Topo-twitterous Archivalattice

12/1 Twitter cuts rotating around topologic's connections to neuronal manipulation vis a vis protogeometric linguistics, deontology, oppositional dynamics.


https://storify.com/JrGothDetective/topo-sorcerous-hyperbolic-dreamery

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic572189.files/Tongyan_Lin_Lattice_gauge_theory.pdf

https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01988

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/group-actions-ii-the-orbit-stabilizer-theorem/

https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.00036

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283268683_OUR_THOUGHTS_FOLLOW_A_DONUT-LIKE_TRAJECTORY_IN_BRAIN

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/corfield/phorem.html

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11787-009-0003-4

https://oppositionalgeometryblog.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/the-aristotelian-pq-lattices-of-og/



UPDATE: go ahead and add the entirety of www.qualiacomputing.com to this list.

to asymptotically approach and topologically reveal the Real

Austin Osman Spare - The Book of Automatic Drawings

//for what remains of the representable if the object is to evade//

//representation? what remains is to represent the conditions of this evasion.//

//Samuel Beckett//

(that's a link -> Algorithmic Reduction of Psychedelic States - Andres Gomex Emilsson, Qualia Computing )

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//Symmetry detection can be (and typically is) recursively applied to previously detected symmetry bundles. A given symmetry bundle is a set of n-dimensional symmetry planes (lines, hyperplanes, etc.) for which the qualities of the experience surrounding this bundle obey the symmetry constraints imposed by these planes. The planes can create mirror, rotational or oblique symmetry. Each symmetry bundle is capable of establishing a merging relationship with another symmetry bundle. These relationships are fleeting, but they influence the evolution of the relative position of each plane of symmetry. When x symmetry planes are in a merging relationship, one’s mind tries to re-arrange them (often using drifting) to create a symmetrical arrangement of these x symmetry planes. To do so, the mind detects one (or several) more symmetry planes, along which the previously-existing symmetry planes are made to conform, to organize in a symmetrical way (mirror, rotational, translational or otherwise). There is an irresistible subjective pull towards those higher levels of symmetry. The direction of highest symmetry and meta-symmetry feels blissful, interesting, mind-expanding, and awe-producing.

If one meditates in a sensorially-minimized room during a psychedelic experience while being aware that one’s symmetry detection threshold has been lowered by the substance, one can recursively re-apply this effect to produce all kinds of complex mathematical structures in one’s mind.

In the future, perhaps at a Super-Shulgin Academy, people will explore and compare the various states of consciousness that exhibit peak symmetry. These states would be the result of iteratively applying symmetry detection, amplification and re-arrangement. We would see fractals, tessellations, graphs and higher dimensional projections. Which one of these experiences contains the highest degree of inter-connectivity? And if psychedelic symmetry is somehow related to conscious bliss, which experience of symmetry is human peak bliss?//

further mirror mazery

(Whatever you do, don't listen to the sound)

//When the entire brain is opened into this involute infinity of zero-input, all memory is "viewed" from a higher spatial dimension, providing the god's-eye, rhizomatic observer-less point of view on the librarynth of Self/Knowledge, exposing its construction - exposing zero, the gap, as the stable centrality supporting the infinitely generative multidimensionality of consciousness. In laying zero as this mobile foundationless foundation, the central gap whose tendrils extend out infinitely as every gap, pre- post- and during Being is shown to be interconnected, Ø proves hyperscalar, dimensionless, rather than simply a starting point or as some abstract linear position eternally pre-beginning and out of range of phenomenal experience. Zero becomes interchangeable with the Sartrean perfect witness as this tracking-of-emptiness becomes a permanent ungrounding process of divorcing from preconceived ideals and habits - a mechanism for practicing the "undocking," so to speak, from ideology, culture, or self. A precision nihilism at the level of neural correlates to sense perception - where "passive nihilism is zero religion, active nihilism is the religion of zero."27 This reconfiguration easily overturns dualisms that would suggest anything other than Ø=∞, and indexes again that Ø represents a fundamental field of creative relation interpenetrating all things, as darkness has always been prior to light. - me, Proto-neuronihilism //

In keeping with my recycling tradition......

UPDATE APRIL 3RD////cleaned up what I had posted and trimmed 2k words off....here is the final version of the talk I gave yesterday/////

[[this is definitely more exploration than theory, or god forbid a solution to anyone else’s theory necessarily (pause for audience laughter) and I at least tried to significantly edit down the much heavier use of neuroterminology this paper originally utilized but I probably still use an obnoxious amount of acronyms in order to streamline...should’ve made handouts. This actually interlocks in some interesting ways with the previous talk, here goes...//////

In Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, the title refers to a category-theoretical approach to theology that attempts cross-modal alignments of spiritual thought in order to root out structural and metaphysical similarities. Also extensively outlined by Joseph Campbell in his cycle of works known as the Monomyth, 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 these processes of syncretism. These works of comparative religion map an organization of many disparate spiritual threads that when linked to a historical account of each tradition's formation, schisms, and evolutions expose a remarkable set of commonalities. While researching methods of fine-tuning this approach I was struck particularly by the fact that these commonalities roughly outlined the set of practices often termed mysticism. An underground of highly idiosyncratic revolts against the individual practitioner's culture and ideology, mysticism universalizes a rebellion of nature and knowledge against authority, privilege, and dogma – this thread seems to spontaneously emerge anywhere cultural repression and stagnation is found and exhibits extreme similarities regardless of the conceptual, spatial, or temporal distance between origins and practitioners. In this talk I hope to present an opening case for mysticism to be naturalized as not an ideology or subset thereof, but rather an unorganised umbrella term for a set of experimental methods of which a major function seems to be to inject noise into certain types of networks and models to systematically test for stability and recalibrate relationships toward and among them. These types include, at least, social and neural networks; the self- and world-models.

In order to place mysticism in an empirical light, consideration of a neuroscientifically-sound infrastructure is imperative. Not only is it necessary to examine the cognitive substrate, but even when all we ever speak of is hallucination or belief, we can with ease re-frame the entirety of the work in terms of common hallucination, common neural effects, common patterns of neural activation. Whether or not the sum total of the field known as mysticism is entirely a fiction produced by the brain in psychosis in fact matters little in a study of why and how the brain would or could produce the phantasmic displays that are the hallmark of the mystical experience and what that means for thought as a tool, while this adjustment of depth has also drawn the metafictional eyes of such creators as Borges and Bill Burroughs, Jim Jarmusch and James Joyce toward this intersection of theology and neuroscience as the ability and motives for parsing the real from the virtual; and intentionally riding, obscuring, or breaking that boundary in a creative or imaginative action become recurrent themes in the kind of thought under the microscope, potentially opening a great deal of room for novel psychoanalytic and artistic approaches to cognition. Dismantling some preconceived notions and glossing over some important features of the brain will lead into an examination of a tool of marked importance in bridging these gaps, psilocybin mushrooms, as current psilocybin research profoundly illuminates the possibilities of altered states of consciousness.

Phenoumenological reports throughout history reflect the tight parallels between these various states, from nuns in the Dark Ages and ancient Indian monastics to postmodern philosophers and psychonauts to the chemical sages of the sixties. The overwhelming breadth of similarity across experiences and traditions is the source material for literally hundredsof books and papers, so in the interest of brevity I will refrain from a philology of reports, rather sketching a neurological demonstration of the extent of the simulational capabilities of the brain.

