Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Bernardo Kastrup
https://archive.org/download/497KastrupDreamingReality/497-KastrupDreamingReality.mp3http://Today’s podcast features a lengthy reading by Bernardo Kastrup from his new book, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief. This reading comes from Part 3 of the book, which is a fictional account of a young scientist who participated in a research program that is investigating the nature of reality through the use of psychedelic medicines and brain scans during the experience. During the course of the experiments this fictional scientist uncovers the many layers of consciousness upon which our consensus reality is based. People who have had the good fortune to experience what Sasha Shulgin called a Plus 5 experience will most likely be amazed at how well Bernardo has captured the essence of such experiences.
More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
by Bernardo Kastrup
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496 - Something a Little Different
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498 - Where The Wild Things Grow
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And I would like to begin today by thanking Blue Lotus, who made a donation to the salon via the forums.
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Blue Lotus is now the 21st salonner to contribute to the support of these podcasts this year,
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and I sincerely appreciate the help in offsetting some of the expenses associated with producing them.
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Without the help that these wonderful salonners have given us,
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these talks wouldn’t be available to so many others.
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They are truly the core of the salon.
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Also, I’d like to thank our fellow salonners on the forums who have provided me with a lot of interesting links and information.
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Already there are people who are finding the others through these forums, Thank you. in Santa Cruz that Physics Package is organizing for this coming Earth Day, April 22nd.
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To state the obvious, that would be an excellent place for you to find a few more of the others if you live nearby.
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And in case you are new here to the salon and wonder where the phrase find the others comes from,
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well, it’s from a quote by Dr. Timothy Leary, who famously said,
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Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle.
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Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence.
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Trust your instincts.
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Do the unexpected.
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Find the others.
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And speaking of one of us others,
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we are now going to get to listen to someone who found the salon somehow,
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got in touch with me,
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and who has
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now contributed to other talks that I’ve previously podcast.
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As you already know, his name is Bernardo Kastrup.
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And if you remember from previous podcasts of Talks by Bernardo, he has a Ph.D. in computer
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engineering with specializations in artificial intelligence and reconfigurable computing.
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He has worked as a scientist in some of the world’s foremost research laboratories, including
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the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, and the Philips Research Laboratories,
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where the Casimir effect of quantum field theory was discovered.
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In addition to a managerial position in the high-tech industry,
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Bernardo also maintains a philosophy blog
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and a video interview series.
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His new book, from which he’s about to read to us,
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is a three-part journey into the rabbit hole
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that we call the nature of reality.
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Its ultimate destination is a plausible,
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living validation of transcendence. Now, when
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Bernardo sent me a copy of this new book a few months ago, he suggested that I skip directly to
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part three, which is from where this podcast reading comes. However, not being someone who
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follows directions very well, well, I began with part one, and I am very pleased that I did,
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because it provided me with some insights about myself that I had never encountered before.
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So, if you’re inclined to read this book for yourself, and since you are about to hear a
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section of part three read here in the salon, my suggestion is for you to start at the beginning
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yourself, because, well, you may be surprised at the insights that it is for you to start at the beginning yourself, because you may
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be surprised at the insights that it presents for you to think about in regards to your
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own life.
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Now, if you’ve ever been to a bookstore and attended an author’s reading, then you know
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that if you are lucky, you’ll get to hear the author read a few short passages from
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her or his new book.
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But generally, these are relatively short readings
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just to give you a brief flavor of the new book
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so that those present will then purchase a copy.
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And while buying a book after a reading may sometimes be the case,
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most authors already know that they are never going to get rich writing books.
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In my opinion, most authors write
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because they want other people to know what they’ve been thinking.
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It’s not about the money. It’s about getting their thoughts more widely known and discussed.
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So, for us here in the salon, Bernardo has taken the time to give us a much more extensive reading.
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In fact, you are about to hear a large section of the core of this new book without having to purchase a copy.
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of the core of this new book without having to purchase a copy.
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And so Bernardo provides us with a much more in-depth account of what I consider to be a truly unique and very important work.
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Now let’s listen to Bernardo Kastrup reading from Part 3
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of More Than Allegory on Religious Myth, Truth and Belief.
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What I’m about to narrate to you consists of several excerpts from my book
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More Than Allegory. It relates the story of a young engineer specialized in artificial
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intelligence systems who finds himself recruited for a massively well-funded but secret project
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involving altered states of consciousness. As I explain in the book, although this story is not to be taken literally,
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it is neither false nor mere allegory. It is true in a way more important than meets the eye at
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first. In the first part of this narration, we will discuss the nature of the project the young
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engineer was involved in. Later on, I will read the engineer’s first reports of his journeys into
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transcendent space, where he encountered an archetypal entity who would come to instruct him
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over many journeys on the nature of reality, life, and self. The secret project was called
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Trilobite, as described in the book. It was set up, funded, and managed by an ad-hoc group
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called The Club. Quoting from the book now, The Club has originally been formed in the late 60s
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by a group of successful bankers who were undergoing a kind of late midlife crisis.
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These people had achieved everything they’d ever wanted in life.
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They had their mansions, yachts, supercars, and whatnot.
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They had power, influence, trophy wives, but lacked one important element.
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Their lives no longer had any meaning.
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Having realized all their material dreams, they no longer knew what they were alive for.
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Moreover, middle age and its usual ailments had begun to force them to acknowledge their own mortality.
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The message from their bodies was loud and clear.
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You aren’t Superman, and you too are going to die.
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Unable to believe the naive religious myths they had grown up with, they wanted to find
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out whether there was indeed something after death, and if so, what.
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Their motivation to explore these questions was total, there was nothing else of interest
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in their lives, and their pockets very deep indeed.
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The club was the way they found to pool their efforts and resources together to achieve critical mass.
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And now, another review of trilobite.
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Again, quoting from the book.
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Originally inspired by the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s,
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the club had set up trilobite to find more effective and controllable methods
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for accessing what was described to me as transcendent realms.
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One quick observation here, I’m reading this in the first person, but these should be the words of the young engineer.
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Back to the book.
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I once asked the project’s chief scientist whether these were actual realities or just otherwise unconscious mental spaces.
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He replied by asking me, rather rhetorically, what the difference between the two was.
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I didn’t quite get his drift at the time. Anyway, the problem was that psychedelics,
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although providing unambiguously powerful effects, were unpredictable and impossible to control.
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unambiguously powerful effects were unpredictable and impossible to control.
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The experience was also awkward to describe or make sense of afterwards.
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It was as if the subject’s rational capacities for analysis and recall were switched off during the trance,
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rendering it impossible to articulate or bring back anything meaningful. Club founders had experimented with psychedelics,
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but were highly frustrated by these shortcomings.
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Their trips had given them the certainty that there was something huge to be explored,
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potentially holding all the answers they had yearned for,
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but tantalizingly out of reach.
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They wanted to find ways to enter the psychedelic realm for longer periods of time,
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with their analytical and recall capacity somewhat preserved,
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and with some level of control over the themes and directions of the trip.
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Specifically, they wanted the trance to be conducive to intention,
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a goal or a question posed before the beginning of the trip.
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The working hypothesis behind the inception of trilobite was that everyday brain activity
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somehow restricted or blocked lucid access to these transcendent realms.
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Club founders were galvanized by Aldous Huxley’s psychedelic-inspired description of the brain as a reduction valve of otherwise
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unlimited consciousness, discussed in Huxley’s famous 1954 book The Doors of Perception,
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and believed it to be rather accurate. Huxley’s book, in fact, had been the basis for the
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foundation of Trilobite. The project scientists were tasked from the beginning with finding ways to temporarily
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and selectively switch off specific parts of the brain in a coordinated manner in hopes that this
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could eventually induce a controlled psychedelic trance. This seminal hypothesis was the guiding
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principle of trilobite throughout its life and, as it turns out, a good enough approximation of
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the facts. Indeed, time after time, the hypothesis was confirmed in trials, at least at an operational
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level. Things did behave as though a normal working brain were a reduction valve of consciousness,
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focusing our attention on what was important for the survival of the physical body,
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but restricting our access to transcendent insight.
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The scientists’ initial attempts had focused purely on drug design.
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However, for many years little progress was made.
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To be sure, new and effective psychoactive agents were developed, some even found their
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way to the streets, but none that could deliver on the club’s key requirement, that of a
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controllable trip, preserving one’s analytical wits and memory formation capacities.
