Palo Mayombe holds two things immaculately sacred: death and the wilderness.

QRI/Slate Star/LessWrong

 There is a distinct sense in which I, as a very poor non-college educated person with physical disabilities do not even have the ability or cash flow to stop what I'm doing to think about what kinds of problems are being treated within these groups as extremely important. Wife has to do mother's dialysis every single night (as in my wife and I haven't been able to go anywhere more than 20 miles away or for more than a couple hours in a year or someone dies), none of the people working on existential risk are going to come over and help, no matter how hard Andres may be working on a cure to kidney stones or Nick Bostrom may be working on AI risk. To come even closer, there might not even *be* labs on the west coast (I see y'all bay area stanford folks) if a wildfire gets a little extra or collides with our bizarrely expanding midwest tornado season. The burning house parable is real shit and only got realer when Mao dropped it again. Now obviously, death is not the conundrum it appears to be when viewed through some OI lenses, maybe mother would clearly be better off if she just let go, perhaps simulation theory is true some way and we are all fine metaphysically, chinese medi-nanobots made swoop in and help any day now, perhaps a law will be passed that guarantees assistance for her.....but tell her that? Tell my black friend who's brother just got shot by the cops (but we are in a rural area so no protests or news coverage) that kidney stones are more important, and you'll be lucky to leave not bleeding....tell my sister that cluster headaches are more important to solve than her daughter's condition and the same fate may befall you....even very gentle NI/Buddhist concepts frequently only serve to emotionally harm people who live in the burning house. Where is the ethics of this in modern consciousness research? How long before enough health care workers burn out on covid work and outreach that one of you gets drafted to drop the psychedelics for a minute and strap on some scrubs because you still have the ability to think somewhat clearly, and how does that affect one's research or mentality? I dropped working on a book re: rescue of classic mysticism toward modern neuro that I'd spent 4 years on several years ago because I literally have to work with my hands or else now...this research is collecting dust, what if something in there was important...how do you talk me down from setting it on fire to warm the (metaphorically burning) house? For all this maybe shit-talking, I am actually curious to know what people who are fully immersed in, frankly, concepts that are utterly science fiction to most people, are doing to help not the reg folks, the average, or whatever, but the lowest? Do kidney stones or cluster headaches really account for the most pain in the world (or is it a kind of privilege to see physical pain as the most important?), and what kind of privilege is it to be able to remain utterly unpolitical right now, on the ground in meatspace? Apologies for the aggro, and apologies to QRI for singling out some of their projects (I only grabbed from what I had readily available mentally in terms of seeing it often on this forum) but I can't even see the slate star scene as anything other than an impediment now after Alexander openly advocates "scientific racism" and eugenics adjacent ideals, while being cash-flowy enpugh to be able to self fund research grants...what happens when someone from this group decides positive valence is important enough to start manipulating and medically intervening on negative valence against the will of the subject and how close might that come to Huxleyan fascism? I have family members that are anti-vax because legally credentialled doctors and scientists performed experiments on them without their consent, they may have killed a couple people with their ignorance. How do I tell them to come off that a little for the common good, especially now that it is too late to solve for the guilt and shame it will create? I realise this is an intense way to engage in this conversation and probably unproductive for some of you but it is killing me even watching this (imo very important) work unfold sometimes and seeing it bend over and over toward specific zones that I find hyper-individualistic (the solving of a single individual pain/pleasure axis as opposed to the kinds of structurally and politically heavyweight mass-objects that affect the lives of thousands simultaneously, in ways that do not correspond with lived experience for any but the most intelligent). Honestly the afrofuturists are doing work light years beyond this while also critiquing science, racism, scientific racism, while also doing work at CERN AND running an urban housing legal aid charity in philadelphia. When's the crossover? When is the BATTLE? Yknow? Am I crazy?

My Green Un-Queen

 Refusing crowns, always, because something else, somewhere else, somewhen else deserves it more. 

Placing crowns, gently, on the lowliest green, on the highest matriarch, on friends and lovers, willy nilly, on lamps, and limbs, and carcasses of forgotten hunts, on cruel animals and orange loverboys alike, secure in the knowledge that as Confucius said, the superior person is distressed by their lack of ability, and is not distressed by men not knowing them. The superior man does not seek to elevate the self but seeks to elevate all else above the self. 

My green un-queen, secure in the knowledge that all heavens await the soul that seeks to elevate all natural creation above works of men and Progress and Economy and Capital.

My green unqueen, who hitched hesitates and halts at every.

Single.

Mark.

Of a brutal end. 

My green unqueen. May all browns and coyotes and pigs bow to your unholy power of creative destruction. May weeds scurry from your trowel, may weeds scrurry TO your trowel, safe in the knowledge that their lives will not be in vain, composted nightly to steal every inch back from this that would colonise our rightful hearth home Heath.