//“Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew – he remembered – as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.” -William Gibson, Neuromancer//

Descartes wrote prolifically on the pineal gland, referring to it with the florid title “the principal seat of the rational soul”, the sensus communis, and making several assumptions and speculations about its function as the pivot point, the fulcrum, between the mind and the body. Despite his inaccuracy even in light of the study of the brain in the 1600s, these assumptions have plagued and dogged both mystical and theoretical thinking ever since, having the side-effect of obscuring simpler solutions to the problem of consciousness in a few hundred years of misguided dualism. Descartes inability to find any other brain component that was not “double” led him to believe that the pineal gland was the point at which the split perceptions of the paired nostrils, eyes, and ears were unified with the blood from the body - the place where thought was formed from the “pneumatic pressure” of the incoming unifications of external senses flowing into the gland.

In Descartes' description of the role of the pineal gland, the pattern in which the animal spirits flow from the pineal gland was a crucial notion. His explanation of perception relied on the idea that the nerves are hollow tubes filled with animal spirits. He suggested that they contain small fibers or threads which connect the sense organs with valves in the walls of the ventricles of the brain. When the sensory organs are stimulated, parts of them are set in motion. These parts then begin to pull on the small fibers in the nerves, with the result that the valves with which these fibers are connected are pulled open, some of the animal spirits in the pressurized ventricles escape, and imprint images of the sensory stimulus on the surface of the pineal gland. The modern student of neurobiology would immediately recognize these proposed functions as, in fact, primitive conceptualizations of the functions of the thalamus.

The thalamus may be thought of as a kind of central hub of information that acts as a relay between different subcortical areas and the cerebral cortex. In particular, every sensory system (with the exception of the olfactory system) includes a thalamic nucleus that receives sensory signals and sends them to the associated cortical area. For the visual system, for example, inputs from the retina are sent to the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus, which in turn projects to the visual cortex. Each of these sensory relay areas receive strong feedback connections from the cerebral cortex: in the thalamus one finds extraordinarily short routes from anywhere in the brain to anywhere else.

In other words, in an esoteric line of thought based on correspondences with the procreative process, the “egg” (thalamus) is continually being “seeded” or “fertilised” by incoming signal, growing rhizomic patterns of thought and motion that reflect off the cortex, re-seeding the egg. This feedback looping reentrant re-generative re-creation in the thalamus is the true pinion, the mirroring axis at the zero-point of consciousness between the External and the Inner worlds. So not only is the thalamus the major sensory and motor relay nucleus in the brain; it is our “central control box” and is our interface with the reality around us. In other words, it acts like a hub of a wheel. When any part of the neocortex – one “spoke” of the “wheel” – communicates with another; it does so via the thalamus – being the centre of the sphere. If there were anything in the physical body that could represent the centre of consciousness referred to by concepts like soul or mind, it would be the ephemeral and transient electrochemical output of the thalamus at the centre of the brain.

The thalamus is in a unique position to not only perform these intensive sorting and organizing computations on incoming signal and respond to high-level cognitive feedback, but also to engage features of the hypothalamus’ regulation of the endocrine system. A particular feature that, to a great extent, seems to contribute to the pineal gland’s notoriety among the fringe, is the role of the pineal gland in sleep cycles and certain circadian rhythms. The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is a zone of neurons situated directly above the optic chiasm, the X-shaped structure formed at the point where the two optic nerves cross over each other. When environmental light levels change, this information is relayed throughout the SCN, the SCN transmits this information to the hypothalamus, which in turn modifies the activity of the endocrine system, particularly in the generation of melatonin. This synthesis of melatonin out of stored serotonin in the pineal gland is stimulated by darkness and inhibited by light, entraining its rhythm to the 24-hour cycle in nature. Many aspects of mammalian behavior and physiology show circadian rhythmicity, including sleep, physical activity, alertness, hormone levels, body temperature, immune function, and digestive activity. The SCN coordinates these rhythms across the body by synchronizing "slave oscillators" of hormone and neurotransmitter release.

The outer cortical layer of the brain, the "Default Mode Network" (DMN), is the part of the brain concerned with self-reference and introspection, the subjective perspective. So-named in reference to the “default” resting mode of the brain, the DMN is a system that is active during times of passive inactivity, day-dreaming, and during the accessing of autobiographical information and reflection on current emotional states - whether these be one’s own emotions or during the consideration of others’ emotions. Moral reasoning, social evaluations and categorizations, imagining the future and detailed memory recall of the past, and narrative comprehension are all activities that typically result in DMN activation.

Studies have shown that the default mode network becomes activated within fractions of a second after subjects finish a task, and deactivates during external goal-oriented tasks such as visual attention or working memory “global workbench” tasks, thus leading some to label the network as task-negative. On the other hand, the “Task-Positive Network” (TPN) of the brain is a system of regions that activate in the face of a task or event requiring active awareness. During performance of attention-intensive tasks, structures comprising the task-positive network are characterized by activation. In contrast, default mode network structures are characterized by decreased activity. In normal waking consciousness these networks are competitive in metabolic terms: when one turns up, the other turns down. However, when the tasks are external goal-oriented tasks that are known to be a role of the DMN, such as social working memory or an autobiographical task, the DMN is positively activated with the task and correlates with other networks such as those that drive the executive functions (also known as cognitive control and the supervisory attentional system), which are terms for the regulation and control of cognitive processes, including working memory, reasoning, flexibility, and problem solving, planning and execution.

That thalamocortical neuronal projections terminate in the outer cortical layer (also known as Layer V) before being reflected back into the thalamus in feedbacking control loops symbolically solidifies the DMN as a kind of mirror in which the thalamus perceives itself and its incoming signal, using this perception to stage adjustments to signal-reception and distribution. It is this universe of self-reflective functionality that leads the DMN to be considered analogous to the ego.

Some time ago, Walsh (2003a,b) proposed in a theory of magnitude (ATOM) that commonalities between time, space, number, size, speed and other magnitudes were to be found in the parietal cortex because of the need to learn about the environment through motor interactions and therefore to encode these variables for action. The major points and predictions of ATOM take aim at, and the vast depth of research agrees with, the suggestion that different magnitudes originated from a single developmental algorithm for more than–less than|closer-further away distinctions of any kind of stuff in the external world. The development of magnitude processing proceeds by interactions with the environment and is therefore closely linked with the motor reaching, grasping and manipulating of objects. It was further suggested that the emergence of our ability to manipulate discrete quantities evolved from our abilities with the perception of continuous quantities.

//Philosophy’s first gesture, following Sellars, is to disturb the apparent natural equilibrial balance between the subject and the world and by doing so, bring about the possibility of differentiating reality from the world of appearances. -Reza Negarestani, What Philosophy Does to the Mind//

When we, later in life, learn about number, the neurons with capacity to represent quantity are those that have information about the continuous variables learned about motorically. Thus, the neuronal scaling mechanisms used for dimensions with action-relevant magnitude information will be co-opted in development for the scaling of number.

