College of Thelema: Thelemic Education

Here's a thought then.

I don't know what to say about the Aiwaz thing, but insofar as I understand the concept of the HGA at all, I understand it the way Hessle understands it - which is as the Jungian "Self". And the concept of the Self is conveniently both internal and objective.

Think of it as a basin of attraction that the mind is gradually approaching. Since it is constantly pulling the mind toward it, or the mind is falling into it, it exerts an organizing influence on the life of the organism. The closer the mind approaches to the attractor, the more this organizing influence resolves into a visible pattern (i.e. is made conscious). The attractor is "internal" in the sense that it is nothing more than the entelechy of your own mind, but it is "objective" in the sense that it is not just any possible state of mind, but a kind of "best fit".

The K&C would then be the experience of the mind looking down into the basin and seeing the attractor. Since the attractor has not yet actually been reached but only noticed, it would be experienced as an Other, and as an Other that is both intimately familiar and also vastly supraordinate to you.

I'm pretty ambivalent about it. I find that cannabis is great for bringing peripheral cognitive processes into the foreground, which sounds like it would be a good adjunct for meditation, except that it's much easier to get distracted by this and lose track of the plot than it is in a sober, centered meditative state.

I am frequently left with the impression that my conceptual horizon is greatly expanded on cannabis but it saps me of the energy required to actually explore it.

@Fr. T.E.U. said

"Indeed - the Light in the head (as I call it) however is only one phenomenon out of many that I often experience. ...Perchance you have had some similiar experiences? Consider:

1. The Light in the head
2. A deep, loud roaring sound as if you were standing in a wind tunnel or standing at the mouth of a cavern
3. The sound of chimes or bells high above your head
4. Flashing lights behind the eyes, akin to lightning bolts peeling across a darkened sky
5. The capability to see - what appears to be - a wavy surface akin to water pouring towards a centralized location in the field of vision
6. An extreme sensitivity to sound, so much so that one could detect a cat stalking in the next room...in a sense, the whole body recieves the stimulation
7. ...Stuff to difficult to describe.

So; do any of these experiences ring a bell?

Thanks for your time,

QaZsE - Fr. T.E.U."

Hey,

I get a lot of 4-7, but no 1-3 (I do get auditory stuff, but it's more of a tinny drone than chimes or bells - I also find it interesting that the tinny drone and the chimes and bells are sequential phases of a smoked DMT trip).

I wonder if you've ever felt anything like an electric buildup and discharge in connection with 4. When I hold my attention on an object for long periods of time, I feel a charge growing in my brain. When this charge gets intense enough, I see these lightning flashes behind the eyelids and they are always followed by a strong physical sensation of electric shock which instantly brings me out.

I am still curious as to the consensus here about the importance of correct posture, positions, straightness of the spine and etc. Zazen instruction seems to be particularly nitpicky about all of this, sometimes to the point of saying that "to take the correct posture is itself zazen" and so on.

It seems that the practice of motionlessness is geared entirely to obtain "body off", and if you can do that then it doesn't much matter whether you are in full lotus, or in a recliner or in a flotation tank when it happens. My experience has been that trying to take the "correct" position was frustrating and unfruitful, but settling into an obviously "incorrect" position that was both stable and comfortable immediately started to produce results. Am I missing something here?

Salvia is a very, very strong drug. I don't know about getting OBEs with it, since Salvia affects the proprioceptory modality and often has an extremely weird and uncomfortable body load, but the uber strong hallucinogens like Salvia and DMT have a distinct "breakthrough" stage which it is pointless to describe (though many accounts are available online if you want to look) except to say that to compare it to an OBE does it no justice.

@Froclown said

"However, this whole process is material, and it becomes more abstract with one material symbol standing in for another material object of event in space time. in short, we work our way up from Malkuth to higher abstraction with Kether the limit of ultimate abstraction where a single symbol is pregnant with symbolic information that the entire world or matter and symbol is condensed into a single abstract point."

I am curious to see how you define these notions of "standing in for" or "abstraction" (nevermind "the ultimate limit of...") or "pregnant with symbolic information" in terms of the metaphysical materialism that you espouse.

At the very least you have to grant that these concepts belong to a vocabulary that cannot ever be reduced to the vocabulary of particle physics. There is no uber-long sentence about subatomic wavicles and their interactions that is conceptually equivalent to a sentence about the meaning or reference of a word or idea. These are just fundamentally incommensurable ways of talking and thinking.