I replace our farmhouse in my dreams with a darker dream: a farmhouse with stone catacombs beneath, eons of family remains tucked away, with baubles and relics and Indiana Jones-level traps and tricks to destroy the thief that would lay claim to knowledge they did not work for, toil for, break stones and soil for, crushing highways and trucks and buffoon goon stooge neighbors beneath our resistance to a Future without Nature. 

I have big dreams for the hedge apple society. I need you to be strong, and to look to the horizon, not the past. To the moon, not the sun. To the righteous war, not a false peace made ever false by offering us four walls and a ceiling to put our Arms Down. 

I believe in you, my Unqueen, unclean floors as a delightful reminder of a life we saved, I believe in you my Unqueen, six months of anxiety and tears and tension about how to interact with a lost child discovering how badly life can be for someone unsure of themselves means six months of gestation toward an August Birth, of someone that has chosen an identity and is Ready to Rock. Years of your nervously accommodating and learning their boundaries, pays off in a lifetime where they care when someone is anxious, and seek to not make it worse at the very least. We are moving toward the Dream, my Unqueen, my Green Bean, my Evergreen Hallloween. 

Loving you is like loving the dead

 Two years ago today I ate a bunch of mushrooms, dressed up in a skeleton costume, pretended to be dead, and asked my girlfriend to do a fake wake for me as a lark. She did such an incredible job I sat up out of my coffin and asked her to marry me. Last year, when Halloween ended up being so cold the facility we were to have our wedding at closed and refunded our money, we had a three day scramble to make our 2 bedroom tiny yard home hospitable and spooky enough to handle 40 family members at zero degrees. It was hard, haphazard, scary in a social anxiety & family nostalgia/pain sense, and then she walked out onto our altar space and it took my breath away and obliterated what little doubt I had left about us, and all the fears I’d been too bad of a person if I could have earned my way to that moment with her. I make missteps galore and I know I do hurtful things still and she gently corrects and comforts me and teaches me how to be there for her in better ways by relentlessly demonstrating being present for those around her. We ugly cry into each other instead of outward now, we ritually guide our past and future selves into better collusion with our now selves. On a stormed tossed sea far from ports, we learned it’s a ghost ship and we are our captain and our crew and other ships fear and tremble when they see our green lights through the fog because they know we are coming for them with a love for a death that is a love beyond death, and a growing intensity of mission for a monomaniacal vision of courageous self-sacrifice to our collective tombwomb. She taught me how to care about things in a way that having a child couldn’t teach me, in a way that is teaching my child how badly I want to learn how to care. What parts of fear and dreams and hope and hate are proper and what parts are pathological, how to tease apart the ways in which love and sex and intimacy where accidentally knitted together badly for both of us. It hurts for weeks now when I cause her to feel shame, even when it was infinitesimal for her. I am filled to bursting for weeks now when she bestows upon me a momentary blast of full eye contact. I just woke her up with sobbing about how much I am thankful for her entire existence and even right now she is leveling up my feelings for her and loving the hurt parts and the evil out of me.  

close to the mirror

finally after what feels like thirteen centuries i've been preparing mirror maze for the last stretch of nonsense so hopefully can publish before i'm dead (2018, maybe 2019....)...though if i continue the joke of referring to it as my thesis, I guess most people get a few years to put theirs together so i shouldn't beat myself up any more than i usually do.... so for sake of sharing this with somethings, here is (tentatively) completed introductory chapter:

//The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But the affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive in the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God. Afterward he will stay near the entrance so that he can gently push all those who come near into the opening.” - Simone Weil, Waiting for God//

//Subtlety grates upon the nerves, yet everything is driven by an immense crudity: death impassions us. Even before crossing over into death I had been excruciated upon my thirst for it. I accept that my case is in some respects aberrant, but what skewers me upon zero is an aberration inextricable from truth. To be parsimonious in one’s love for death is not to understand. - Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation//

//Verily I tell you that if you have to mourn, you should mourn those who are born, rather than those who die. - Tozen, Series of Reflections//

The open-secret grave is (naturally) in-crypted.

This thing called human has long viewed death as the gross inversion of health and human-ness, a sickly and unbearable price to pay for the “gift” of life, a savage relic of animal nature to be feared, avoided, ignored, covered-up, battled, conquered, transcended... It has always viewed life and death as the purest kind of antithetical - intrinsically and explicitly opposing forces forever and permanently fatal to one another, associated with black and the negative in the white light’s battle for purity - and so has (un)naturally sought to mute the cold voice of our common grave....