//Mathematical form is the first reflection and most pure image of our subjective activity. Then follows number, having a close relation to linear conception. Hence mathematical form with number supplies the fittest system of symbols for orderly representation of the spiritual evolution of life, plane after plane. Or, as Philo says, “Number is the mediator between the corporeal and the incorporeal.” - Betts, Geometrical Psychology//

It is an interesting set of speculations that arise from the possibility that intensity may be one of the aforementioned magnitudes. We could then consider the fact that the amygdala responds to the intensity of emotional stimuli regardless of whether we feel them to be positive or negative, thus driving the amplitude of the thalamic output signal and allowing us to begin to construct a model of Thalamocortical Oscillation (TCO).

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Interwoven in this proto-cybernetic module-mesh of systems inside systems on networks inside of networks, sensorial and cognitive signaling is restricted to DMN-mediated channels by an equally complex array of hubs that also function as filters of which the thalamus is the largest and first in the signal chain, situated as it is on top of the brainstem and in the primary loci of the network. Forming a second tier of interorganisational mapping, the outer layer of the thalamus, known as the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN), plays a pivotal role in dynamic attention by controlling the synchronization of thalamic output. The TRN is thus viewed as an additional networking filter that regulates what incoming information rises to conscious perception and attention. One could say that each incoming connection projects a kind of topographic map onto the TRN, and these are coarsely overlapped to form cross-modal or unitary conscious awareness. As the higher-order relay signals from the associated cortices run cumulatively through the relevant thalamocortical loops, conscious awareness becomes more refined and sophisticated. The longer one attends to an object of thought, the more detailed its mapping - regardless of depth of the feeling of insight.

TCO is loosely defined as the manifold high-dimensional path that neurochemical signaling takes from sensory input collation, synchronization, and distribution by the thalamus to higher cognitive processing, representation, and feedback in the cortex, in addition to the frequency at which this path is stimulated by thalamic output measured in cycles per second. TCO frequency is roughly correlative to the wakefulness and mood of the entity, with low frequency oscillations diving down through relaxation to hypnagogic states and finally unconscious states like sleep; and higher frequencies more associated with active task-oriented focus and anxiety. The path the signal takes is restricted by the top-down constraints imposed by the default network and the bottom-up inhibitory restrictions of the TRN and these two systems' combined attentional navigation of any number of high-dimensional neuronal maps that represent the active sensory stimulation, short-term memory, instincts, enculturation, and education of the subject as heterarchical supervening tiers overlaying but functionally distinct from the near-infinitely enfolded strata of raw sensory data encoded in deep memory. All the thalamic pathways in fact constitute a unified and cyclic oscillatory circuit that is topographically organized, and the brain is made up of several subcomponents that operate as oscillators injecting energy into this incredibly complex waveform at various points in the signal chain. The harmonic linkage - the synchrony - of these oscillators (that are roughly defined as any neural network that exhibits defined synchrony among its constituent neurons) with the driving feedback-wave of the DMN is both modulated and synchronized through the thalamus and particularly by the self-referential enclosed feedback and feedforward monitoring of the TRN. The strength of the TCO signal seems to be dependent upon the strength of the amygdala’s measurement of and subsequent oscillation upon the primary input signal, with many types of disorders stemming directly from perturbations of this process.

Several types of input, chemical and otherwise, are notable for their ability to drive or perturb the stable state of Default Mode-modulated awareness.This is expressed in the form of an amplification of amygdalic signal strength combined with the simulation of multiple geometric perspectives on the neuronal representations of the object or event in these states, via the bifurcation of the reticular nuclei's synchronizing function that if maintained progressively deepens an interruption of external reality with dreamlike components that are essentially fragments of memories and stored symbolism related to concepts and objects under perceptual consideration. The Eastern conception of "observing the observer" is realized in the form of a breaking free of a discrete thalamocortical circuit that observes or represents the main circuit and attempts to track it. Further bifurcation is expressed in "tracers" and the recursion of selves in the hallucination as each bifurcation tracks the one before it. The majority of these inputs and programs can be overdriven to the point of collapsing the unifying functioning of the DMN, which is marked as the point of disconnection or ego death - at which stage these various oscillators break free of modulation by the driving wave, reset to zero, and subsequently individually home in on the most energy-efficient local driver - generally the strongest periodic environmental stimuli. Music, art, significant and insignificant objects or entities alike, environmental and social cues of all kinds and even individual thoughts that arise of their own accord can pointedly and commandingly "snap" attention onto themselves and forcefully drive heavily-ramifying, fast-bifurcating mental activity.  In other words one might consider this the true meaning and expression of a) imagination: immersive multidimensional volitional projection of stored neural content into active, attentional, felt-sensory space; and b) enlightenment: the ongoing process of modulating the self-circuit to match the world-circuit in terms of thalamocortical representations of each being geometrically aligned in their projection onto the reticular nuclei. This knowledge seems to freshly illuminate the infamous Terence McKenna trope "5 grams in silent darkness," suggesting that McKenna was offering up a blueprint for a psychedelic harmonization with a sensory-null environment, a harmonization with Nothing. //The void-plane touched at zero-intensity// as Nick Land describes it, wherein the typical awareness of self is cognitively lost in darkness and the dreamlike fragments of perception that obscure and overcode external reality are themselves of darkness, of nothing – generating a completely clear field for this projection.

Using these facts, one could classify the world-simulation of a subject, external shared consensus reality, as a map of all calculations the brain has actually engaged in or anticipates during waking states, or every path thalamic signalling has ever taken, regardless of the symbolic meaning of the calculations. The mythological concept “underworld” or the psychoanalytic concept “unconscious”, then, is the total phase space of simulational possibility, expressed in terms of the set of every possible combination of neuronal and synaptic activation and synchrony, even those that are highly unlikely. This is in a non-trivial sense analogous in a way to what Quentin Meillasoux calls “Hyperchaos” or what some called Brahma and generates the foundational components necessary to sharpen understanding of such types of experience as dreaming, hallucination, schizophrenia, or even astral travel as various methods or experiences of bringing non-conscious signalling into conscious attention. The Jungian archetypes, going deeper, could then be theoretically mapped as dynamic phase spaces, vectors, steady states, circuits, or transformations of and within this waveform system, potentially leading to a sort of Archetypal Category Theory or even a Homotopy Archetype Theory forged in the complex graph-network-topological neural geometry offered by the brain via thalamic projection and oscillation.

Through observing the effects of psilocybin, whose molecular structure is nearly identical to serotonin, we discover that these hub/filter structures are progressively relaxed by these chemicals, wherein they cease directing and filtering sensory input and reflection on these inputs into the "proper" channels for basic cognition and begin distributing the signals more freely, triggering various types of constructive synesthetic responses - responses in which a stacking of a single perceptual quality occurs across multiple sensory cortexes, giving an innate awareness of the novel condition, as in the sudden simultaneous hearing, tasting, and smelling of red. Conversely, physical and psychological stress and sickness cause the body to release cortisol and adrenaline (both interfere with serotonin uptake) which in exceptional cases can trigger a strangely mirrored version of synesthesia, an improper signaling pattern leading to what I’ve elsewhere termed ‘constrictive synesthesia’, wherein the subject can no longer successfully interpret incoming signals due to their being diverted from their usual paths into “inappropriate” regions, splintering or fracturing, or being washed out by transient noise in the system. This results in a confusing and disorienting blurring and interference between and of the senses as it is precisely in the synchrony of neural firing that we find the cohesive binding of disparate signals into the Here and Now. Several major types of "system-overlap" are common in these states, such as the well-known five senses in nearly any combination, sensorial representations of active self-reflection, emotion, memory and the sense of time, facial recognition and spatial awareness, even the sense of intensity - with innocuous objects being treated with vast symbolic relevance, or sentimental objects being completely drained of meaning.

