealed underlying eternalism

Too Timid Tim – Reflects His Lack of Coherent Two-Leg Model

Incoming

Hermetica as a Path of Initiation (Litwa, 2025)

The Way of Zen by Alan Watts: “Truth Is Unspeakable” –> Freke, Ok <Throws Book into Fireplace>

Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: Freke Is Rejecting the Trite Cliched Ways of Talking About Transcendent Knowledge

Jesus Mysteries book: The #6 Bestselling Book at Amazon in 2000

Website

YouTube videos

Videos

Forthcoming Podbook (audio book)

Books

Rejection of Non-duality that negates individuals

“The Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence” [descriptive, except missing ‘eternalism’ & ‘psychedelic’] (1988) =
“the Egodeath theory” (2001?)

The Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Possibilism
[too much marketing lie??]

Deep Awake: Wake Up To Oneness and Celebrate Your Individuality
(Tim Freke, 2016)

Evolved^TM into Conversing About the Universe 🤯 [on cannabis]

A Process^TM of Emergence^TM, of Becoming^TM, of Forming^TM [the Egodeath theory “of transformation” (period)] [not wrong, not helpful]

“Transform^TM, Evolve^TM, Process^TM, Emergent^TM, Forming^TM” — Not Wrong, But Not Helpful

Spirituality is an emergent^TM level of the One Process

To Clarify, I’m Talking About Next-Level Emerging^TM & Evolving^TM & Process^TM & Forming^TM

Big Ideas: Evolve^TM, Emergent^TM, Multiple Levels^TM at the Same Time(!!)

Unfolds^TM, Resonant^TM, Vision^TM

Take It Out of Two-Worlds Mythology[?] and Put It into that one Processual^TM Dynamic^TM Evolving^TM World

Don’t Say “Spirit is Outside of the Natural World” – Say “Emergent^TM” Instead

Evolutionary^TM, Emergent^TM Process^TM Moving into the Spiritual

Via Process^TM of Evolution^TM and Complexification^TM

The After-Death Experience Is Undergoing an Evolutionary^TM Process^TM

The Evolved^TM ‘Soul’ or ‘Psyche’ Means the Ability to Make Sense Out of Tim’s Meaningless Utterances

We Should Seriously Take 12 Grams of Golden Teacher to Be Evolutionary^TM, Evolved^TM; Next-Level, and Emergent^TM

Study the Emergent^TM Realm, to Understand Lots of Spiritual Phenomena Like the Psyche

When the Body Fails, the Psyche Continues, as a Process^TM

FINALLY! “Take Psychedelics” (in an Emergent^TM, Evolving^TM Way, of Course) “or move your focus to the imaginal”

12 Grams Makes you Move Focus to the Imaginal, in High Definition Spirit Realm; Then You Get Real Emergent^TM, and Evolve^TM, and Become Leading-Edge^TM

Where Is the Imaginal^TM Realm?

Avoid Algorithms^TM that Run in the Material World

Evolution^TM = 12 G Psilocybin Imaginal Space Truckin

Proof I’m Right: Internet Conferencing Is Working Right Now, b/c of this Evolution^TM

If My Jargon Impresses You, You Are Evolving^TM

Takes 20-40 Minutes for the Evolving^TM to Kick In – we’re really moving now, I Wish I Could Claim It’s Because of my Jargon

Can We Find Golden Teacher, Source of Mythic Imaginal, Again? If so, We’d Be the Absolute Leading Edge^TM; the Spiritual Exploration Awakening