As a result of millenia-long fear-driven cultural campaigns to toxify and expel the tomb and all its secrets, we are born into a paradigm that demands unified identity, self-assuredness, conformation, and concrete boundaries as entities that by our very nature flow and flood over these static riverbanks. To attempt stasis in such a river is to embody turbulence in an anxious, desperate, and ultimately vain search for calmer waters...this ship is perpetually sinking into the infinite deep, this arkhé (arché-ark) inevitably capsizes, dragging with it the separation between ship and water. Viewing life and self through the lens of this stasis puts one in danger of coming to equate breaking the rules of one’s given identity with dying.

|A life of perpetual-drowning-as-reality. 

|Of motion-sickness as the world-for-itself.

Thus the western human arkhé-type views the self through the darkened, turbulent mirror of Individual Control, observing a noisy and recalcitrant illusion of mastery that confuses movements of an ephemeral reflection for the concrete action in real time. A virtual prison of mimicry and transfixed hypnotism, the labyrinthine rationalizing of complacency and the narcissistic ultraviolence of life- and gain-obsessed will-to-power aggression culture ensures and entrenches this turbulence while amplifying attempts to contain or expel death’s effects such that gained power may never be relinquished, even beyond dying. Death emerges from technocratic transhumanism as ultimate horizon of control: Unconditional accelerationism|radical paranoia|bleak-hole nihilism irrupt as advanced strategies but even (or especially) these have difficulty coping with the wave upon novel wave of pathology that breaks upon the mind as the organ of infinite imagination seems to have as many ways of malfunctioning, as many ways of hiding information, as many ways of covering its tracks, disguising itself...The words of Simon Springer’s ‘I, Dirty Anarchist’ clarify our situation: 

//Only through a politics of division can one conceive of themself as a distinct and disconnected entity. It shouldn’t surprise us then that the rise of the ego has developed alongside the pursuit of both nationalism and capitalism. They are, each one, related distortions that attempt to make sense of the world through a partitioning of the self from all else. Whether expressed as an individual, as a state, or through the process of accumulation, all of these ideas seek to carve out and define what is ‘mine’ from an inalienable connection to the source of all life and what rightfully belongs to the entirety of existence. This ideology of division has recently culminated in the perverse hyper individualism of the present neoliberal moment, a condition of profound hallucinatory separation where the ‘I’ cleans itself of all ethical virtue. We are told to stand alone as obelisks of conceit.// 

This problem is intensified by exponential growth in input streams - a “being-opened” that often decays into a foreclosure, an always-already-closing-off in defense against the constant|cyclic|cyclonic laceration of incoming signal: a closing-off that mirrors the dual concepts of repression and oppression : compulsively pre-emptive strikes on anticipated potentialities. 

People really don't like to consider their own

decomposition,

negation,

deceleration,

death, 

loss, 

destruction, 

implosion.

They certainly don’t wish to work toward these things, and even terrible traits become protected when the self is perceived as static, separate, inviolable.

This defense mechanism amplifies the difficulty of the transformation from being turned inward (the passive nihilism spawned from the insignificance of the self-model in relation to the world-model) to being turned inside-out (the active annihilism of these models and the merging of self with world), adding complexity to this lock, the picking of which is a prerequisite step for the accurate tuning of the singular Will toward interlocking integration with the unity of nature, of non-differentiation between “self” and “reality”. 

The reconfiguration of the isolating and oppressive feedback loop called the individualised ego by skills that are explicitly developed in the twin disciplines of self-destruction and self-construction is the navigation of the titular mirror maze. The realization that every abyss is a mirror and the removal of any mirror reveals a new abyss paves the way for the labyrinth of self-reflection to fall before the demonstration of this interconnecting voidplane behind, beneath, below all things. We invert undeath and nail selves to the cross, double sacrifice to the world-tree. //In darkness and concealment// we refute the original difference between life and death and elaborate possibilities of existence throughout the liminal interzones. 

As the labyrinth represents the self: the inversion, the mirroring, the heresy of this re-alignment manifests in the assertion that there is no exit and we are our own minotaur - fullness is achieved by devout exploration of the extent of the emptiness of the image. 

//”...The organism cannot live the death that gives rise to the difference between life and death.” To which the yogi replies, “Au contraire, Mister. I’m living it right now. So are you if you did but examine yourself.” - Timothy Morton, Thinking the Charnel Ground//

To view the alienated individual as undead opens a necromantic channel of revolution: to view the self and reality as liminal implies a mirror-reversal in ontological priority, a rotation from being to becoming: from the 3 dimensional perspective of a discrete object moving inside time to the “higher” view of process in 4 dimensions. 