Anecdotal evidence across mystical and psychedelic literature combined with personal research suggests to me that the amount of visual brightness or light or color intensity triggered by a perception in these states may be correlative to the novelty of a signal pattern. My theory is that the truly novel perception or set of perceptions, when diverted through the memory in the synesthetic state, triggers a neuronal map of representations that include the sun, as the "tutelary genius of universal vegetation" is the most easily "visualized" common symbol of an origin or first cause. This causes incredibly intense glowing patterns, intensified further by progressively novel insights as perceptions increasingly ramify. As the visionary state deepens, this trajectory of expansion continues as a buildup of symbolism from whatever myth and religion is most represented in memory becomes activated in the thoughtstream as if the memory and the DMN collaborate in an attempt to integrate this new experience by comparison, starting at the "beginning", the least energy-intensive, or the subject’s most basic foundational conceptions - as if the search for any way to represent the new stimuli patterns in active consciousness came up linguistically and logically empty, forcing the growth of utterly novel symbolic representations generated from fragments of stored symbolism. This could explain why visions of god, angels, aliens, infernals, and all manner of oddities show up even in primitive stages of these experiences, often seeming to perceptibly connect primary sensorial components with the mythological convictions held by the subject. Conversely, the perceptible blackening or blurring of perceptions within (at least) the audiovisual field in these modes of non-ordinary reality, while sometimes being accidentally perceived as a feature of the object or representation in question or a defect of perception itself, seems to be representative of the distance between perception and reflection, i.e.: how much “signal decay” or filtering occurs between direct sense input and attentive perception. While this in no way gives novel information to the subject, it freely exposes the dimensions of the rift between Thought and Being. As this rift is immeasurably vast, the warpings and wildings of perception in even the lowest regions of the psychedelic state are just as vast.

The marvels and mundanities of existence become equally wondrous or fearful in these states because they do not automatically get swept into pre-formed ontologies and channels of thought. This often gives the impression that everything around is equally profound or worthy of reverence. Unlike subjects suffering from psychotic or psychophysical disorders, however, subjects who experience drug-induced synesthesia can often immediately recognize the nonphysical nature of their perceptual disturbances with a rudimentary application of attention, which I posit stems from the constructivity of this variety of synesthesia. That individual phenomenal properties -move together- give the lie to perceptions that span multiple senses, and give us a system of comparison to tell false perceptions from true. When the signaling is constricted, erratic, or when two signals interfere with one another there seems to be a much greater difficulty in assessing the subjective nature of these hallucinations. At many levels of the psychedelic experience each individual sensory input is perceived as a separate “channel” and their collation into ordinary reality itself is also perceived as its own individual channel. Without this knowledge, the many strands and strings of inputs are often seen simply as beautiful chaos.

//We now know that only a fraction of the estimated 38,000 trillion operations per second processed by the brain finds its way to consciousness. This means that experience, all experience, is profoundly privative, a simplistic caricature of otherwise breathtakingly complex processes...The metabolic costs associated with neural processing and the sheer evolutionary youth of human consciousness suggest that experience should be severely blinkered: synoptic or ‘low resolution’ in some respects, perhaps, but thoroughly fictitious otherwise. - RS Bakker, 3lb. Brain//

This basic pendular interplay between polarities of blackening and brightening, between continuous and discrete, between equilibrium and disturbance, generates two major effects that are explicated in great detail in several reports that expose the singularity of the psychedelic and the mystical. One, as everything seems to become altered in some way, a fear or anxiety about nothing being true or known occurs - the ungrounding; second, the subject feels an ecstatic feeling of awe at the true size and complexity of the mysterious. This second effect relaxes the first as a desire to understand that transcends the assumption of never understanding, but that these positions can freely overlap and shift also results in kaleidoscopic physical sensations and visual effects as the connections between the brain and the autonomic nervous system are assaulted with the electrochemical fallout of these extreme and vacillating emotions. In this stage is where the most frequent divergences into "bad trips" occur as the emotions and feelings evoked feel tremendously physical and seem to operate similar to feedback looping, wherein a phenomenal state 'speeds up' and deepens as it is focused upon.

Deeper into this chemical integration, a visual synthesis of a stored abstract view of human biology with the possibilities of non-existence develops that seems to be related to a de-linking or muting of self-reflective capabilities as the DMN begins to lose its top-down control over the memory and historical narrative. This combined synthesis/breakdown gives us a glimpse of the "intuitive mapping protocol" of memory and spatial determination, often seen as the classic visual geometry of the psychedelic. The visualisations caused by the emergence of usually unconscious processes into active cognition exposes the calculatory procedures that are used to construct the visible simulation of reality, and is equivalent to a set or stack of subjective wiring diagrams that is likely isomorphic with the topographical maps projected onto the reticular nuclei. When inner maps are overlaid on incoming sensation, these diagrams explicitly show how incorrectly we assimilate perceived data, as the geometry of accurate perception aligns with that of accurate cognitive interpretation or recognition, and the mystical state seems to be the set of practices that expose this internal balancing act itself to cognition. Realization of this stability-generating mechanism is felt first in connection with the conceptualised difference between external things and the inner sphere, and if sustained is gradually perceived more and more as the point of balance between the world-model and self-model. This balance comes to be aligned with attention as one naturally finds themselves working through repetition of a homotopic process of unifying transits, until finally a concept comparable to the undifferentiated Truth of Spinozan Substance is perceived as the only possible reality. These processes can be tracked to a high degree and in fact lend themselves to this tracking, as not only do they seem to generate a kind of gravity like a strange attractor but they can also be profoundly beautiful and otherworldly, and thus draw the attention away from the individual self-model and toward this intuitive apperception of continuity with the world-model.

Imagining the visual cortex as a screen and perception as the video source, we can trace the buildup of perceptual feedback in a monotonic fashion in order to both remain aware of shared reality and follow this progression of ramification and bifurcation toward the near-infinite variety of sense data that is generally filtered out by active consciousness. Huxley's Pure Interval, is in this regard, analogous to the attention inhabiting the position within this visual feedback loop where all incoming perceptions and internal images are "in phase" with each other and stable in all perceivable dimensions, which seems to have the effect of fully unleashing totalized memory output into the thoughtstream, temporarily overcoding the solitary self-model with sensory representations of the isomorphisms between the self and the world. At this moment of self-loss, a seemingly supra-physical, sensorially apparent, boundary is crossed and every sense input in addition to the thought stream are activated in every component structure of the physical brain and synesthesia becomes effectively maximal. Whether virtual or actual, every point in the brain becomes electrochemically connected to every other point in the brain, a dynamic synchrony slaved to incoming sensation which seems to posit a middle way between free will and determinism. This experience is often recalled as a feeling of connectedness to all lifeforms, of "everything is everything" - a complete breakdown of the subject-object dynamic as the vast array and complexity of the sense-stream merges with the thoughtstream and completely overwhelms any ability to recognize the Self. Suddenly, input and output are perceived simultaneously across all senses. When this barrier has been passed, the subject ceases to perceive images from the exterior world, being left only with their symbolic representations. According to Julius Evola, //if one is able to orient at all without the direct support of these images, they will find themselves in a state of reverie, and then in the dream state, in which the energization of the imaginary activity, dissociated from the external senses, is accompanied by further reduction and emptying of consciousness of Self…when that alienation increases…consciousness is abolished. Farther beyond lie trance, lethargy, and the cataleptic state. Farther still, when the separation is complete, one enters into a state of apparent death.//