You could of course say that the vocabulary of reference, meaning, intentionality, etc. and the vocabulary of particle physics are just different ways of talking about the same thing (i.e. the world), but to the extent that in practice we need both and cannot reduce the one to the other, it simply makes no sense to me to say the vocabulary of particle physics is somehow privileged and describes the way things are "in themselves". A vocabulary can only ever be the map and not the territory. The world does not appear to us with labels indicating its materiality or immateriality. It appears only in its suchness. All ways of carving that suchness into discrete objects and patterns are only as good and as true as what we can do with them.

I would think it's just that although the HGA is an archetype of the Self, Aiwass is not the HGA, but Crowley's HGA, and therefore as individual as Crowley. Also if you want to be Jungian about it, the archetype can only enter consciousness as the subject and not as the object. Anything that is perceived as an external entity that can be labeled, named or conversed with is not the archetype but the mask you've put on it.

@Serpentarius said

"If the dreamer chooses to ignore the dreamlets, then sooner or later as part of this hypnogogic state the brain shuts down the body with something called Sleep Paralysis - which prevents you from acting out what is going on in your dreams. The onset of this paralysis feels like your whole body is buzzing and shaking, that which has always traditionally been refered to as "the vibrations""

This seems overly reductive to me. On the one hand the connection between sleep paralysis and "automatic rigidity" seems to make perfect sense, but on the other hand interesting altered state "kundalini-esque" body sensations do not always develop in this direction. In my experience the effect is often the opposite - there is a heightened awareness of the body and a greater freedom of movement. Buzzing and shaking is part of the "body load" of many psychedelic drugs, but it often creates a hyperexcited state and not an automatically rigid state.

This always happens to me when I do dharana with eyes open, but I don't feel like I'm losing consciousness. It's like the blackout aura without the blacking out. I figured this was happening because I'm diverting a lot of attention from the visual field. Is this not standard?

The '88 US Games Systems deck can be had at Borders for $20 fwiw.

Since I am here by way of psychedelics and have been a rabid skeptic and materialist before encountering them, let me share a bit of my own experiences. You guys can decide whether and to what extent it was authentic, but I think it pretty much speaks for itself.

The first time that I ever tripped off shrooms (a much smaller dose than I've taken since) I spent hours laying in bed and having a schizophrenic conversation similar to the one described by the OP. Here are two features of the experience that stand out most:

1. Unusually high organization of the mind. Synaesthesia is common with psychedelics in general, but it is rarely a coherent process that has a definite goal. I was not simply having synaesthetic reactions to random stimuli. Instead, there was the sense that many distinct sensory modalities came together in the service of what normally might be called ideation or abstract thought. I was "thinking" and having "ideas" but I was thinking with the visual cortex; I was hearing these ideas, and feeling them in in my body. There was an impression of unusual coherence, as though all the parts of the brain were aligned together in the service of a specific cognitive task.

2. Encounter with a transcendental Other. At one point I had a clear sense of being visited by something alien. It is hard to explain exactly what I mean by "visited". In a sense, I found it with (but not "in") my brain in much the same way that one finds physical objects in physical space with eyesight. This was a sort of abstract object that existed in an abstract space that I could perceive through cognition. I might just as easily call it an "idea", but it was not in any sense an idea that "I" was having. This was an idea that had a life of its own, and once it got a foothold in the brain it exercised more control over the organism than its own egoic self-concept.

This thing, whatever it was, infected me with a level of understanding that seemed completely superhuman. I appreciated that all of the things that most bothered me or occupied the most of my attention were basically trivial, childish, and hallucinatory. There were artifacts of a fundamentally deluded way of looking at the world. This insight came along with a profound feeling of lucidity, serenity, and sanity. It also brought a recognition of the basically ignorant and hypnotized nature of my ordinary way of being in the world.

At one point I asked the Other if it was God, in some kind of naive Judaeo-Christian patriarchal sense (the only idea of God that I could conjure at the time), and it laughed. Later I asked it if it was me. This was closer to the mark but not quite correct. Yes and no was the answer.

I should mention also that there was a sense of being tested by this Other. The test was a series of metacognitive puzzles that were solved always by understanding the nature of one's own mental processes. I remember solving two or three of these, and when I finally failed to understand the last, the sense of alien presence departed (with a vibe of disappointment) although the trip went on.