This metamorphosis is amplified and accelerated in the black hole of //immanent negativity, any event, be it a singularity or a process, that leads to an increase in entropy, leading, ultimately, to an apotheosis that explicates the givenness of emptiness//, the clarion call of Adam Lovasz’ Non-Oriented Ontology. While he limits his deconstruction to physical and social dissolution and their effects, we propose a speculative method to engage a disconnection of the brain’s self-model from its world-model, “ego death”: a demonstration of the Mors Mystica as the effective mental simulation of death and isomorphic to the Buddhists’ satori: displaying the zero-point of nihilism, the self-shattering truth of the via negativa: the removal, however temporary, of all mirrors, all images; clearing the screen of symbolism reveals the field that underlies the screen and demonstrates how a pendular circuit of deconstruction to augmentation and back attenuates the attention and quiets the verbal mind, setting the stage for profound psychogenic experimentation, exploration, and play.

Delinking from outdated ideologies, undocking from obsolete frames of reference, negating problematic components of personality, engaging a symmetry by renouncing the disconnected self-model and the incomplete world-model: this neuronihilism lies at the junction of time, death, and identity. When we speak of the complete deactivation of the phenomenal self-model, the complete delinking of the default modality of the brain from a position of top-down organization and modulation of bottom-up sensory data, whether or not what we speak of are fictions of the brain in psychosis matters little in an assessment of the image the brain is displaying to the phenomenal self in these moments. 

It is to this end that we view the intersection of the fields of neuroscience, mysticism, art, physics, topology, psychology, semantics, symbolism, mythmaking and metafiction as a single, continuous, natural domain of self-reflective metaknowledge which one may call alchemical. Understanding the alchemical process to be a system for the construction of Philosophic Stone, we follow Gabriel Catren in defining the Stone as 

//...the adamant converging pole of the concrescent operations carried on by a particular process of transmodal philosophical synthesis. The orchestration of a philosophical stone requires an amalgrammation of the local grammars that literalize the diverse modes of thought into a unique grimoire, and the arrangement of the regulative ideas that provide different prismatic orientations in thinking into a single constellation. - Catren, Alchimery//

It may seem like an outrageous statement, to claim to understand even part of the recipe for Philosopher’s Stone, but the true depth of this alchimerical realization lies in the unveiling of its universality - that every artistic construct, every collaborative gesture, every act of translation, every syncretic knotting of thought is an alchemy that responds to alchemical procedures. We hope to demonstrate in this book that many types of constructions can be considered mandalic and alchemical: that every Stone is a temporally persistent artefact of the complete synthesis of one’s self-model with their world-model as a result of a calibration process between inner and outer worlds that produces an artistic “proof-of-work” of satori, and that there exist protogeometric rules that govern this process that align with Jung’s study of mandalas as steganograms of //the state of the self as it was on the day that it was created//.

To step inside the self-reflecting Librarynth is to engage the alchemical process, beginning (and realising oneself to be) the Magnum Opus. To //shatter the image is to break the enemy//, the enemy that is the self-model’s fear of dissolution in the //infinite ocean of god//. 

Blood and bone into the alembic, //ready to sacrifice all vanity and all satisfaction as in the past one burned his furniture and the beams of his roof to feed the furnace of the Great Work//, apply fire and compression until Nigredo-blackened ash of the self and the world are one Diamond Body, sharpening the self against world like blade against whetstone until all that remains is razor sharp, precision Nothingness. 

There are vast amounts of pages devoted to alchemical procedures, but an alliance (and modernisation) of Eastern and Western mysticisms suggest a more direct route than processural and systematic growth upwards. As above, so below - as Virgil guides us, transcendence is not only acceleration outward but can also be a tunnelling downward: the Black Sun that is the squared-circular union of the Solar and its polar Negative is, after all, at the center of the labyrinth, not its exit. One may learn to convert the Nigredo stage directly into the Beatific Vision with no intervening mediation by utilizing the concepts of harmonics and symmetry to develop an intuitional “neuronavigational” system that does not rely on the symbolism of any language, committing the arch-heresy of refuting the need for an intermediary to cover the gap between the human domain and the rhizomatic observer-less god’s-eye view of the world-model. We assert that higher-dimensional instances of phenomenological symmetry are the religious/mystical/psychedelic experiences - the experience all religions are aiming at, and which some regard themselves as gatekeepers of or defenders against. By becoming this process of navigation one tends to quickly recognize the value of creative and persistent attentiveness over any variation of formal completion: the endless impossible task taken up precisely because it is endless and impossible. 