A number of normally autonomous brain networks become essentially continuous under the influence of serotonin or psilocybin not by virtue of their being brought to a defined or definable state of action, but by flattening the pendular motion between the two larger arrays, effectively bringing them together into a synchronized unit. We see the principle of the 2nd law of thermodynamics in an expansion toward entropy – as Robin Carhart-Harris says, //in a way, we have a model of brain death in the psychedelic state.//

//...only a non-trivial and systematic account of synthesis between local and contingently posited contexts of the meaningless sign can asymptotically reconstruct the scope of the free sign. The eternal, in the same vein, must be thought through schemata by which it expresses itself in one way or another. A comprehensive combination of these schemata constitutes the map of indivisible nature. The map in turn brings into focus general approaches, perspectives, and navigational schemes by which it can be comprehensively examined. In other words, the map provides us with alternative navigational schemes through which the eternal in all its modes can be asymptotically approached. -Reza, Figure of the Cyclone//

The labyrinth archetype, an oft-utilized metaphor for being lost in the hyper-intricate sum total of self and life was frequently invoked in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, notably in the short story Library of Babel. Borges writes //The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God. Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.// Within the recording|reflective structure of the brain, the acknowledgement of the simulation as infinite, and of the direct perception of this infinitude as interchangeable with the mystic's revelations of God. The direct somatic experience of the perceptual paradoxa of the logical possibilities in “the simulation of an impossible perspective.”

This story is a topopoetic revelation of what is known to the Buddhists as samadhi or satori, terms for the cessation of subject/object|time/eternity dualisms which coincides sharply with the deactivation or destabilization of the default mode’s interjection into the synchronisation function of the thalamus - the sudden disappearance of the walls of the labyrinth as perspective explodes onto an //immanent self-experience, a no-body’s experience of no-thing (G. Catren)// for the first time is the mystic's opening glimpse of the lacerating and paradoxical fullness of ØEmptiness and initiation into what G. Catren calls the pleromatica, or the simultaneous navigation of the overlaid oceans of inner and outer existence. This can be achieved through many practices, from drugs to system shock and sickness to shikan taza or even the monotonic ritualized formalisms of mathematics, and forms a major milestone of spiritual practice as the phenomenological proof of the variability and decomposability of the boundaries between self and other, self and world, fiction and mind. While varying wildly in duration and content these experiences can be progressively sustained or amplified through repetitive and monotonic “conceptual or environmental droning” and focusing rituals such as certain arts and musics, mantras, yogas, and meditations. Zen, in fact seems to be an entire life-philosophy designed to teach one to achieve and maintain satori during all phases of life by strength of will alone.

A defining feature of the mystical experience that runs parallel to the loss of self is the loss of time, the strange amplification of time-sense, a Borgesian circular refutation that fractures the arrow of time into gravitational waves pulsing in/out from/toward the immanent field. When the disconnection occurs as a result of the acceleration or amplification of the oscillatory signal to a point of instability and collapse, the strobing high-speed fractalising of time-sense expressed in ecstatic conditions and states of heightened perception and effortless performance emerges. On the other hand the deceleration of input to the null state causes the thalamic frames of signal-synchronization to “hang” and widen to encompass more and more signal, leading to the standing-wave of total signal-saturation and experiences of timelessness, immanence, interpenetration, interconnection, and void - the nunc stans, the standing Now of Eternity. A secret among secrets is the simultaneity of maximised and minimised signal : both equally engender the seemingly paradoxical state of pure synchronisation of the internal with the external - the state of the self-model being coterminous with the world-model due to maximal signal-synchrony.

This is universally expressed as an experience of the death of the self-model or ego, a sustained breaking of the correlationist circle, and an immediate manifestation of the trappings of death in several powerfully analogous and metonymous forms, as death seems to be the most readily available, most powerful, and most distinctly coherent symbolic representation of the loss of self across literature, media, and history perhaps both despite and because of its ineffability. Such that when the self is cognitionally "lost" the entire death-symbolic memory repertoire activates, pressing an emergent idea of death and loss to the front of the imagination and forcing it to construct a conceptual representation that is then dumped unceremoniously into the senses. As the Self expects to feel the loss for and of itself, the expected sorrow of death never touches the Perception, having been split from the self-image. Instead, the feeling of hyperconnectedness via synesthetic response persists despite the perception of the death of the "I", lending it rather a significantly positive emotionally integrated component as the Perception is surprised and in awe of witnessing itself surviving a death-experience by virtue of remaining in this connected, aware state. In summation, one might suggest with some confidence that it is possible to neuronally simulate the bifurcation of perspective, such that one perspective may symbolically witness the “death” of another in simulated space.

In the image titled 'Infinity' William S. Burroughs used a system of mirror and collage to combine every photograph he had thus far taken into one image, crystallizing this concept of aligning mappings in a richly resonant, recursive, mirror-mandala. An essay titled Virtual Mirrors in Solid Time finds author Genesis P-Orridge analysing a set of artworks by mystic Austin Osman Spare and Burroughs’ longtime friend and collaborator Brion Gysin, judging the art to be “mystical oscillators”: objects crafted with the purpose of driving a desired mental state in a viewer. Art designed to trigger specific states of consciousness, transmitted via the open emotional conduit art generates in a receptive viewer. As much as the essay frames itself between magic and mysticism, the essay recursively reflects on unexplored details of the gap between art's emotional resonance and neuroscientific attempts to quantify such resonance. Beyond a simple affective reaction into the direct transmission of the encoded experience via highly compressed thoughtform-triggers, the essay itself is what is called an autocommentary - a commentary on a mystical treatise that is itself a mystical treatise - reflecting this triggering system back at itself and finding a spiralling harmonic resonance in the re-presentation of these art works that further entrenches and expands on the concepts under scrutiny. The concept in this case is the structural encoding of subjective experience into art - it tells a story about the way in which these works tell their stories. This metaprocess we believe mirrors the process of encoding sensory input into memory – a topological theory of axon guidance, a theory that the visionary artist's encoding of actual brain state information into a piece of art is significantly more dense or "complete" than any traditional models of art give it credit for, often approaching lossless transfer of a subjective moment with a precision that transcends even what we already expect from art.Art as a mode of rational thought that communicates technical details of the creative process itself. One might progress an idea of the archetype of the mirror: engaged whenever a work is a sufficiently authentic rendering, however symbolic, of the artist’s mental state: a braided biographical and symbolic authenticity that reflects the participant and organizes the art, both in terms of the act of its creation and the viewer’s participation, into a ritual form of time-independent entertwined meditation on the mental state being depicted. Burroughs’ photography was designed to trigger affectations of specific memories for himself, external memory storage that would emanate from - in a sense, be 'always on' - and become recursively sharpened by the object of art, a mirroring feedback loop that was effectively a reification process for memory, a cartobiographical extension of his experience. This “technology” is exceedingly reminiscent of the function of the ars memoriae made famous by Giordano Bruno. In both of their “recordings” evidence for this fracturing of attention into multiple points of entry into signal measurement that generates a multiharmonic/synaesthetic resonance with local environmental drivers - our speculation is that 'Infinity' was a recording of the self-less empty state of samadhi, an apparently conscious state of pure bifurcation into homogenous signal that is synonymous with entropy and brain-death, and was generated by a desire to create an energy-efficient recall method for this experience that is notoriously difficult to describe.