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Early methods for synthesizing drugs were crude, severely restricting what could be achieved. And even
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as methods improved over the years, project scientists realized that drugs alone, no matter
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how well designed they were, could never give them sufficient granularity of control over the
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activity of different brain regions. Finally, they also realized that the subjects’ responses during the trance were dynamic,
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requiring the effect of the psychoactive agent to quickly adapt on the fly.
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That was impractical with drugs.
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The scientists’ ultimate dream was to be able to selectively deactivate any individual
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neuron anywhere in the brain at any time.
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Drugs alone simply couldn’t do it.
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It was only in the mid-1980s that project scientists began exploring another tool,
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exposing the subject’s brain to electromagnetic, or EM, fields.
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Some guy in England had managed to control a subject’s motor functions by applying these fields through the skull,
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so project scientists figured that they could push the technique further.
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The EM fields could disrupt activity in specific regions of the brain in a way that could be programmed and adapted on the fly.
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The theory was that one could manipulate the subject’s state of consciousness
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with these fields, opening the gates of transcendence, so to speak. The whole thing
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was rudimentary back then, but it offered enough degrees of freedom for progressive refinement.
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Through exhaustive and unbelievably expensive trial and error over many years, project scientists had converged on a mix-and-match technique
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that they called the recipe.
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It entailed three different elements.
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A carefully coordinated series of intravenous infusions
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that delivered different psychoactive drugs at specific moments,
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colloquially called the juice mix among research associates,
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a programmed series of EM pulses at specific locations of the subject’s brain, which we
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inaccurately called the light show, and brain function measurement technology to monitor
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the subject’s neuroactivity during the trance, the telemetry, also a rather inaccurate term that
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stuck. A custom-made computer coordinated all three elements. The recipe had shown tremendous
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promise in trials carried out during the first few years preceding my joining the project.
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This had motivated the club to free up a seemingly unlimited financial line to,
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once and for all, have Trilobyte deliver on its goals. Their efforts to get me on board
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were a small part of this renewed push.
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One of the key remaining technical challenges had to do with pattern recognition and control.
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This is where I came in.
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With their brain function measurement technology,
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project scientists could see and record the neural activity in a subject’s brain with exquisite detail.
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But they hadn’t yet developed a way to reliably interpret the patterns they saw.
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They didn’t quite know what the telemetry meant from the subject’s direct subjective perspective, that is, what the subject was experiencing
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in association with the measured pattern of brain activity.
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To develop a tool to help figure this out
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was the first part of my team’s task. The second part
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was to develop a way to translate this interpretation of the telemetry
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into commands for adjusting the juice mix and the light show. The idea was to have a computerized
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system continuously observe the subject’s brain activity and adapt both the cocktail of psychoactive
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drugs and the position and intensity of the EM pulses on the fly,
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so to steer the trance along paths predetermined by the subject’s original intention.
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Our general approach was to use offline data to train an AI system to interpret telemetry.
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AI stands, of course, for artificial intelligence.
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AI stands, of course, for artificial intelligence.
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Trilobite had amassed a huge library of telemetry recordings and corresponding trip reports,
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the latter written by the subjects shortly after their respective trips.
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With enough trip reports and telemetry recordings, we should, theoretically, be able to develop an AI system that could mine for correlations between the
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two and learn what patterns of neural activity corresponded to what types of subjective experience.
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Once the AI had learned enough, it could then be deployed live during a trip, so to help
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adjust the light show and the juice mix on the fly.
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There were huge problems, though.
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Despite the thousands of trip reports and telemetry recordings available to us,
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the data were, statistically speaking, extremely limited for our purposes.
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The complexity of the neural activity and the variety of subjective experiences reported were such that orders of magnitude more data would be necessary for an ordinary AI to learn the correspondences.
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To compound the problem, the trip reports were not time-stamped. We didn’t precisely know what
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segment of the telemetry corresponded to what part of the subject’s later narrative of his or her
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experiences. Fundamentally new technical insights were necessary to tackle these issues.
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Even with these problems addressed, project scientists were aware that deliberate control
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of the trends could only be done coarsely, at the level of broad themes and directions.
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But that was enough.
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The club’s intent was to learn about the underlying nature of life and reality, so the system
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was meant to continually monitor the telemetry to see if the trip was going in this general
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metaphysical direction.
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If not, it should calculate changes in the juice mix and the light show
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to put the trip back on the intended course. Notice that the idea here wasn’t to create an
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artificial virtual reality by manipulating brain function. In fact, that would have defeated the
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whole purpose of the project. As mentioned earlier, the hypothesis was that the
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trance gave subjects access to transcendent but real landscapes, where real answers to the biggest
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questions of life could be found. The goal of fine-tuning the juice mix and the light show
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during the journey was merely to help an explorer navigate an unfamiliar terrain
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with some level of control, not to artificially simulate the terrain itself. Selectively
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deactivating certain parts of the brain was just a means to send people off to specific locations
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of a transcendent space, rather like Jodie Foster in the movie Contact.
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There actually were some interesting rumors about the relationship between that movie
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and trilobite, but that’s not relevant here.
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There, they would hopefully find the answers and insights the club sought.
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The young engineer ended up not only working on the development of the recipe, but becoming an explorer of consciousness himself.
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How this transition happened is explained in the book.
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For the remainder of this podcast, I would like to read to you the engineer’s reports of his first transcendent experiences.
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Quoting from the book again.
00:19:47 ►
Quoting from the book again. plugs isolated my senses completely from whatever was going on around me. But I knew that the complex and rather large rig around my head was about to kick into operation, so it was comforting to know
00:19:53 ►
that I wouldn’t be able to hear its rather disturbing hum. The nurse was probably already
00:19:59 ►
starting the carefully orchestrated series of intravenous infusions that would, together with the electromagnetic
00:20:06 ►
fields beamed directly into my head, completely change my sense of self and reality.
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From that moment on, and despite all the training I had undergone, I really had no idea what
00:20:20 ►
was going to happen. I felt that my whole life had somehow been about that very time.
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Ten, nine, eight, seven. I could feel the knot of my ordinary mental associations becoming
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untangled, different threads of thought and emotion being teased apart and allowed to starve
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in isolation. I didn’t resist it, merely witnessing as huge mental spaces opened up in my
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mind. How incredibly spacious it was. Mundane questions, worries and concerns were gone.
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-
- My awareness of my own body dissipated quickly, leading to mild anxiety. The body became distant, remote, even abstract.
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-
-
- It is impossible to describe one’s state of consciousness at this stage.
-
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One drifts within an ocean of previously obfuscated mental contents,
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uninspeakably huge vistas comprised of images, affections and insights, opening
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up at each twist and turn. The unfathomable ocean felt as autonomous and tangible as the
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ordinary world, if not more.
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- This feels so concretely and palpably real, I mentally remarked to myself.
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concretely and palpably real, I mentally remarked to myself. But it is concretely and palpably real, a voice responded, seemingly out of the blue. What the heck, I asked, rather startled. It is
00:21:54 ►
difficult to say whether the answer I then received was my own conclusion or something
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communicated by the voice. I am this other you’ve been trying to find. I paused to gather my thoughts or whatever
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type of mental activity one manifests in that state of consciousness. I was surprised and excited,
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only reassured by the fact that I sensed great patience and serenity on the part of the other.
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My struggle was in deciding which line of inquiry to pursue next.
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Part of me wanted confirmation of whether the other was an aspect of myself
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or a separate, autonomous entity of some sort.
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Yet, I also felt irresistibly puzzled by his very first words.
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It is concretely and palpably real, he’d said, referring to the unfathomable
00:22:47 ►
mental space where I now was. How could it be? I knew I was undergoing a glorified psychedelic
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trip enhanced by EM fields. I was lying in a scientific laboratory, monitored closely by
00:23:01 ►
over a half-dozen people. My eyes were shut and my ears plugged.
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Clearly, my experience was mental and, as such,
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not concretely and palpably real.
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But isn’t your ordinary waking reality
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ultimately also a mental experience?
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The other asked, in seeming awareness of what I was thinking.
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All you can know about it is experiential.
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Whatever else reality may be, apart from your experience of it,
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is just an abstraction of your intellect, forever beyond your life.
00:23:38 ►
This was disarmingly logical.
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Yet habits of thought, when reinforced over a lifetime, are hard to break. So I insisted.