Finally, let me add that when I ate more shrooms on other occasions, this entire Self vs Other dynamic gave way to something totally different. Instead of experiencing this Other as a foreign entity that was giving me information, I began to experience myself becoming it. This experience felt at once like possession and like self-remembering, as though the thing by which I was possessed was more myself than I ever had been. There was the same sense of extreme internal coherence, lucidity and sanity. But there was also the sense that I had woken up to discover myself as a kind of "meta-self" that had been hypnotized by its own thought process.

I think the parallels between this sort of experience and what is talked about in the mystical traditions do not need spelling out. In fact, it is only as a consequence of having this experience that I was able to understand that there is anything to religion and mysticism at all. Before the shrooms I was adamant that it was all superstitious nonsense.

The real problem with "psychedelic enlightenment" is that it is almost always conditional on the psychedelics. The experiences described above were so far out of my normal range of consciousness that I had simply no way to integrate them into my life. I had neither the willpower nor the trained concentration required to make them stick. (The feeling of manifesting or being the meta-self and then dissipating back into relative disorganization is particularly sickening. It feels rather like death - not the good death in which the maladaptive organization pattern falls apart to make way for the better one, but the failure to make the new pattern survive). I tried all kinds of chemical cocktails in an effort to anchor the sane state but nothing worked consistently. I've now turned to meditation and it's been giving me brief glimpses of the previous experiences, but nothing nearly as intense.

@Jim Eshelman said

"There does come a point where (speaking symbolically) the two triangles, instead of naturally gravitating apart unless held together by concentration, switch to naturally falling into each other. A union is made that is permanent. But, that link being deep rather than superficial, it is in the individual's depths that it's experienced, and not necessarily in his or her surface or superficial aspects that it is always evident. In some ways one could say that, the fusion having been made, one is "visited" by it here and there with greater frequency. But at the same time, if it was authentically made, the link is continually present, even in the personality's worst moments."

I have to say reading this has swept away a great deal of confusion.

I wonder, how important actually is it to have an erect spine when you're doing this?

I tried sitting this way but I have chronic posture problems and the muscle strain was just killing me. However, the other day I sat in a reclining chair and for the first time got an unmistakable result. There seems to be a difference between the discomfort felt from sitting in a position that actually puts unusual stress on the muscles and just the general discomfort which is caused by the body wanting to twitch and shift balance regardless of what position it is in. It seems that overcoming this latter type of discomfort is what produces the result.

Cheers, Aum418

If snappy, dismissive one-liners and mindless ad homs are how "adepts" and "initiates" hold discourse, then count me among the "pompous windbags".

@Aum418 said

"
@Fnord said
"The whole point of Skinnerian behaviorism is that the mind is a black box in which nothing happens worth talking about, except conditioning."

That is a methodological and not a metaphysical claim, like you seem to be making."

This is semantics. The methodology of explaining everything solely in terms of behavior and environmental influences rests on the metaphysical premise that nothing interesting happens inside the brain. It's not like the behaviorists said, "well we don't know what happens inside the brain, so let's look at behavior instead and see where that gets us." Behaviorist rhetoric, is very explicit that there is no reason to look in the brain, and that nothing will be found there except the mechanisms by which conditioning occurs.

"
"You would think it would be obvious to anyone participating in this particular community how hopelessly and profoundly false that is. It is also a scientific model a century old and is about as relevant as geocentrism."

You are the one who is hopelessly and profoundly false. FIrst of all, the Skinnerian model is, if anything, HALF a century old and it is EXTREMELY relevant within psychology and especially medicine. Im sorry you have to hear that but you are just completely wrong that it is outdated and equating it with geocentrism only belies your utter ignorance about its use in modern society."

Behaviorism is a century old and half a century debunked. The fact that behaviorists discovered true and useful things about behavior that are still relevant today does not mean that their metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the mind are relevant today. The fact that geocentrists discovered true and useful things about the motion of the Earth does not vindicate geocentrism as such.

"
"Anyway, people do not have "innate temperaments and inclinations hard-wired into their brain"."

Coloquially speaking, yes, yes they do. In fact, some people might give the above quote as a mild definition for 'genes' let alone neural structure.