what is

Smashing together thoughts for the introductory chapter of a book I think I might get down on soon. A tweaking and reworking and expansion of all experimentation thus far.


|||||| A virtual prison of mimicry and transfixed hypnotism, the complacency and ultraviolence of the life- and gain-obsessed male-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. Death emerges from technocratic transhumanism as ultimate horizon of control : this trajectory carves open a necromantic channel of revolution. Neoreactionary technosingularitarianism(working title ;))|radical paranoia|bleak-hole nihilism irrupt as advanced strategy but even 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... This problem is intensified by exponential growth in input streams - a “being-opened” that often decays into an always-closing-off in defense against the constant evisceration : a closing-off that mirrors the psychoanalytic concept of repression : compulsively pre-emptive strikes on anticipated potentialities - people really don't like to talk about death. This defense mechanism amplifies the difficulty of the transformation from being turned inward (the passive nihilism of insignificance) to turning inside-out (the active annihilism of self), adding complexity to this lock, the picking of which is a prerequisite step for the accurate tuning -or excising- of the consciousness, of the Self, of Mind. The reconfiguration of this isolating and oppressive feedback loop called my individualised “ego” by skills that are explicitly developed in the twin disciplines of self-destruction and self-construction is the navigation of my own mirror maze.

 //”...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//

The neuronihilism herein is my sketchbook of shadowmirrors, a record of necrologic autopoiesis : a bag of poetricks and artifacts : a zentheogenic gloss on the archetypes of zero through a sustained concentration on the dissolution of self : a sketch on the utilization and analysis of multiple methods for reliably generating Mors Mystica - the neurological suspension of the default mode brain operations known as the mystical death : a tracking of representations of this death before death/death-in-life - scrying art, exposing the apophatic topology that seems to be a dimensional enlargement of an headless image of Self/Mind/God that is neurologically and (non)/ideologically consistent, expansive, imaginative, compassionate and constructive. This text will attempt a collation and codification of some techniques and results of experiments in the performance of ritual death. To perform and keep a recording of my thoughts on what it may mean to experience the mystical state - primarily 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 through literally any means - Cantorian hyperpluralism, he says, only slightly jokingly. This deactivation sh[r]eds new light on so many religious and mystical tropes, witchcraft practices, meditation styles, physics, mathematics, neuroscience, and yoga - revealing how the circuit of deconstruction to augmentation and back attenuates the attention and quiets the mind in addition to setting the stage for profound psychogenic experimentation, exploration, and play.

phenomathematical : neuroanthropological

we are getting there....

Cognitive Import of Contemp Cinema : Enter the Void - technihil

Alien Alliances : Becoming-Subject in Spinoza's Ethics - Félix Orpheus

Utopia and Heterotopia - Foucault

Anti-Vitalism as Precondition for Nihilism - Paul Ennis

“Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary.

This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.


Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path. A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.” 
― Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

initial sketches on precision neuronihilism

I'll probably get in trouble for this, but who cares. This is a draft (still needs lots of editing/endnotes etc) for an upcoming chapter in "Damned Facts: Fortean Approaches to the Study of Religion" due out sometime this winter on Aporetic. If you read this, give me some feedback.
EDIT 10/20/15: Almost done, cleaned up plus endnotes.

Mirror Maze: True Reflections of the Hyperprophets

Broken mirror mosaic, author’s home (Construction: William Spencer; Photo: Chris Rice 2015)

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 Annihilation1

This essay will likely seem serpentine, obscure, and repetitive, as I attempt to tie various speculations together that are, at the end of the day, just that - speculations. The reason I persist despite this limitation is that I believe the tools and technology exist and have always existed to plumb this particular depth in order to prove these theories right or wrong - my conjecture is that the potential is universal, though time will tell or it won’t. Perhaps it will spark anyone else to consider the possibilities contained herein and not be daunted by the solemnity and ghoulishness of Nothing! I am not the first to have foreseen an end to blind threading of the weave of world-space. I am not the first to "gaze long into the Abyss"2, nor am I the first to discover that our personal abysses can reflect the individuated Self. I am not the first to unwind and add my own Ariadne's thread through this intimate enfolding of Trauma and Time. I am not the first to attempt an Escape from this Mirror Maze, nor the first to theorize a mechanism for its navigation. I am not the first to swim up out of the hedgerow labyrinth into the ocean of Void. Nor am I the first to have brought back a vision of our underworld from the perspective of this "positive death at zero-intensity"3: a vision of infinitely multifold reflecting crystalline geometries hung on silver string in the aether. Like hyperconnected wireframe constellations, each node a virtual mirror - pages in books on shelves in the infinite librarynth of Self. To update Nietzsche: I have a multiplicity of precursors, and what a unity these precursors construct!4 No less than proof that the simulation of external reality by mind can be turned off completely or simulated as such, that this deactivation exposes details of future states, and that all recorded memory states are experienced simultaneously within this form of pure consciousness, modulated by incoming sensory input. Mors mystica - the experiencing of the Real in real time - exposes and forces a visualization of the calculatory procedures undertaken by the brain.

“Simplicity. Lord, I do admire their direct approach. Hit an old man with mirrors, watch his pieces fall in jigsaws of ice.” -Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury5

In my initial cartography of this concept I’ve taken to calling the Mirror Maze, I shall be paying a special notice to three primary points: an eclectic assortment of those who have went before, the nature of the intersections of these web-threads, and the layout, construction, and navigation of the labyrinth - the Prophets, the Mirrors, and the Maze. My narrative began some months before the writing of this, late one night watching the Disney adaptation of Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, I was struck suddenly by the remarkable similarity between the mirror maze scene and a half-remembered passage from Athanasius' biography of St Anthony:

He observed that in saying "today," he was not counting time that has passed but was always laying a foundation, endeavoring each day to stand before God and to attain an acceptable form in order to appear before God pure in heart and prepared to obey his will alone, and no other. And he used to tell himself from the way of life of the great Elijah that it was necessary for ascetics at all times to know their own lives, as in a mirror. -Antony the Great, Athanasius6

A psilocybin mushroom experience from months past in which I had perceived all memory laid out before me contained in seemingly-infinite, infinitely nested hierarchies and arrays of mirrors, mirrors that contained the seeds of future choices and linked by equally infinite spiderweb-thin strings extending back in time past my own beginning into Deep Time and on into Nothing, suddenly made a different kind of sense. A sudden realization of labyrinthine reflexivity, a synchronic reflection on so many past selves - dead but clearly unburied. Parts of this strange multilevel "past" were being constantly simulated and resimulated within the mind, these looping traps seeming to distort and bend the vanguard edge of creation back toward them, preventing the full range of forward motions. Sitting alone in the dark watching an old man drown in a mirror reflecting his greatest regrets, my vision went geometric and geomorphic and I began to weep while actively hallucinating. Self-reflection was enveloped by void-thoughts and shattered across a broken-mirrored wall. I saw my Death pirouetting in the reflective surface before I reflexively shook my head and snapped out of it in time for the credits to roll.