To explore this dissolution of self and begin a sketch on the utilization and analysis of multiple methods for reliably generating the neurological suspension of the default mode brain operations known as the mystical death, we shall first examine the brain networks at work in this deactivation. This will allow us to examine a tradition of ritual intoxication that transtemporally cuts across cultural and geographic boundaries, illuminating several forms of cognitive flattening that are isomorphic to the dissolution of social, neural, and psychological boundaries found in these altered states of consciousness. This reduction of boundary-condition-thresholds across multiple axes renders thought maximally general-> genitive -> generative - driving a pluralized unity : a multiplicative multidentity - the droneswarm flexibly mutating between becoming-One : becoming-Many : becoming-Zero. This radical flattening of the impersonal flood of sense-data and an entity’s material existence blurs reality into an infinitely-smeared, [sub]merged heterarchy of seemingly-conscious pheno(u)mena. Mors Mystica exposes and forces a visualization of the calculatory procedures undertaken by the brain to generate a single subjectivity out of the multiplicity of multifarious and multivalent signals at play on its antennae.

A phenoumenodelic experience - any experience that //involves a shift of the very transcendental structure that renders a transcendent experience possible// - unfurls the full depth of the Mirror Maze out of the hyper-enfolded limitations of the stratified human structure - //transcending transcendence// onto a free field of impersonal experience - the immanent //void-plane of zero-intensity.// In the phenoumenodelic experience, we puncture the “Bouncing Wall” of correlationism, //make a slit in the umbrella [...] tear[ing] open the firmament itself//, and counteract the gravity of unitary consciousness. It is from taking this void-plane transformation as the urgrund that we may learn to engage multiple phenomenological perspectives on the world-model from within the same self-model.

We shall continue this cartographic expedition by engaging in a tracking of representations of this death before death/death-in-life, organizing an illumination of harmonic convergences in art reflecting the death of the body, the death of the mind, and the death of the world by scrying art, literature, Buddhism, and atheology to expose the apophatic keyless lock that opens onto both an infinite Sisyphean scaling of a headless holy-mountain and its simultaneous inverse, Orphic katabasis: the acephalic anti:image of Self/Mind/God/Reality that is >neurologically and ideologically consistent and >consistently non-ideological and extra-neurological. Expansive, imaginative, compassionate and constructive - embodied, enactive, and extended - self-reflective, organic, and algorithmically-constructed, persistent waveform. Mysticism and the interior drive to conceptualise reality as God naturalised in the alchemical furnace that reduces all concepts to geometry in order to drive universal adaptation. //The quest for god is the quest for the ultimate symmetry.//

The Mirror Maze is the multifaceted hyperreflective Philosophical Stone and we become this maze by learning to identify not with the limited, frightened, homesick perspective of the individual seeking attainment in the world but with the entire fluxxing unstructure that gives rise to this separation. 

//One way or another, no matter which theory of our journey is correct, it is myself I address; to whom I rehearse as to a stranger our history and condition; and will disclose my secret hope though I will sink for it. - Barth, Night-Sea Journey//

We are not the first to have foreseen an end to blind threading of the weave of world-space. We are not the first to "gaze long into the Abyss", nor are we the first to discover that our personal abysses can reflect the individuated Self. We are not the first to unwind and add our own iteration of Ariadne's thread through this intimate [e/u]nfolding of Trauma and Time. We are not the first to attempt an Escape from this Mirror Maze only to become lost in the desert, nor the first to theorize a mechanism for the navigation of these inner zones. Nor are we the first to have brought back a vision of the underworld from the perspective of this "positive death at zero-intensity": a vision of a self-reflecting crystalline multiaxial multiplex manifold extending in every direction, infinitely, containing everything including itself and the voidplane and all the recursion and paradox that entails, but //even recursion, then, is not complex enough for a mirror so deeply synaesthetic and so causally complicated//. Indra’s Net is the template, but as we shall see, we are dealing with a presentation of this that is explicitly phenomenological. A common vision, not a universal abstraction. 

Like a mobile and hyperconnected wireframe|cobweb|constellation, flexible and fluxxing, each node a virtual mirror containing the entire structure within it - infinite pages in infinite grimoires on infinite shelves in the total librarynth : the timeless and annihilating unity of Kalachakra : //he who knows to the end of the secret of Teonanacatl can even see that infinite clockwork// spoke Maria Sabina// reminiscent of so many literary and artistic structures, from Dante’s map of Inferno to the metaphor lurking in Foucault’s panopticon, to those intricately carved Chinese nested concentric spheres, each able to spin on their own individual axis. So many representations spiraling|piling up or down (pick your hyperspherical poison). 

To update Nietzsche: We have a multiplicity of precursors, and what a unity these precursors construct! No less than a sizable body of witness that the limit[ed/ing] simulation of external reality by mind through the so-called “doors of perception” (which we will learn are but a colloquialism for the various gates and hub systems that separate different brain regions) can be turned off completely or simulated as such, that this process exposes details of future and past states as all recorded memory events and predictive hypotheses are experienced simultaneously within this un[der]worlding ultraconnectivity. 