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Yes, but there is a clear difference between the world of my mind inside my head and the
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real world outside my head. For one, I need to have my eyes open to see the real world,
00:24:01 ►
while this experience right now, including you, can only be within
00:24:05 ►
my head.
00:24:07 ►
After all, my real eyes are closed right now.
00:24:12 ►
Your confusion arises from a fundamental inversion.
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It is your head that is in your mind, not your mind in your head.
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This realm is indeed entirely within your mind, but so is your
00:24:27 ►
ordinary waking reality, your body included. Both realms are mental worlds unfolding within
00:24:35 ►
consciousness at all times. The act of focusing your attention on one particular realm obfuscates the others. That’s why you cannot feel your body right now.
00:24:47 ►
Your body is a mental content that belongs to another,
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now obfuscated realm of mentation,
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another dream of mind, so to speak.
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I had never thought of things this way,
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and the idea was strangely seductive.
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But if the other was correct, the implications would be nearly unimaginable.
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The idea that the mind is inside the body, as opposed to the other way around,
00:25:16 ►
is behind everything we consider true about the world and ourselves.
00:25:21 ►
Not only are psychiatry, psychology, and our understanding of death directly rooted in it,
00:25:28 ►
our economical, political, social, educational, scientific, philosophical, and even religious
00:25:33 ►
systems are also indirectly based on it. We couldn’t possibly have gotten it all so wrong
00:25:41 ►
for so long. We would have noticed problems and contradictions earlier.
00:25:47 ►
Yet, the edifice of our culture
00:25:49 ►
has survived for centuries
00:25:51 ►
standing on this very foundation.
00:25:55 ►
Picking up on my thoughts again,
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the other continued.
00:25:59 ►
Nobody knows how the matter of the brain
00:26:03 ►
could possibly produce the qualities of experience.
00:26:06 ►
The edifice you speak of has only stood for so long because you’ve conveniently quarantined the most difficult and fundamental questions.
00:26:19 ►
I knew this was at least partly correct.
00:26:23 ►
The issue he was referring to is now known as the hard problem of consciousness.
00:26:28 ►
We cannot even conceive coherently of a process by which arrangement of matter
00:26:34 ►
could produce subjective experience, let alone explain experience.
00:26:40 ►
It’s a baffling mystery in neuroscience and philosophy of mind.
00:26:44 ►
But I wasn’t ready to admit defeat.
00:26:48 ►
Perhaps, but neither can we ignore all the evidence for a world outside mind.
00:26:54 ►
For instance, if I close my eyes, I stop seeing because photons from a world outside my mind
00:27:00 ►
can no longer stimulate my brain via my retina.
00:27:04 ►
Moreover, there is overwhelming evidence that the brain has a lot to do with the mind. inside my mind can no longer stimulate my brain via my retina.
00:27:05 ►
Moreover, there is overwhelming evidence that the brain has a lot to do with the mind.
00:27:10 ►
My very presence here is proof of it.
00:27:14 ►
Right now I am experiencing you because drugs are being pumped into my brain and electromagnetic
00:27:20 ►
fields are being beamed into my head.
00:27:25 ►
The brain and the mind are surely not separate from each other.
00:27:29 ►
In saying that the brain is in the mind, I am saying precisely that they aren’t separate.
00:27:37 ►
But that doesn’t imply that there is anything outside mind.
00:27:41 ►
You are merely assuming that a world outside mind is the only possible explanation
00:27:47 ►
for sense perceptions, like your ability to see. What other explanation can there possibly be,
00:27:54 ►
I asked. Before we explore this question, remember how this conversation started.
00:28:08 ►
how this conversation started. You experience this realm to be as real, as palpable, as concrete as your ordinary waking world. At the very least, this proves that mind is capable of producing
00:28:16 ►
fully convincing realities without the aid of anything external to it, correct?
00:28:23 ►
Yes, unless this realm actually isn’t mental, but material,
00:28:28 ►
I retorted rather hesitantly. I knew I was directly contradicting my earlier stance,
00:28:34 ►
but I felt I needed to explore all alternatives. Perhaps this realm, too, is outside mind,
00:28:41 ►
I continued, just like my ordinary waking reality. Perhaps the recipe
00:28:46 ►
has just brought me to a parallel universe of some kind.
00:28:51 ►
Oh, I see. And how would that work? asked the other, with a slight undertone of mockery.
00:28:58 ►
I don’t know. Maybe mind can tune into different material universes.
00:29:03 ►
In that case, he countered, mind would have
00:29:06 ►
to be fundamentally independent of your brain, not generated by it. Isn’t that right?
00:29:12 ►
True, I admitted. This would indeed imply some form of dualism.
00:29:18 ►
So how would you then explain the ordinary correlations between brain states and mental states.
00:29:32 ►
It would still be conceivable that, after my mind chose to tune into my ordinary waking world, my experiences could be modulated, as opposed to generated, by my material brain
00:29:39 ►
in that world, just as empirically observed.
00:29:42 ►
I was reaching and I knew it.
00:29:44 ►
world, just as empirically observed. I was reaching and I knew it.
00:29:53 ►
Yes, however, rebutted the other, in that case the recipe couldn’t have caused your mind to tune into another realm and then keep you here simply by manipulating your brain from within your
00:29:59 ►
ordinary waking reality, could it? Indeed not, I conceded. My brain exists in the ordinary realm, so it
00:30:08 ►
couldn’t have any influence on what happens here. Yet, I am here presumably thanks to the ongoing
00:30:14 ►
interference of the recipe with my material brain. Precisely, so your hypothesis cannot be true.
00:30:21 ►
so your hypothesis cannot be true.
00:30:25 ►
Okay, but then again, I insisted, if the brain is in mind, how come the recipe works?
00:30:30 ►
How come drugs and electromagnetic interference with my brain
00:30:33 ►
changes my mental state?
00:30:37 ►
Why wouldn’t they?
00:30:39 ►
You are implicitly thinking in dualistic terms.
00:30:42 ►
You assume that your subjective experiences are one type of stuff,
00:30:47 ►
while physical processes, like drug intake and exposure to electromagnetic fields, are another.
00:30:54 ►
But what I’m suggesting is precisely that both are mental,
00:30:57 ►
and therefore can affect each other just like your thoughts can affect your emotions.
00:31:06 ►
each other just like your thoughts can affect your emotions. I am saying that everything is mental,
00:31:11 ►
including the drugs and electromagnetic fields, not only your brain.
00:31:17 ►
And how does this answer my question? I was genuinely confused.
00:31:27 ►
When you dream at night, the objects you see in your dream do not correspond to a world outside your mind, do they?
00:31:31 ►
Yet, they can influence your subjective state within the dream.
00:31:36 ►
Dreamed-up water can get you wet and make you experience cold within the dream.
00:31:41 ►
A dreamed-up lover can make you feel arousal within the dream.
00:31:44 ►
Even dreamed-up drugs can make you trip within a dream.
00:31:52 ►
Moreover, you always have a dreamed-up avatar, whether implicit or explicit, since you always experience the dream from a localized, moving viewpoint within it.
00:31:58 ►
I think I already see where you’re going with this.
00:32:03 ►
Your ordinary life is like a dream, he continued, anyway.
00:32:08 ►
Your physical body is inside your dreaming mind, just like your avatar is inside your nightly
00:32:14 ►
dreams. The recipe can change your state of consciousness for exactly the same reason that
00:32:20 ►
a dreamed-up lover can make you feel arousal, or that dreamed-up water can
00:32:25 ►
make you feel cold.
00:32:27 ►
The same goes for your earlier point about closing your eyes.
00:32:31 ►
If you close your avatar’s eyes in a dream, you might also stop seeing within the dream.
00:32:38 ►
Whether this is the case or not depends merely on the particular rules of cognitive association that govern the dream by tying its unfolding experiences together.
00:32:50 ►
These rules are a kind of belief system in mind,
00:32:55 ►
encoding what mind instinctively believes
00:32:58 ►
must be the consequences of any given event or action.
00:33:03 ►
What then transpires in the dream
00:33:05 ►
is precisely what mind implicitly,
00:33:09 ►
in deep, highly obfuscated layers of cognition,
00:33:12 ►
believes must transpire.
00:33:15 ►
You stop seeing when you close your eyes in a dream
00:33:18 ►
if your dreaming mind expects that shutting your eyes
00:33:22 ►
should prevent you from seeing.