"What they have is a modular computational architecture that consists of thousands of semi-intelligent, semi-autonomous subsystems dedicated to the solution of particular problems in the ancestral paleolithic environment that shaped the evolution of the brain."

Congratulations, you managed to throw out a lot of big buzz words and really say nothing at all. In fact, I could easily interpret the 'semi-autonomous' nature of those 'subsystems' to be 'inclinations' and 'temperaments.' So really youve done nothing expose yourself as a pompous windbag."

The whole point is that the colloquial way of speaking about the structure of the brain is confused and belies the complexity of the issue. Specifically, "temperaments and inclinations" are things that we attribute to people, or to personalities. A brain is not a person or a personality. The question as to whether folk-psychological attributions can be reduced to functional or structural properties of the brain is a matter of ongoing debate in cognitive science. In fact, this question is often answered in the negative.

The modules that are described at the computational level of brain architecture do not at all correspond to features that we would normally attribute to personality. To give some examples, the types of problems that these modules solve include the recognition of syntactic universals in natural language, recognizing correlations between facial expressions and emotional affect, the development of sophisticated and reliable folk-psychology and folk-physics in very young children, and so on and so forth.

Those features of a human being that we recognize as psychology and personality arise only when this panhuman computational architecture couples with the environment.

"
"The idiosyncrasies of human personality arise as a result of a complex feedback loop between this evolved architecture, its developmental trajectory, and the environment in which it is embedded."

A feedback loop between its own structure and its trajectory in the future? You just use large words thinking they impress people, dont you? Its kind of cute, I guess..."

Unfortunately, this is how the system actually works. You have (a) the panhuman computational architecture, you have (b) its developmental trajectory (i.e. the subject matter of developmental psychology), and you have (c) the environment. The state of (a) as it traverses (b) is a function of (c). However, since the modern environment is directly created by human beings at their various stages of development, what you get is a feedback loop.

This is not a horrendously complicated idea, but I can see how it would appear that way if you're used to thinking in terms of gross oversimplifications.

"
"This is putting the cart before the horse. We want to adapt the tools we've got to the environment; not adapt the environment to our tools. The game is transcendence, not paralysis."

The tool is the body and the mind... not the environment. You are the one switching cart and horse around."

That is what I said. Considering reading attentively before replying.

"
"As far as your idea of society telling us what our true will is, this is a stunningly nightmarish idea. "

It really isnt... it happens all the time today in just about every culture I know baout."

Actually, just about every culture has some kind of outlet whereby an individual can disconnect from his or her social persona and obligations and find his or her identity in the ground of being rather than in arbitrarily defined social roles. The nightmare is when this outlet is pathologized or criminalized, and people who cease to identify the concept of self with the social persona are locked up in wards or prisons. To what extent we are living this nightmare in the developed world is an open question, but obviously it is not as bad as it could be in a Skinnerian dystopia.

"
"Without such minds, the collective has no check on it whatsoever."

There is no such thing as 'the collective' except as a name for a lot of individuals. By calling it that you should your own inability to see differences and nuance but rather only black and white - theres US and theres THEM, the collective, who are stupid and unworthy. This kind of temperament, Im afraid, is the nightmarish one."

The collective is not a name for a lot of individuals. A collective has a set of shared values, norms, habits of being. As soon as you are born into a society, you are brainwashed with its arbitrary reality tunnel as a consequence of socialization. This renders you incapable of evaluating the collective reality tunnel in any objective way until you become aware of the brainwashing and are able to work through it. The reason for doing this is not to feel special and liberated and go off and live in the woods, but to be able to bring things into the consciousness of others that are typically kept out by the rigidity of socialized brainwashing. Individuation is a social function.

"
"The whole point of individuation/attainment/enlightenment is to produce a mind that can move outside the collective reality tunnels and see them from without."

No its not, its union with God/divine. Unless your 'enlightenment' consists in you thinking yourself so much cooler, smarter, better, and 'controversial' and 'counter-cultural' than everyone else, count me out. It sounds a lot like being a whiny teenager to me and absolutely nothing like adepthood or initiation."

I'm sorry but you just come off as too much of a prick to talk about these things with.

@Froclown said

"you fail to see, their is no divine, no spiritual, no supernatural, no mind other than brain etc."