This knowledge does not come without a price, however. While the scaling of the Mountain is an understandable metaphor, the Orphic descent is both figuratively and literally a tunnelling through the unknown, literally in the sense of projection of signal across non-neuronal space. Exposure to the hellish realms - exposure to the possibility of ultimate negativity in thoughtspace - is not merely a mathematic eventuality when dealing with this “negative navigation.” The shibboleth of our cause is intimacy with pain and suffering - thorns have always been the fee for penetrating the hedgemaze boundaries and this intimacy becomes hard-coded into the actions of the entity in a progression toward larger and larger capacity for boundless compassion. Every oscillation from life to death and vice versa seems to amplify Bodhisattvic tendencies: the bardo-revelation becomes empyrean indoctrination, a training ground for hyperspherical harmonics. The constitution for and the discipline to not shy away from these dark transformations and blackened zones is an uncommon trait - the rarity of which maintains the secrecy of our methods for tolerating even the extreme limits of negative convergence. 

This secrecy, this encoding/encryption, is not so much a test to the faithful or a jealous guarding of secrets, but as a safety precaution: these secrets can be easily abused because enlightenment is not difficult at all.

In works like Aldous Huxley’s ‘The Perennial Philosophy’ and Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth sequence one finds a category-theoretical approach to theology that organizes a range of spiritual histories and genealogies in order to perform various computations on these structures: rooting out invariance and mutability in descriptions and practices, comparing the historical evolution of different mythologies and shearing off unstable comparisons or sharpening isomorphisms to see what is left behind after this process. This comparison-process has even been taken as a mode of spirituality in itself, leading to many variations including such esoteric philosophies as gnosticism or theosophy that are themselves merely elaborations of this process of syncretism. Huxley’s excellent work of comparative religion maps the similarities of several traditions’ formations, schisms, and evolutions, exposing remarkable commonalities; Campbell’s Monomyth explicitly systematizes his claim that all mythologies and religions are constructed by an identical set of aims - principally the transformation of an individual through an cyclical array of checkpoints and challenges symbolizing the journey through the death of the disconnected individual and their rebirth as the spiritual Initiate once again fused to reality. The symbolic journey into the underworld and back is the essence of mysticism, and in perennial philosophy this journey is shown to be radically trans-modal.

An underground of highly idiosyncratic practices that trace a diagonal between revolt against and veneration of the individual practitioner's culture and ideology, mysticism universalizes a rebellion of nature, growth, and knowledge against authority, privilege, or dogma – physis and logos over physics and nomos. This thread seems to spontaneously emerge anywhere cultural or ideological repression or stagnation is found and exhibits extreme similarities regardless of the conceptual, spatial, or temporal distance between origins and practitioners. In order to present a case for mysticism to be naturalized we must reframe it, not as a spiritual ideology or subset thereof, but rather an umbrella term for an unorganised set of experimental methods for systematically testing the stability of and calibrating the relationship between the self- and world-models in the brain.

Yamantaka: Endless Emanation, Endless Liberation essay intro

O Manjushri! Your being is non-dual, exclusive and all-pervading.

By acting equally toward all, you are the Father of all Conquerors;

as the Dharmadhatu you are the Mother of all Conquerors;

as a Wisdom Being, you are the Child of all Conquerors.

I prostrate myself to you, O Manjushri, who is complete in glory.

Although in Dharmakaya neither love nor hate is found,

through the enactment of your compassion the presence

of a King of Fury is revealed to subdue all evils in the triple world.

I prostrate myself to Bhairava Yamantaka, the Terrifying Opponent of the Lord of Death.

//a spectre of black and unending radiance of glorious splendour - Trepaneringsritualen, The Black Egg//

….as the legend goes, Yama was the first human to die. After being directed to meditate for 50 years in
order to awaken to his enlightened nature, the ascetic found a remote cave in Tibet and began his
practice. 49 years and 11 months and 29 days later, a group of cattle thieves entered the cave and
began to butcher the water buffalo they had stolen. Noticing the yogi in the cave, they beheaded him
as well lest he be able to identify the men to the authorities. Frustrated and enraged at dying so close
to the completion of his objective, his corpse rose and attached the water buffalo’s head to his body
and killed the men and drank their blood, becoming the Judge of the Nine Hells, Yama Lord of Death.
Yama, unsatisfied by such momentary retribution as is possible in a world before death and the
Buddha’s teachings of Nirvana and disembarking from the wheel of rebirth had disseminated, went
on a murderous rampage in the surrounding country, killing indiscriminately and threatening all of
Tibet. In desperation, followers of the Buddha-dharma appealed to the Great Bodhisattva, Manjushri, for
help. Approaching the abode of Yama at the mouth of hell, Manjushri confronted the buffalo-headed god
who called out to Manjushri a challenge: “What sorcery could this frail being possibly bring to bear against
the Lord of the Underworld?” In reply, Manjushri disappeared. Believing the scene to be at a close,
Yama retired to his throne. As Yama sat, the skies darkened. Manjushri, combatting Death with its mirror
image multiplied , had assumed a colossal buffalo-headed form with 48 arms, 16 legs, 13 faces, blazing
with the Wisdom Fire. This entity fell from the sky, flattening a different building of Yama’s palace with
each of its 16 feet, and crushing Yama on his throne under its erect penis,
//throne submerged in funeral birth - Moss, The Coral of Chaos//

The Vajrabhairava, Ultimate Adamantine Terrifier.