00:33:24 ►
In ordinary waking reality, you call the applicable rules of cognitive association
00:33:30 ►
the laws of cause and effect, or the laws of classical physics,
00:33:35 ►
or, even more deeply ingrained in your belief system, the laws of classical logic.
00:33:42 ►
The one peculiar thing about the rules of cognitive association in ordinary
00:33:46 ►
waking reality is that they are rather stable and consistent, unlike those usually governing
00:33:53 ►
a nightly dream. Yet, this very stability and consistency are part of the belief system
00:34:01 ►
applicable to ordinary waking life. You implicitly, instinctively believe, and therefore expect, that nature must be rather
00:34:10 ►
stable and consistent.
00:34:14 ►
I don’t know why, but this resonated strongly with me.
00:34:18 ►
I intuitively knew that there was truth in this, even though I was extremely uncomfortable
00:34:23 ►
with the way it contradicted my worldview. In this state of cognitive dissonance, I offered, what you are saying is that this
00:34:32 ►
realm feels so real to me, not because it is material, but because the ordinary world
00:34:39 ►
I consider real is, just like this realm, mental. Precisely, both realms are mental, these being
00:34:49 ►
the reason why you experience them in the same way. Reality is a feeling. Concreteness and
00:34:56 ►
palpability are qualities of experience, not of the abstraction you call the material world.
00:35:09 ►
you call the material world. This realm is real not despite being in mind, but because it is in mind. I understood him perfectly, but the point raised many questions. If all reality was in my
00:35:17 ►
mind, did it mean that I was the only conscious being in the universe? Did it mean that all
00:35:23 ►
reality was my personal dream, other people
00:35:26 ►
being simply projections of my dreaming mind? And what about the other? Was he, too, just a
00:35:32 ►
projection of myself? Now that I had finally interacted with him, he felt so autonomous and
00:35:39 ►
external to me that I began to question my original assumptions. I wanted to confront him with
00:35:45 ►
these questions, but I felt exhausted. I needed time to process and integrate this experience
00:35:51 ►
and all the insights I’d had. The other recognized this. Reassured, I then proceeded to mentally
00:35:58 ►
chant the mantra that would trigger the AI to stop the trip and bring me back. In the minutes during which my re-entry unfolded,
00:36:07 ►
I could sense the presence of the other slowly fade away.
00:36:12 ►
I knew I would miss him, but I also knew I’d be back soon.
00:36:18 ►
Some of the drugs used in the juice mix caused the body to develop temporary resistance.
00:36:25 ►
in the juice mix caused the body to develop temporary resistance. If you used them again shortly after the previous trip, their effect would be markedly diminished. So I had to wait
00:36:32 ►
a full week before I could journey again, and even that amount of time was considered short
00:36:37 ►
by the attendant nurse. Luckily, she was sympathetic when I said I couldn’t wait.
00:36:43 ►
Indeed, there was more than just capricious eagerness behind my haste.
00:36:48 ►
I had to go back home to my day job in a little over a week,
00:36:51 ►
and I still hoped to squeeze in another journey during that time.
00:36:56 ►
Since my previous trip, I had tried to integrate and consolidate the insights I’d had.
00:37:02 ►
However, many more questions and doubts had arisen in my mind.
00:37:06 ►
I felt I needed to address them all before I could go back home in relative peace of mind.
00:37:13 ►
It was a sunny Thursday afternoon when I returned to the lab for the next journey.
00:37:19 ►
I had already fine-tuned the recipe based on the telemetry recordings of my last trip
00:37:24 ►
and felt
00:37:25 ►
ready to encounter the other once again. The transcendent space where the dialogues with the
00:37:32 ►
other unfolded had the general feeling of being underground, like a cave or a subterranean
00:37:38 ►
installation. Many explorers would describe it as a domed chamber, so we colloquially refer to it as the dome.
00:37:47 ►
Once in the dome, in the presence of the other, I wasted no time and went straight to the point.
00:37:55 ►
I am confused. You say that reality is the imagination of my mind, there being no external world.
00:38:07 ►
my mind, there being no external world. So does it mean that I am the only living being in the universe, everybody else being projections of my mind? Does it mean that you are just a projected
00:38:13 ►
aspect of myself? Neither possibility seems reasonable or plausible to me. I could sense
00:38:20 ►
the other think something like, okay, this will be delicate, but he didn’t quite say it,
00:38:25 ►
whatever it means to say something in that space. Instead, he offered this. The confusion rests in
00:38:33 ►
what you mean by the words my and I. It’s true that all reality is in your mind, but the your here does not refer to you as an individual person. Instead, it refers to
00:38:48 ►
your true nature as impersonal mind. Your sense of personhood is an amalgamation of a particular
00:38:56 ►
experiential perspective, that is, a specific point of view within the dream, a particular set of memories, and a particular model of self-identity.
00:39:06 ►
In other words, your personhood consists of images and thoughts.
00:39:13 ►
But images and thoughts are ephemeral, ever-changing, they come and go.
00:39:18 ►
As the constant witness of these changing images and thoughts, you can’t BE them, can you? Only your innermost
00:39:27 ►
subjectivity, the instinctive I-feeling that precedes and couches all images and thoughts,
00:39:35 ►
is your true mind, wherein all realities unfold. Somehow this wasn’t really satisfying to me.
00:39:45 ►
Somehow, this wasn’t really satisfying to me. So reality doesn’t really unfold in my mind, but in some kind of impersonal mind, a la
00:39:51 ►
Aldous Huxley.
00:39:54 ►
This is where words become very delicate.
00:39:57 ►
The other seemed to be trying to be particularly precise at this point.
00:40:02 ►
I could answer yes to your question, but that would be misleading.
00:40:07 ►
It would lead you to think of mind at large as some kind of abstract entity that isn’t really
00:40:13 ►
you. Yet, the instinctive and concrete sense of I that you feel right now, which precedes and
00:40:21 ►
couches all of your perceptions, thoughts, emotions and memories,
00:40:26 ►
is mind at large.
00:40:28 ►
This way, mind at large really is the felt you.
00:40:32 ►
It just isn’t your concept of you.
00:40:36 ►
If you stopped thinking and forgot everything you know, you would still have this same instinctive
00:40:41 ►
I, feeling.
00:40:45 ►
This is too subtle. I’m not sure I really grasped thisive I, feeling. This is too subtle.
00:40:46 ►
I’m not sure I really grasped this, I protested.
00:40:50 ►
Then, try the thought experiment I just hinted at.
00:40:54 ►
Pretend right now that you forgot everything you know.
00:40:58 ►
Pretend that all your memories, theories, opinions, beliefs, everything, dissolved into
00:41:04 ►
oblivion without your losing consciousness.
00:41:07 ►
What’s left? The mere invitation to try it instantly triggered the thought experiment
00:41:13 ►
in my mind. For what felt like several seconds, everything I knew about self and world vanished.
00:41:30 ►
vanished. Pure being, I replied. I only felt a sense of pure being. That’s it. Pure being,
00:41:38 ►
unpopulated by thoughts, concepts, memories, etc. Every living creature feels this sense of pure being in exactly the same way. Our organisms have the same instinctive I-feeling that is Mind at Large.
00:41:50 ►
But this is just a feeling, not an entity, I pointed out. What does it mean to say that
00:41:55 ►
Mind at Large is a mere feeling? It would make more sense to me if you said that Mind
00:42:01 ►
at Large has the feeling you are talking about.
00:42:04 ►
if you said that Mind at Large has the feeling you are talking about.
00:42:08 ►
Stop looking for an object, he rebucked me.
00:42:11 ►
Mind at Large is the subject.
00:42:15 ►
All objects exist in Mind at Large as experiences,
00:42:19 ►
so Mind at Large itself can’t be an object, can it?
00:42:22 ►
You must turn inward, to the innermost sense of pure being you’ve just felt.
00:42:27 ►
Only by being itself can mind at large know itself.
00:42:32 ►
Because it is all there is, including time and space, it cannot stand outside itself to observe itself as object.
00:42:42 ►
This turns things inside out.
00:42:44 ►
I am beginning to see what you mean, I acknowledged.
00:42:48 ►
Mind at large is pure subjectivity.
00:42:51 ►
It can only pinpoint itself through its most primordial in a sense of being.