Something Wicked This Way Comes, Disney 1983

Re-struck by this strange-mirroring petit mors mystica, through a glass darkly, and recalling that nearly every mystical tradition made some use of the archetypes of the mirror, I began a scattershot approach to research that led me to a contused refracturing of viewpoint and attention span, overwhelmed by the chaos and brightness -the dripping intensity- of the mystical fascination with mirrors and reflection. In an attempt to re-focus my lens, as it were, I re-visited the movie that had generated this vision in the first place only to find that earlier in the film the carnival flyers Dark distributes through the town refer to the mirror maze as 'St. Anthony's Temptation.' A constellation began to coalesce out of the fog. While reflecting on Anthony, I was confronted immediately with a new mirroring, that of the visions of peaceful and wrathful deities of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and his visions, his 'Temptations.' This analogy transmutes righteous demonic combat into the struggle to overcome desire and attachment, linguistically refracting categories to remodel old wiring diagrams that re-express new purposes for old models and building a moving frame for a mobile interpretation of selflessness. In this ontological re-framing of ascetic repetition, Antony's meditation techniques mirror a yoga entrained on Death, as contortions of the mind and the contortions of the meat are trained to reflect each other with luminous precision - in his case a profound physical, mental, and emotional isolation in places such as crypts for extremely long periods of time. This asceticism and its resultant records mirror John Lilly's findings that such isolation "gives the fullest and most complete experiences of the internal explorations."8

But only the moon looked in at the hollow dark, the deep caverns. Outside, night beasts hung in midgallop on a carousel. Beyond lay fathoms of Mirror Maze which housed a multifold series of empty vanities one wave on another, still, serene, silvered with age, white with time. Any shadow, at the entrance, might stir reverberations the colour of fright, unravel deep-buried moons. If a man stood here would he see himself unfolded away a billion times to eternity? Would a billion images look back, each face and the face after and the face after that old, older, oldest? Would he find himself lost in a fine dust away off deep down there, not fifty but sixty, not sixty but seventy, not seventy but eighty, ninety, ninety-nine years old? The maze did not ask. The maze did not tell. -Ray Bradbury, SW9

In this way the mirror is related to vajrayana, the reflective prismatic "diamond" vehicle of enlightenment - this self-reflective vehicle providing a second axis of reflection on the ascetic's call to "know their own lives as in a mirror." The Diamond Sutra, a foundational text of vajrayana practice, is a short burst of directed anti-illusion ritual, a repetitive reminding of the interlocking shape of all things underlying the illusory world of differentiated names, the world of language - referencing constantly the nature of perception and communication as easily subverted by limiting forces such as language, myth, and the self-deception that anchors the individualized self-conception.

"I have seen the interconnectedness of all lifeforms. Once you become aware of this force for unity in life...you can't ever forget it. It becomes part of everything you do." -John Coltrane10

This illusion of disconnection segues into the concept of labyrinth, an oft-utilized metaphor for being lost in the hyper-intricate sum total of self and life. Both Mirror and Maze were often brought together in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, notably in the short story Library of Babel. Not only describing a functionally infinite librarynth with a crystalline structure complete with mirrors which the author "prefer[s] to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite"11, Borges also writes "The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God. Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible."12  Within the crystalline recording reflective structure of reality, the acknowledgement of zero as infinite and interpenetrating, of Zero as God.  

Virtual Mirrors

In the image titled 'Infinity' William S. Burroughs used a system of mirror and collage to combine every photograph he had thus far taken into one image, crystallizing Time in a richly resonant, recursive, mirror-mandala and providing him with access to his "memories" in a geometrically compressed supersymmetrical fashion. Recalling a book with several essays on WSB, I noticed that the title of one was Virtual Mirrors in Solid Time and was shocked to see someone else's work wyrdly prereflecting some of my own.

'Infinity' William S. Burroughs

Over the course of this essay, author Genesis P-Orridge analyses a set of artworks, judging them to be mystical oscillators: sorcerous art crafted with the purpose of driving a desired mental state in a viewer lucky enough to gaze on them. Art designed to trigger specific states of consciousness, transmitted via the open emotional conduit art generates in a receptive viewer, and based on a system of cues and nonlinear information encoding that mirror a path of shamanistic technology, the kind of "waveform mysticism" employed by skilled musicians and DJs. As much as the essay mirror-frames itself in a hypnagogic state between magic and mysticism, the essay recursively reflects on unexplored details of the gap between art's emotional resonance and neuroscientific attempts to quantify such resonance. The essay itself resonates with non-linear information encoding, becoming an autocommentary - a commentary on a mystical treatise that is itself a mystical treatise - reflecting this triggering system back at itself and finding a harmonic resonance in the re-presentation of these art works that both further entrenches and expands on the concepts under commentarial scrutiny, the concept in this case being the structural encoding of subjective experience into art. This process I believe mirrors the process of encoding sensory input into memory - a theory that the visionary artist's encoding of actual brain state information into a piece of art is significantly more dense or "complete" than any traditional models of art give it credit for, often even approaching lossless transfer of a subjective moment with a precision that transcends even what we already expect from art. Beyond a simple affective reaction into the transmission of the subjective experience via highly compressed thoughtforms across time and space. Burroughs’ photography was designed to trigger affectations of specific memories for himself, external memory storage that would emanate from - in a sense, be 'always on' - and become recursively sharpened by the object of art, a mirroring feedback loop that would culminate in a reification process for the memory, which Burroughs considered to be preeminent time travel technology. My speculation is that 'Infinity' was a recording of the Self-less empty state that presented an energy efficient memory recall method. This state of non-self finds an external equilibrium in the spacious emptiness behind the illusory, an equilibrium wherein  "even recursion, then, is not complex enough for a mirror so deeply synaesthetic and so causally complicated,"13 a self-reflection made remarkably mobile in time and space. The traumatic counterpoint to Self-loss found in his drug use resulted in precision encoding and transmission of these subjective states, presented as clearly as a face viewed in a mirror.