Yamantaka, Destroyer of Death.

Symmetry and Extremity

The Sanskrit noun dharma, derived from the root dhṛ (to keep or maintain), means "what is established or firm", and is used interchangeably with “truth” or "law". Symmetry is defined by physicists and mathematicians as having two key elements: //(1) The possibility of a physical change, and (2) immunity to that change, which is also known as invariance.// This essay will be an attempt to communicate the extremity of Yamantaka yogatantra, and interpret the myth/teachings through the paired lenses of the ars memoriae “memory palace” system for developing the memory and Yohan John’s assertion that both science and religion are on a quest for ultimate symmetry. Alongside revealing how the thangka and the mandala are two different projections of this symmetry that both develop an imagistic system for memorization and navigation of an architecture of ethics, John’s assertion will background our demonstration that Yamantaka practice is a phenomenological hypersymmetry par excellence - one of the most extreme ritual/religious symmetries extant. This realization aligned pairwise with Avalokitesvara/Mahakala (detailed in AJ’s essay in this volume) and groupwise with the 8 Tibetan protector deities in their charnel grounds, arrayed around the mandalic palace amplifies and mutates the arborescent cognition of Buddhistic systems into a symmetry-generating metasystem - into a labyrintheology capable of indexing a convergent path from any conceivable point, with Yamantaka particularly being a system for realisation of the dharma within the most “degenerate” substrate.

inhale inhale you're the victim

I’ve only told a few people about this time in my life. A brief segue between smoking weed and
graduating to hard drugs in high school found me sitting in a basement with a few friends, fellow
burnouts, stoners...what had appeared in the dimness to be a paper bag assumed to contain strong
drink made its way around the rotation but when it was handed to me it felt empty. I peered inside
and the intense smell of gasoline assaulted my face, fumes rising from a soaked wad of paper towels
at the bottom.

“Uhhh…”

“Just put your face in and breathe in and out really deeply dude, you’ll get pretty wasted.”

A lot of harder drug users will sort of sink to whatever level is available to them in terms of intoxicants
in order to keep normality at bay, and I was to prove no different. Our main weed guy was busted
several days earlier and we were as dry as a bone. Being 15 with no income does not make it
easy to acquire alcohol. We had yet to become aware of the thriving crystal meth scene lurking
behind every curtain in our town (though that would come hard and fast later). A group of older kids a
year earlier had taught my friends how to huff paint from a breadbag, and they reveled in the ease
with which they could get profoundly stoned using things commonly found in any garage. I looked
at the bag for a second and in retrospect it is my experience that at that moment of truth for anyone
that goes with such a chemical approach there is an extremely short list of thoughts that go through
one’s mind, and they’re all terrible, empty, lonely, lost thoughts. One hit from the bag is enough to
diagnose someone with depression, anxiety, trauma.

Anyway.

What kind of story would this be if I’d said no thanks and that was that? Of course I was eager
to feel anything that was not my normal feelings or to feel nothing, to feel literally any deviation
at all. Breathe deep, molecules begin to buzz, time ceases to exist. Who knows how much was
actually inhaled that night, considering the trip lasts around 10 minutes but we were tripping all
night and into the next day without sleep. Blink once and it is 8 pm, blink again and it is 6:45 pm,
blink again and it’s noon the next day, erratically time travelling. Full blown apocalyptic end-times
hallucinations, gods, angels, and speaking in tongues. Multiple high speed oscillations between
life and death that I wouldn’t recognize as “ego death” until psychedelics years later. Elves, aliens,
insects, alien elvish insects. Ghosts and demons. Ultradimensional conversations with mutating
starling-swarms of disembodied voices. Complete dissociation while my body was still active and
interacting with the world. Extremely negative interactions.