I didn't say anything about anything divine, spiritual or supernatural. I said that the contemporary scientific picture of the mind/brain is not the behaviorist picture, but its exact opposite.

"No mind other than brain" is not a scientific statement but a metaphysical prejudice. In fact, the contemporary picture is that the best metaphor for the mind/brain is a computer, where the mind is construed as software and the brain as hardware.

The idea is that the mind is an abstract structure that is realized by the physical substrate of the brain. Similarly, the operating system running on your computer is an abstract structure that is realized by a particular box made of physical stuff. But the operating system is not identical with the box of physical stuff; that is ridiculous. In fact the very same operating system is simultaneously running on many other boxes, each of which is made from different physical stuff.

You could just as easily make an analogy with music. A song is played on an instrument, but a song is not identical with the instrument. Many different people can play the same exact song on many different instruments. And yet there would be no songs without instruments, and the way the songs sound is related to instruments in a lawful way. Now that's some spooky metaphysics.

Anyway, you do not learn how to play a good tune on a guitar by taking the guitar apart and looking at the pieces under a microscope. Doing that might teach you something about how to make a good guitar, but nothing about how to play good music.

"Look at Crowley example were a young man has a WILL deep in his conditioning to join the navy and to be at sea, but his parents wishes a less deep and personally satisfying but economically and emotionally more pressing (at least short term) bend his arm and he settles for an unsatisfactory career for from sea. Now certainly his desire to be at sea must have been shape by past life experience than hardened ao he grew, perhaps he had a sea faring grandfather who told him stories of the sea, or he had many heros of his time than were navy men, or his peers telling of world travels, or he was of a racial tradition say norse or Scandinavian whose customs, myths and ideals of virtue involve the sea. All these kinds of factors work to condition the man to the sea, but the one factor, his parents economic support force the man to submit to his parents support against his WILL. He is by nature (race) and by nurture his natural surroundings and conditioning of the sea faring caste, it is rather cruel then to take a man conditioned to one caste by nature and nurture and impose restriction which force that same man into a caste that is not aligned with him psychologically."

I don't understand. You've just described the normal, spontaneous process of individuation. A man grows up, lives life, and becomes an idiosyncratic someone. Where does all this stuff about "sea faring castes" come from? At what a point does the man begin to belong to this "sea faring caste"? When he is born? When he learns that he is Scandinavian? When he reads a book about sea monsters? When his grandfather tells him his first story about the sea?

The unification of the Self is inherently a spontaneous process. You do not, per the genetic determinists, get to look into someone's brain and see their destiny. Nor do you, per the behaviorists, get to fabricate their destiny out of thin air and then condition them with it. It is discovered on the fly, by the individual, as he navigates life.

I mean, I'm just amazed. We are in this mess in the first place because we've been brainwashed without our consent, and your solution seems to be more intensive brainwashing.

Wow, the last place I'd have expected to see people pushing Skinnerian social engineering programs is on a Thelemic forum in 2009.

"This is not totally accurate as biology shows that people do have innate temperaments and inclinations hard-wired into their brain..."

"Not totally accurate" is mild. It is, in fact, totally inaccurate. The whole point of Skinnerian behaviorism is that the mind is a black box in which nothing happens worth talking about, except conditioning. You would think it would be obvious to anyone participating in this particular community how hopelessly and profoundly false that is. It is also a scientific model a century old and is about as relevant as geocentrism.

Anyway, people do not have "innate temperaments and inclinations hard-wired into their brain". What they have is a modular computational architecture that consists of thousands of semi-intelligent, semi-autonomous subsystems dedicated to the solution of particular problems in the ancestral paleolithic environment that shaped the evolution of the brain. The idiosyncrasies of human personality arise as a result of a complex feedback loop between this evolved architecture, its developmental trajectory, and the environment in which it is embedded.

Since the computational architecture of the brain originates in the paleolithic, the only way you could possibly "match your biology with your desires" is by regressing human culture to a prehistoric paleolithic hunter-gatherer environment. This is putting the cart before the horse. We want to adapt the tools we've got to the environment; not adapt the environment to our tools. The game is transcendence, not paralysis.

As far as your idea of society telling us what our true will is, this is a stunningly nightmarish idea. The whole point of individuation/attainment/enlightenment is to produce a mind that can move outside the collective reality tunnels and see them from without. Without such minds, the collective has no check on it whatsoever.