00:42:57 ►
Yes, he confirmed.
00:42:59 ►
And its most primordial sense of being is your instinctive I-feeling right now. Therefore, in the only way
00:43:08 ►
that matters, you are mind at large. The universe unfolds in your mind. It’s just that your mind is
00:43:16 ►
not only yours, it is also my mind, the neighbor’s mind, the co-worker’s mind, the cat’s mind, the ant’s mind, etc., since we all share the
00:43:27 ►
same instinctive I-feeling.
00:43:31 ►
I think I got it.
00:43:34 ►
I know you did, although you will need time to ponder about the implications and integrate
00:43:39 ►
them in your life.
00:43:41 ►
That was an understatement.
00:43:43 ►
Nevertheless, my original question hadn’t been answered yet.
00:43:47 ►
Okay, but then how come are there so many living creatures in the world?
00:43:52 ►
What is the nature of all these seemingly separate beings, given that Mind at Large
00:43:57 ►
is presumably one?
00:44:01 ►
Your individual life is one among countless chains of associated mental contents in mind at large.
00:44:08 ►
It consists of specific sensations that lead to specific thoughts, which lead to specific feelings, which trigger other sensations, etc.
00:44:20 ►
Other chains, that is, other lives, consist of other sensations leading to other thoughts, other feelings, etc.
00:44:30 ►
After all, what is life but a distinctive series of experiences connected to each other through cognitive associations?
00:44:38 ►
The uniqueness of these associations is what characterizes your sense of personhood.
00:44:43 ►
is what characterizes your sense of personhood.
00:44:45 ►
To be a little more precise,
00:44:49 ►
each living being is in fact a distinctive cluster,
00:44:51 ►
not just a chain,
00:44:54 ►
of mostly internally associated thoughts,
00:44:58 ►
feelings and sensations imagined by mind at large.
00:45:03 ►
The biological body is what this cluster looks like from the perspective of other clusters.
00:45:06 ►
Each cluster becomes amnesic of the rest of mind at large because the dense cognitive
00:45:12 ►
associations within it lead to highly focused internal attention, which then obfuscates
00:45:18 ►
everything else outside the cluster.
00:45:22 ►
It wasn’t lost on me that this last point about obfuscation confirmed
00:45:27 ►
Trilobite’s hypothesis regarding how the recipe worked. By inhibiting neural activity in targeted
00:45:34 ►
areas of the cluster, through drugs and electromagnetic fields, it reduced obfuscation,
00:45:40 ►
allowing the dome and the other to emerge out of a cognitive haze.
00:45:51 ►
At this stage of my work at Trilobite, however, I was already pretty much taking this for granted so I decided to ask the other about something else that had caught my attention.
00:45:57 ►
What did you mean by internally associated thoughts, feelings and sensations?
00:46:05 ►
associated thoughts, feelings and sensations. It means that experiences inside the cluster tend to repeatedly evoke other experiences
00:46:11 ►
also inside the cluster.
00:46:14 ►
Sensations may lead to habitual thoughts, which may evoke recurring emotions, which
00:46:19 ►
may trigger familiar memories, which in turn may lead to other similar sensations, etc., all mostly
00:46:26 ►
within the cluster.
00:46:28 ►
For instance, when you find an old painting long forgotten in your attic, you may think
00:46:33 ►
once more of your childhood home, which may make you feel like a kid again, which in turn
00:46:38 ►
may bring back memories of your parents, which may cause you to contemplate an old photograph
00:46:43 ►
of them, etc.
00:46:44 ►
your parents, which may cause you to contemplate an old photograph of them, etc.
00:46:50 ►
This way, you end up with a set of mental contents that mostly reference each other,
00:46:56 ►
reinforcing their collective experiential footprint at the expense of everything else outside the cluster.
00:46:58 ►
It is this internally associated set that gives you a personal history and a sense of
00:47:04 ►
individual identity.
00:47:08 ►
So far so good, but I needed reassurance about a particular point that had been bothering me.
00:47:14 ►
So, other people really are conscious, just like I am, right?
00:47:19 ►
Yes, they are. If the other had a face, I’m sure he would be smiling at my insecurities.
00:47:26 ►
They are other amnesic clusters like yourself, he continued.
00:47:31 ►
Comfortable with this confirmation, I approached the more delicate point.
00:47:36 ►
And are you also an amnesic cluster of mind at large, just like other people?
00:47:42 ►
No, I am not an amnesic cluster.
00:47:46 ►
I am the rest of mind at large, as partly actualized and perceived by your ego.
00:47:54 ►
Now you’ve lost me. Come again?
00:47:58 ►
Amnesic clusters are like islands in an ocean of mentation, he elaborated.
00:48:04 ►
The existence of the islands doesn’t eliminate
00:48:07 ►
the ocean. I am what the ocean looks like from the vantage point of someone standing on your island,
00:48:14 ►
that is, your ego. So any other explorer who comes to the dome can see you just as I do?
00:48:23 ►
I asked, hardly disguising a little jealousy.
00:48:26 ►
Anyone can potentially come here and talk to me, yes, but the view of the ocean is different from
00:48:33 ►
every island, and it isn’t complete from any island, since from no one of them can the entire
00:48:41 ►
ocean be seen. The view from each island contributes a different but equally
00:48:47 ►
valid angle to humanity’s understanding of the ocean. Thus, what you see of me is as much a
00:48:54 ►
function of your own individual peculiarities as it is of my nature. For instance, you have
00:49:02 ►
strong analytical tendencies, so you experience a rather analytical other.
00:49:07 ►
Another explorer with poetic or artistic tendencies would have a very different, though equally valid, experience of me.
00:49:17 ►
His metaphors were very helpful, even though I knew they weren’t complete or rigorous.
00:49:24 ►
What matters is that I understood what he was trying to say.
00:49:29 ►
Ask the ocean instead of a mere island, I asked.
00:49:33 ►
Do you know everything?
00:49:36 ►
My interest in the other was directly proportional to how much I thought he knew.
00:49:43 ►
Potentially, yes, but I only truly know what you or another living being asks
00:49:48 ►
me. How come, I protested, surely you either know something or you don’t, regardless of being asked
00:49:57 ►
about it. Whatever I have never been asked about by a self-reflective cluster of mind at large like yourself, he continued, I know only in potentiality.
00:50:10 ►
Think of it as the light of a match.
00:50:13 ►
Until you ignite the match, its light exists only in potentiality, in the form of energy chemically stored in its phosphorus head.
00:50:22 ►
But when you ignite the match, its light becomes actualized.
00:50:27 ►
Only then can it be seen. My knowledge is like the match. It exists complete, but only in
00:50:35 ►
potentiality, until you or someone else asks me about it. Your questions then partly ignite the match of my limitless insight so its light can be seen
00:50:47 ►
only then does it illuminate existence
00:50:50 ►
I couldn’t help but be struck by the power of his metaphors
00:50:55 ►
he was prepared, if so needed
00:50:57 ►
to sacrifice rigor in order to ensure
00:51:00 ►
that I not only understood his point intellectually
00:51:03 ►
but grokked it with my
00:51:05 ►
whole being. If I didn’t feel the insight he was attempting to convey, he wouldn’t consider his job
00:51:11 ►
done. So before I or someone else asks you a question, I insisted, even you don’t know the
00:51:19 ►
answer? I do know the answer always, but only in potentiality.
00:51:26 ►
In other words, I know it, but I don’t know that I know it.
00:51:32 ►
The answer remains latent, like the light of a non-ignited match,
00:51:36 ►
and doesn’t illuminate my experience or yours.
00:51:40 ►
This was fertile ground and my thoughts were running wild.
00:51:44 ►
Why don’t you ask yourself all relevant questions? This was fertile ground and my thoughts were running wild.
00:51:48 ►
Why don’t you ask yourself all relevant questions?
00:51:53 ►
You could then illuminate the whole of existence and eradicate ignorance.
00:51:58 ►
Because I am incapable of asking myself questions.
00:52:04 ►
What? This was completely unexpected, but he continued before I could interject.
00:52:10 ►
Asking myself questions would require a particular cognitive configuration that arises exclusively within clusters like the human mind.
00:52:15 ►
Only the dense internal associations of a cluster enable one layer of cognition
00:52:21 ►
to become an object of inquiry of another layer of cognition.
00:52:26 ►
In other words, they enable you to think about your thoughts.