One of the friends dragged us outside at some point, and told us a story about finding a
crate of actual dynamite near an abandoned railroad line that was a half mile from the
house when he was like 9. In my fried state I believed he’d told us he had the dynamite
right then and was going to blow up the house, me, the school, I was growing more and more
paranoid and frantic that it would be up to me to prevent a terrorist attack. It was later related
to me that out of nowhere I began attacking one of the others and yelling disconnected
gibberish, fought my way upstairs where the parents were sleeping while yelling about a bomb,
let both dogs out of the house into the woods and tried to start the adults’ car (it was a manual
transmission so luckily I couldn’t)....somehow none of this woke anyone, and around 2 that
morning a friend brough us some weed and I calmed down a little, though everything was
mostly blur and glitch. The next morning we left (driving, with milk jug full of gas to huff in the
car) and it had snowed a little. We took a curve too fast and swerved into the other lane badly
and then fishtailed almost off the road, right as a cop car went by….it had its lights flashing,
was going very fast the other way and did not stop for us….another mile up the road and the
driver blew through a stop sign and nearly hit a small child, screeching to a halt so close to him
that we couldn’t see him over the hood. The kid was sitting with his legs a foot underneath the
car, eyeballs an inch from the bumper. Driver tells the kid to never speak a word of this or we’ll
run him over for real next time and picks him up and plants him on the sidewalk and we drove off…..

Of course this did not put me off further experiences with inhalants, and the experiences got far
weirder and more stressful. Was probably huffing gas, paint, or ether once or twice a week for
maybe 6 months, and continued to occasionally use computer duster for another 6 months as we’d
convinced ourselves it was cleaner, whether or not that is the case...I began to think about how to
express some of the stranger chemical experiences recently after a discussion about putting
together a book about bad trips. I’ve had more than my fair share, and a lot of them involve
drugs that aren’t anywhere near psychedelics, unknown research chems, chems that are typically
incredible harmful to humans and not intended to be anywhere near our insides...I guess I feel it
necessary to record these experiences and experiments for several as-yet-unknown reasons.

Posterity? :D

Thought what better place to store these particular ramblings than here, where no one reads?

Furthering Negative Limitations (notes)

//Trying to get back in the habit of posting here....even if only a place to keep the occasional note, such as this one for the Thornscape essay.//

When identity (executive synchronic function) is removed or blunted forcibly, there can be an instinctive
fightback against this loss (which is not dangerous or problematic on its own, but only relative to certain
mental outlooks that privilege the Self as Center).

This fight itself (in brain terms: pathologically persistent search functions operating on zero data/an
empty frame of reference OR the pathological addition of new data to a frame that is in the process of
being emptied or broken) generates new identity-frames that temporally extend the experience of
dissociation. This can be extended toward a limit where, when we reach a point at which “bare” identity
is generated out of “nothing”, every glimpse of a frameless state autogenerates a new frame that
emerges directly into a state of autodeconstruction. This oscillation prevents a “clean” experience of
the frameless void-state/mors mystica, and prolonged exposure to this oscillation can generate
extreme anxiety, depression, various and sundry negative or painful brain states (this can resemble
tinnitus - depending on certain environmental factors, you can actually *hear* the oscillation).

This can last indefinitely because every recovery attempt generates movement away from the
frameless space, leading to a state in which the identity only remains insofar as it is connected to loss
or pain or whatever is removing the frames - i.e. a negative bias against frame-removal will result in
the pain of breaking frames, fear of lost frames, grasping at new frames, etc; while a positive bias
toward frame-removal will experience negativity in the sense of being unable to speed up the removal
without generating new frames, fear of being unable to prevent the generation of new frames,
grasping at nothingness, etc.

His Brain was Infected by Devils: Tinnitus as Master Sound, Waveguide to the Frameless State

/// ...Another trait the flat tone. No life. Same flat tone at all times.
For its affirmations. For its negations. For its interrogations.
For its exclamations. For its imperations. Same flat tone. You were once.
You were never. Were you ever? Oh never to have been! Be again. Same flat tone...

Samuel Beckett -- Company ///

Thornscape: Disidentification and Warding at the Limit of Negative Identity

One day I might come back and put the actual essay here ;)

sources:


https://seminalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/dehors
https://seminalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-black-metal-mixtape
http://www.transart.org/wp-content/uploads/group-documents/126/1389741131-Kafka_The_Burrow_Part1.pdf
https://markovsoroka.bandcamp.com/album/tchornobog
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2905935?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm

//The formal refusal of success and circulation in the mainstream by underground artists radicalizes itself towards a desired invisibility. But one which has to be visible as an invisibility.....Works such as Les legions noire's catalog, aka Mortuário’s C32 tape, dehors’ anonymous productions testify to this insistence in banging one’s head against the ontological category of art. But is it a futile gesture? - JP Caron//

Let this also serve as a soft notice for upcoming sequel to Void Front Press' book Sustain//Decay, titled ATTACK! probably due out this summer, featuring work by Absentology, German Sierra, Xenovenomism squad B Konior/Y Granata, JP Caron, Owen Coggins and others.