00:52:31 ►
And only by thinking about your thoughts can you formulate the probing questions required
00:52:37 ►
to make sense of existence.
00:52:39 ►
The reason is that all reality is in mind.
00:52:43 ►
Therefore, to understand reality, one needs to inquire into the multiple subtle layers
00:52:48 ►
of hidden assumptions, expectations and beliefs in one’s own mind.
00:52:54 ►
To do so, mind must turn in upon itself.
00:52:58 ►
It is this process of turning in upon itself that creates clusters, enables self-reflection, and focuses the attention
00:53:08 ►
of egos at the cost of obfuscating everything else.
00:53:14 ►
While marveling at the cogency with which his elucidations came together, a critical
00:53:19 ►
insight suddenly struck me.
00:53:22 ►
This is the meaning of life.
00:53:25 ►
The human purpose is to light up the meaning of life. The human purpose
00:53:26 ►
is to light up the match of your
00:53:28 ►
latent knowledge.
00:53:30 ►
That’s a fair way to put it,
00:53:32 ►
confirmed the other, with slight
00:53:34 ►
hesitation.
00:53:36 ►
The insight was incredibly powerful
00:53:38 ►
and rewarding to me, despite the
00:53:40 ►
rather cautious confirmation
00:53:42 ►
by the other.
00:53:43 ►
A big part of me wanted to end the dialogue right then and there
00:53:47 ►
to enjoy the afterglow,
00:53:48 ►
but there was still something nagging at me.
00:53:53 ►
You alluded to layers of cognition a couple of times.
00:53:57 ►
I have a general intuition about what you meant,
00:53:59 ►
but could you perhaps explain it a little more specifically?
00:54:04 ►
You perceive, feel and think in layers, he answered.
00:54:09 ►
Each layer provides the beliefs and expectations
00:54:12 ►
that condition and facilitate the layer above.
00:54:17 ►
For example, when you see a bird,
00:54:20 ►
you uncritically project onto the perceived image
00:54:23 ►
everything you already believe about and expect of birds.
00:54:28 ►
Their general body form, flight capabilities, likely behavior, place in the natural order of things, etc.
00:54:35 ►
Your perceptions and all other cognitive associations that follow from them
00:54:40 ►
are thus conditioned and facilitated by implicit underlying beliefs and expectations.
00:54:47 ►
If they weren’t, you would be discombobulated every time you saw a colorful feathered being
00:54:53 ►
darting around the sky.
00:54:56 ►
Clear, I interjected, but he hadn’t finished his point yet.
00:55:01 ►
The thing is, you don’t question your underlying beliefs and expectations while seeing the bird.
00:55:08 ►
You implicitly take them for granted.
00:55:11 ►
Uncritically and implicitly taking something for granted is the effect of underlying, obfuscated layers of your cognition.
00:55:20 ►
Here’s another example.
00:55:22 ►
When you drive to work in the morning, your actions are conditioned
00:55:26 ►
and facilitated by your expectations regarding the way to work, the operation of the car,
00:55:31 ►
etc. While focusing on your driving, you take it for granted that if you turn the wheel
00:55:37 ►
clockwise, the car will turn right, if you step on the brake, the car will stop, if you
00:55:43 ►
turn left on the next intersection, you will arrive at work, and so on.
00:55:47 ►
These implicit expectations reside in an underlying layer of your cognition
00:55:52 ►
that is obfuscated by the driving.
00:55:56 ►
You act on these obfuscated expectations automatically, thoughtlessly.
00:56:02 ►
I see. I guess this applies to anything I do.
00:56:07 ►
Indeed, he confirmed.
00:56:09 ►
But notice that layered cognitive activity
00:56:12 ►
is not limited to the performance of tasks.
00:56:15 ►
It applies also to how you feel about life and self.
00:56:20 ►
Could you give me a concrete example?
00:56:24 ►
Whether you discern meaning in your life, he obliged, is entirely conditioned by beliefs in underlying layers of your cognition.
00:56:33 ►
Deep within yourself, do you take it for granted that you are a material entity bound in space and destined to oblivion?
00:56:41 ►
If so, such belief will prevent you from experiencing your life’s meaning.
00:56:47 ►
I guess I just found out today that there is a transcendent meaning to life after all,
00:56:52 ►
I exclaimed enthusiastically. Then run with it, he encouraged me, at least until you discover
00:56:59 ►
further nuances to your insight. He seemed to be hinting at something he chose to leave unsaid.
00:57:09 ►
But by now I was mentally drained and had no energy to press him further.
00:57:13 ►
I knew that the other could sense my exhaustion and wouldn’t mind my aborting the journey.
00:57:19 ►
So the re-entering mantra was intoned and I left the dome.
00:57:27 ►
So the re-entering mantra was intoned and I left the dome. I had one more opportunity to visit the dome and dialogue with the other before I would
00:57:31 ►
have to return home.
00:57:34 ►
This would be my third journey after the recipe had begun to reliably deliver me there.
00:57:40 ►
After it, months would pass before I would have another chance, so I had to get as much as possible out of it.
00:57:47 ►
In both my previous experiences, I’d noticed that I only had enough mental stamina to engage in one general topic per session.
00:57:56 ►
The force of the insights was such that it left little room for a more eclectic discussion.
00:58:03 ►
So I carefully chose the topic I wanted to address
00:58:06 ►
in this final trip before my upcoming return home. It was a question that had been bugging
00:58:12 ►
me a lot since the last session, and I was determined to confront the other with it.
00:58:18 ►
To set my intention correctly, I kept on mentally repeating the question all the way through the final countdown,
00:58:27 ►
the juice mix already flowing through my veins.
00:58:32 ►
You seem to be in a fairly hard-nosed mood today,
00:58:36 ►
said the other rather sarcastically, but in good spirits.
00:58:39 ►
You are very eloquent, I opened,
00:58:43 ►
but some of the things you say raise many questions.
00:58:45 ►
Shoot, he dared me.
00:58:49 ►
I was not sure I was comfortable with this light-hearted side of his.
00:58:56 ►
You said that ordinary reality is a kind of dream imagined according to a belief system,
00:59:03 ►
that the world behaves the way it does because, deep within, we expect it to behave like this.
00:59:08 ►
You compared it to the crazy causal associations of regular dreams,
00:59:10 ►
people changing shapes when we touch them,
00:59:14 ►
objects appearing out of nowhere when we think of them, etc., which seem entirely plausible and natural during the dream,
00:59:18 ►
simply because they reflect our dreaming minds’ implicit beliefs and expectations.
00:59:24 ►
Right, go on, he said.
00:59:26 ►
My interpretation of his earlier elucidations seemed to be correct.
00:59:31 ►
Well, then why can’t I change the laws of nature just by wishing them to be different?
00:59:37 ►
After all, they merely reflect my own beliefs and expectations.
00:59:42 ►
Touché, I naively thought.
00:59:48 ►
You are mixing up belief with volition,
00:59:55 ►
the other replied, instantly deflating my arrogance. Reality is a reflection of what you believe very deeply within your mind, not of what your ego wishes for. What people wish for is not
01:00:01 ►
necessarily what they truly believe in. As a matter of fact, most people wish for endless things they don’t believe possible.
01:00:10 ►
Right, I get that, I conceded.
01:00:12 ►
But I still thought that there was something to my argument, so I persisted.
01:00:17 ►
Nonetheless, reality shatters people’s beliefs all the time.
01:00:22 ►
Millions believed in the imminent second coming of Christ at several points
01:00:26 ►
in history, only to be disillusioned. Even today, many of my colleagues in science passionately
01:00:32 ►
believe their theories of nature, only to watch experiments contradict and destroy their
01:00:37 ►
expectations. Reality doesn’t seem to care at all about our beliefs.
01:00:43 ►
When I said that reality reflects your beliefs, he answered,
01:00:47 ►
I didn’t mean the superficial beliefs of your ego, but those held in deeper, obfuscated layers
01:00:53 ►
of your cognition. As we discussed earlier, mind at large differentiates itself into clusters of
01:01:00 ►
mentation. This differentiation happens in layers. The cognitive processes
01:01:06 ►
in each layer condition those in layers above. The human ego spans but the top layers of
01:01:14 ►
differentiation. Underneath it, there are many other layers, all the way down to the
01:01:21 ►
undifferentiated ocean of mind at large. The higher the layer of differentiation is,
01:01:27 ►
the denser the internal associations within a cluster, and the more sparse the external
01:01:34 ►
associations between clusters. The beliefs that govern ordinary waking reality are not the beliefs
01:01:42 ►
formed in the superficial egoic layers, but in much
01:01:46 ►
deeper layers, with comparatively many external associations.
01:01:53 ►
Do you mean that the beliefs in question are unconscious beliefs?
01:01:57 ►
I asked.
01:01:58 ►
They are obfuscated beliefs that completely escape the focus of your ordinary attention,
01:02:05 ►
yes.
01:02:10 ►
They aren’t literally unconscious because there is nothing outside consciousness.
01:02:16 ►
What about delusions, I continued, without paying much attention to his last point.
01:02:22 ►
For instance, some people believe very deeply that they can fly.
01:02:28 ►
Then they jump off buildings and die. These aren’t deep beliefs, for they don’t reside in deep layers of cognition. They are just strong, sincere beliefs,
01:02:35 ►
still in superficial layers. The existence of very strong but relatively superficial beliefs
01:02:42 ►
in a cluster of mentation does not cancel
01:02:45 ►
out the effects, such as gravity, of beliefs concurrently held in much lower, less differentiated
01:02:52 ►
layers. There is no actual contradiction here, for these conflicting beliefs are all experienced
01:02:59 ►
in their own way, each within its own cognitive scope.
01:03:03 ►
own way, each within its own cognitive scope.
01:03:08 ►
I understood this, but wasn’t satisfied yet.
01:03:14 ►
You keep talking about a person’s beliefs, but at the end of the day, everyone shares the same reality with everybody else.
01:03:17 ►
We all watch the sunset, have meals together, watch the same sports teams, win or lose the
01:03:22 ►
same games, listen to music together, etc.
01:03:27 ►
The same laws of nature apply to every human and even every living creature.
01:03:33 ►
For instance, high heat burns both a man and an amoeba.
01:03:37 ►
How come a man and an amoeba can share the same belief system?
01:03:42 ►
Because the layers of differentiation in which this belief system
01:03:46 ►
resides are common to all biology, he explained. The many external associations in those layers
01:03:54 ►
link clusters together. Do you mean that the minds of all living creatures are interconnected
01:04:01 ►
at that level? Yes, exactly. At that level, particular species
01:04:07 ►
haven’t yet differentiated from one another. They remain interconnected. That’s why you all share
01:04:13 ►
an underlying belief system. The mind of an amoeba at that level is one with the mind of a man.
01:04:20 ►
All amoebas and all man can thus share the same dream you call ordinary waking reality,
01:04:27 ►
even though each individual has a different point of view within this common dream.
01:04:34 ►
His words were accompanied in my mind by astonishing visuals.
01:04:39 ►
I could see an endless three-dimensional structure of cosmic proportions composed of countless layers.
01:04:47 ►
A homogeneous web of straight, long interconnect lines characterized the bottom layers. I knew
01:04:53 ►
that each interconnect line represented a chain of cognitive associations. Going up
01:04:59 ►
from the bottom to the top, broad but increasingly well-defined tangles of shorter, curled-up
01:05:07 ►
interconnect lines could be discerned, spanning many neighboring layers. Near the top, each
01:05:14 ►
tangle further differentiated into many small, dense knots of even shorter, even more curled-up
01:05:22 ►
interconnect lines, with vast empty spaces in between them.
01:05:27 ►
I knew that the knots were the clusters of cognitive associations the other had described
01:05:32 ►
before. As such, each of them corresponded to a living creature emerging from the undifferentiated
01:05:39 ►
ocean of mind at large. I could scan the layers from bottom to top and interpret this movement
01:05:47 ►
of my attention as the passage of time. This way, I could see the dynamic formation of the tangles
01:05:55 ►
and knots as progressively more advanced stages of a kind of chemical agglutination or cross-linking reaction. Once again, my mind was on fire.
01:06:07 ►
These ideas and images opened up huge new horizons and the potential implications were astounding.
01:06:15 ►
If, as you said earlier, mind at large is my own mind as much as it is anybody else’s mind,
01:06:23 ►
it is presumably possible for me to gain awareness
01:06:25 ►
of deeper layers of universal mentation. In principle it is, he confirmed. By letting go
01:06:33 ►
of your ordinary attention in just the right way, you can indeed reduce the obfuscation of
01:06:39 ►
these deeper layers, which are always in your consciousness anyway.
01:06:51 ►
But by accessing them, just as I access the dome right now, I could presumably change the belief system in these layers and thereby change ordinary reality.
01:06:55 ►
Yet this doesn’t seem at all possible.
01:07:00 ►
If you were to reduce the obfuscation of the layers where the belief system behind ordinary reality resides,
01:07:06 ►
you would simply become cognizant that you have those beliefs, but you would still hold the same beliefs.
01:07:16 ►
So there is no possibility to change the rules of cognitive association that govern ordinary reality?
01:07:22 ►
I asked with a note of disappointment.
01:07:24 ►
association that govern ordinary reality? I asked with a note of disappointment.
01:07:30 ►
A silent pause ensued that seemed to last for several uncomfortable seconds.
01:07:35 ►
I wondered whether it said something wrong or whether the other was simply hesitating.
01:07:39 ►
Finally, he continued slowly and emphatically.
01:07:50 ►
To change a belief system, you have to become lucid of the layers of cognition that underlie and give rise to it.
01:07:59 ►
In other words, you have to go at least one layer deeper than the layers where the belief system itself resides.
01:08:04 ►
And you have to do it in a critical, self-reflective manner.
01:08:09 ►
So why doesn’t anybody do it to make life easier?
01:08:14 ►
Why do the rules governing ordinary reality seem so implacable and immutable?
01:08:17 ►
I probably sounded rather cynical here.
01:08:22 ►
Because self-reflective access to a layer of cognition requires back-and-forth associative interconnections
01:08:26 ►
between this layer and higher layers.
01:08:30 ►
Without them, you can’t think about your thoughts or inquire critically into your own hidden beliefs.
01:08:37 ►
However, such back-and-forth interlayer interconnections form only in the high-density associative environment of clusters.
01:08:46 ►
The belief system that governs ordinary reality, on the other hand, resides in layers much deeper than those where clusters develop,
01:08:56 ►
thereby escaping the reach of back-and-forth interlayer associations.
01:09:01 ►
The fisherman’s line isn’t long enough to reach those depths, so to speak. As such,
01:09:08 ►
people cannot change their ordinary reality because the corresponding belief system is too
01:09:13 ►
deeply ingrained beyond the reach of self-reflection. I think I understand this, I commented,
01:09:22 ►
but could you try to explain it in simpler terms?
01:09:24 ►
I understand this, I commented, but could you try to explain it in simpler terms?
01:09:34 ►
The belief system that governs ordinary reality is like a collective instinct. It’s an automatism,
01:09:40 ►
unreachable by lucid reasoning. Your sexual instincts, for instance, cannot be changed by mere rational judgment. Otherwise, celibate monks, ascetics and people with socially
01:09:46 ►
reviled sexual preferences would have easier lives. This is so because you cannot think about
01:09:52 ►
the mental processes that underlie and give rise to your instincts. You can only attain lucidity
01:09:59 ►
of the instinct’s effects, not of their source. Likewise, humankind cannot change the rules
01:10:07 ►
of cognitive association whose reflection is the laws of nature.
01:10:13 ►
But there are beliefs one can reflect critically upon and change, I pointed out. For instance,
01:10:20 ►
any scientist who has ever changed his or her mind about the validity of a certain theory
01:10:25 ►
has done precisely that.
01:10:27 ►
And so has anyone who has ever changed his or her religious views.
01:10:34 ►
Beliefs can form in any layer of cognition, the other clarified.
01:10:39 ►
Wherever they are in mind, they determine some aspect of your experience, that is, of
01:10:44 ►
your world. But some
01:10:46 ►
beliefs are superficial and accessible to self-reflective inquiry, while others are much
01:10:52 ►
more deeply ingrained, escaping the reach of back-and-forth interlayer associations.
01:10:57 ►
The belief system that underlies the laws of nature is of the latter kind.
01:11:04 ►
Yes, this is clear to me now, I acknowledged, my skepticism somewhat soothed.
01:11:10 ►
I wonder about one thing, though.
01:11:13 ►
It seems to me that an exploding number of rules of cognitive association would be required
01:11:18 ►
to account for every aspect of ordinary reality.
01:11:22 ►
We would need a rule for what happens when I close my eyes,
01:11:26 ►
another for what happens when I sit under the sun, a different rule for the effect of each drug.
01:11:32 ►
This is incorrect, he interrupted me. The myriad effects that you are referring to
01:11:38 ►
arise as compound implications of basic, much more generic rules of association.
01:11:44 ►
bound implications of basic, much more generic rules of association.
01:11:51 ►
Many of these generic rules simply correspond to what you know as the laws of classical physics, which aren’t many.
01:11:53 ►
That the laws of classical physics are, in fact, rules of cognitive association
01:11:58 ►
doesn’t change the fact that their effects can combine into higher complexity implications.
01:12:06 ►
the fact that their effects can combine into higher complexity implications. This way, there is no law of classical physics or rule of association dedicated to specifying
01:12:13 ►
what happens when you close your eyes.
01:12:15 ►
The effect of closing your eyes is the compound implication of much more generic regularities
01:12:22 ►
in nature. So all rules of cognitive association are reflected in the laws of classical physics
01:12:29 ►
we know?
01:12:31 ►
No, your knowledge of the patterns and regularities of nature is not complete, he continued.
01:12:38 ►
Most significantly, while the classical laws you know apply all the way down to the level of molecules,
01:12:50 ►
there are organizing principles in nature, wide-ranging beliefs of mine at large, that only apply at the level of complex macroscopic systems.
01:12:56 ►
Currently, you dismiss these purely macroscopic regularities as mere coincidences.
01:13:04 ►
Are you referring to meaningful coincidences or
01:13:07 ►
synchronicities, like getting a call from someone you happen to be thinking about,
01:13:11 ►
or getting an unsolicited job offer precisely when you’re considering a change of career?
01:13:18 ►
Yes, but not only synchronicities, he answered. Certain aspects of physiology and metabolism,
01:13:24 ►
as well as other organizing
01:13:26 ►
principles that your science cannot study under controlled laboratory conditions,
01:13:31 ►
also reflect wide-ranging beliefs about how nature should behave.
01:13:36 ►
Yet unknown laws of nature waiting to be discovered, I commented with a sigh.
01:13:43 ►
Yes, undiscovered mental patterns reflecting
01:13:46 ►
instinctive beliefs and charged with emotions, he clarified, which will remain unknown for as long
01:13:54 ►
as your science arbitrarily limits its own perspectives by unnecessarily inferring a world
01:14:00 ►
outside mind. The clarity, coherence and evocative power of his words were formidable.
01:14:08 ►
I just wasn’t fully convinced yet, because I suspected that upon more careful examination,
01:14:14 ►
holes or gaps could still be found in his metaphysics. But I no longer had the mental
01:14:19 ►
energy to pursue the dialogue further. My most urgent questions had been addressed, and I needed a
01:14:25 ►
break. Sensing all this, the other offered, you have much to think about over the coming months.
01:14:33 ►
Integrating all you have learned takes time and shouldn’t be rushed. There is a natural rhythm
01:14:38 ►
to everything. You are correct that the story is not yet complete and more elucidations are required,
01:14:45 ►
but we will have occasion to explore more when the time is right.
01:14:52 ►
Over a year would pass before I could return to club premises and resume my journeys.
01:14:58 ►
The delay was entirely due to my personal and professional circumstances in life, not to trilobite.
01:15:06 ►
personal and professional circumstances in life, not to trilobite. Indeed, despite the fact that advances in the recipe since my earlier trips had been reliably delivering many other explorers to
01:15:12 ►
the dome, including club leadership, project scientists were still eager for me to return.
01:15:18 ►
There was a somewhat unjustified expectation on their part that, like before, my own journeys could deliver
01:15:25 ►
even more advances to the recipe. Moreover, my trip reports had turned into a kind of
01:15:31 ►
popular novel, the next chapter of which everybody wanted to read. During this interlude of a
01:15:38 ►
year, I had continued to help refine the recipe. Telemetry recordings and trip reports from many other explorers were now flooding
01:15:46 ►
in, unveiling more specific correlations than ever between neural activity, or rather lack thereof,
01:15:53 ►
and the most interesting elucidations of the other. We zeroed in on these and developed a new setup
01:16:00 ►
to give the other even more latitude and autonomy to convey his insights, or her
01:16:06 ►
insights, since many other explorers experienced the other as female.
01:16:12 ►
I had arranged to be the first explorer to try this new setup and was eager to see the
01:16:19 ►
results.
01:16:22 ►
Well, I think this is plenty for this time
01:16:26 ►
if you’re curious
01:16:27 ►
we may follow this up
01:16:30 ►
with another reading next time
01:16:32 ►
for now I hope you’ve enjoyed
01:16:33 ►
take care
01:16:34 ►
you’re listening to the psychedelic salon
01:16:38 ►
where people are changing their lives
01:16:40 ►
one thought at a time
01:16:42 ►
well I hope that you’ve enjoyed that as much as I have.
01:16:47 ►
Of course, I have an advantage over you in that I’ve already read Bernardo’s book.
01:16:52 ►
As you have just discovered, what we have now listened to is more densely packed with
01:16:57 ►
information and new ideas about the psychedelic experience than I’ve ever played for us here
01:17:02 ►
in a single podcast before.
01:17:04 ►
psychedelic experience than I’ve ever played for us here in a single podcast before.
01:17:10 ►
When I first became involved with psychedelic medicines, I have to admit that it was mainly a recreational pleasure trip for me. However, as time went on, like all serious psychonauts,
01:17:16 ►
I began to focus more on the personal lessons that I was taking away from those experiences.
01:17:21 ►
And by the 1990s, again like many others, I was wondering what more
01:17:27 ►
could be learned by scientists who understood brain chemistry and had access to large scientific
01:17:32 ►
equipment, such as the MRIs and then the later new functional MRIs that were being developed.
01:17:39 ►
As you may know, that type of research is now actually taking place at several locations around the world, mainly in Europe. But for us non-scientists who have an interest in such research but
01:17:50 ►
don’t have the academic backgrounds to delve more deeply into the subject, I for one want
01:17:56 ►
to thank Bernardo for creating a fictional account that brings concepts from this work
01:18:01 ►
out into the world for the rest of us to think about.
01:18:04 ►
brings concepts from this work out into the world for the rest of us to think about.
01:18:09 ►
Now, I’m not sure exactly to whom I’m saying this right now.
01:18:10 ►
Maybe it’s you.
01:18:15 ►
But I do know that there are quite a few young people who listen to these podcasts and who are already in college or who are just now getting ready to embark on their path of higher education.
01:18:22 ►
And if that’s you, and if the story that Bernardo just told resonates with you,
01:18:27 ►
then my recommendation is for you to do whatever it takes for you to follow a path
01:18:33 ►
that leads you to helping the rest of us better learn how to best use these powerful psychedelic medicines.
01:18:41 ►
From my point of view, this is the best and perhaps the only path that will lead us humans away from building and deploying ever more nuclear weapons and ultimately destroying ourselves.
01:18:53 ►
The first nuclear reaction on this planet and the first psychedelic experience using LSD both took place within six months of one another.
01:19:04 ►
For me, this is much more than a simple coincidence.
01:19:08 ►
For me, this so-called coincidence is pointing to a way out for us humans
01:19:13 ►
to escape the almost certain extinction of our species
01:19:16 ►
by blowing one another up with nuclear weapons.
01:19:20 ►
So, I sincerely hope that an army of young psychedelic explorers
01:19:24 ►
will continue to grow so as to counter the army of young psychedelic explorers will continue to grow
01:19:25 ►
so as to counter the army of mindless nuclear war fanatics who see armed conflict as the only way to go.
01:19:33 ►
And don’t think that you have to become a famous or great scientist to be of service to us all.
01:19:39 ►
As Gandhi once said,
01:19:41 ►
What you do will be insignificant, but it is essential that you do it.
01:19:47 ►
My suggestion is that you take the time now to re-listen to this reading by Bernardo,
01:19:53 ►
because there is much more to it than anyone can grok with just one listen.
01:19:58 ►
You may surprise yourself at how many new ideas you have the next few times you listen to this talk.
01:20:05 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo
01:20:07 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:20:10 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.