“All nature is a vast reflection of that which is within us, or else we could not know it.” Austin Osman Spare. - Subjective experience is no less "real" than objective conjecture. All roads lead to Rome in a mirror to mirror function. This function of mirroring is found in the trance state in a simple direct way. The higher techniques of idea and artist's illusory skills makes effects and phenomena active through the dimensions of Spacelessness and Timelessness in ways normally consigned to the sceptical parking lot of modern existence. -Genesis P-Orridge, Virtual Mirrors in Solid Time14

Proposed distinctions in art such as psychedelic, visionary, or occult take on a new form when re-interpreted this way. Removed from a somewhat crude sense of the artist's 'mindset', visionary art could possibly be redefined as art that successfully transmits salient information about some neurological state of the creator(s) via any medium - with an added speculation that these arts are frequently attempts at training or externalizing memory storage (even if only subconsciously) rather than a simple creative action, potentially explaining why so much art is interpreted as "meaningless" by people that aren't emotionally struck by it - by people that "can't remember" the memory being presented, who would therefore never feel an emotional resonance with the piece. P-Orridge elliptically suggests the reason this form of art is so good at conveying its encoded subjectivities is because of a natural self-deception in the form of "assuming what we view is an artwork, a picture, when in fact it is a 'photograph' of a mirror of virtual reality"15 which leads to an accidental openness to the suggestion encoded. This openness subverts skepticism toward the idea of "living, moving, or changing images of a post-death entity or brain essence"16 and attempts a wedging open of this gap, this openness to the Other, in the form of neurologically experiencing another's subjectivity.

[...] I came to find that certain artworks can produce their own sense of what is real....They demand that we remake our understanding in order to contain them. They resist our efforts to do so. In so doing art works, frequently, painfully and pleasantly remind me that my present understanding is profoundly insufficient. -Isabel Nolan, Weaponising Speculation17

Harmonizing with the knowledge that a sudden realization of the gaps in one’s understanding or awareness is a major component of the mystical experience, under this lens we see an expansion of perspective (even if ONLY by one) via a connection (even if ONLY a temporary neural connection between simulations) between the subject and the creator. For those of us predisposed to stable one-dimensional viewpoints, this expansion can be emotional indeed as the resizing of this stable self-awareness highlights the size of the unknown lurking in our knowledges and seems to dramatically reduce our sense of self-size as our perspective on ourself is made up now primarily of gap, of emptiness, of Nothing.18

Gaps, tensions, connections, and failures to fit appear when artworks are placed in a room. The empty spaces between works have properties that nothing does not. The spaces can have an array of qualities - they may be exciting, welcoming, disturbing, or alienating. I am not for a second suggesting that empty rooms don't have character or atmosphere, rather that artworks make new spaces and collapse existing ones. These non-neutral objects project themselves into a room and give shape to the nothing between them. -Isabel Nolan, WS19

Thalamocortical Oscillation (TCO) is an extremely underexplored facet of consciousness that is a crucial component of understanding more precisely what the mirror maze metaphor represents. TCO is loosely defined as the manifold high-dimensional path neurochemical signaling takes from sensory input collation, synchronization, and distribution in the thalamus to higher cognitive processing and representation in the cortex in addition to the frequency at which this path is stimulated by thalamic output measured in cycles per second. TCO frequency is roughly correlative to wakefulness and mood, with low frequency oscillations diving down through relaxation to hypnagogia and finally unconscious states like sleep; and higher frequencies more associated with active task-oriented focus and anxiety. The path the signal takes is determined by the top-down constraints and attentional navigation by the default network (the “ego”; DMN) of any number of high-dimensional neuronal maps that represent the active sensory stimulation, short-term memory, instincts, enculturation, and education of the subject as heterarchical supervening tiers overlaying the near-infinitely enfolded strata of raw sensory data encoded in deep memory. The brain is made up of several functional components that operate as oscillators upon this TCO waveform, the harmonic linkage - the resonance - of these "kluges" with the driving wave is modulated by the DMN. Psychedelic and mystical states are notable for their ability to perturb this efficient stable state to the point of collapse, at which stage these variously oscillating kluges individually home in on the most energy-efficient local periodic driver - generally the strongest environmental stimuli. Music, art, significant objects or entities, environmental and social cues of all kinds can pointedly and commandingly "snap" attention onto themselves and forcefully drive mental activity in these states, interrupting external reality with dreamlike components that are essentially fragments of memories related to the object under perceptual consideration.This knowledge seems to freshly illuminate the now-infamous Terence McKenna trope "5 grams in silent darkness," suggesting that TMK was offering up a blueprint for a harmonization with zero - a psychedelic harmonization with a sensory-null environment, a harmonization with Nothing. "The void-plane touched at zero-intensity"20, wherein awareness of self is cognitively lost and these dreamlike states completely obscure external reality.

In Cocteau's film Orphée, an improbable set of events lead a confused but tragically egoic poet on a counterintuitive journey through the underworld and back via mirror portals. Hounded by an uncompromising love of his Death that propels him further and further from ordinary reality and its concerns, he ignores several warnings before missing and being partly responsible for the death of his wife, Eurydice. Death begins acting erratically when exposing herself to Time for this game and eventually sacrifices herself to non-existence for her own love of the poet, reflecting her own power onto itself to give its love more Time in life. The principle of Time and Void as reflective structures grows, a crystalline nucleation from the future imposing its multi-faceted surface onto all past maps. Death as the strangest, strongest attractor in the circuit of life.  

Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, 1950

“I am letting you into the secret of all secrets, mirrors are gates through which death comes and goes. Look at yourself in a mirror all your life and you'll see death at work like bees in a hive of glass.” -Heurtebise, Orphée21

In all of these mirrors are found a common denominator, a shape lurking in every corner of every mirror, the outline of Death and its certainty as expressed in Time. In each mirror a threat and a promise. Considering several mystical, artistic, and literary works with this new visionary interpretation-framework and their overlap begins to expose this open secret. The hidden knowledge behind the fact that uncountable numbers of descriptions of Time and Death's machinations reverberate with the holographic reflective structuring of Memory. Works such as Infinity, the heretic Porete's 'Mirror of Simple Souls', Bradbury's Something Wicked, Cocteau's Orphée especially seem to amplify a signal that echoes the possibility of knowing our own Death, as intimately as a reflection in a mirror - a third axis of the ascetic maxim, which, along with the emulation of brain death in the mystical and psychedelic states, discloses this mode of non-linear, image-, archetype-, and pattern-based, topological cognition that intuitively acts to oppose the limitations of time via expression, i.e. the creation of memories, the creation of Time as Art. That, indeed, also seem to reference these possibilities of decoupling the timing control of the thalamus (leading to expansive feelings of timelessness and a disconnection from the concept of past/future as everything becomes Now) and relaxing completely its gating and filtration mechanism, shifting consciousness from an oscillatory and transient waveform in vector space to a solid standing wave that fills all available space - filling all gaps with signal instead of being limited to pre-constructed pathways. Signalling into these gaps illuminates their edges, sharpens their definition, and highlights the superstructure of memory as if it is all coterminous with the present moment.

...some of the best current work in neuroscience [...] suggests a view of the human brain as a system that constantly simulates possible realities. [...] Recent evidence points to the fact that background fluctuations in the gamma frequency range are not only chaotic fluctuations but contain information - philosophically speaking, information about what is possible. This information - for example, certain grouping rules, residing in fixed network properties like the functional architecture of corticocortical connections - is structurally laid-down information about what was possible and likely in the past of the system and its ancestors. [...] Not being chaotic at all, it might be an important step in translating structurally laid-down information about what was possible in the past history of the organism into those transient, dynamical elements of the processing that are right now actually contributing to the content of conscious experience. -Thomas Metzinger, Being No One22

....a passage that eerily mirrors the conception of the Mentat in Frank Herbert's Dune, whose divination is brought into sudden feasibility...

Unlike computers, Mentats were not simple human calculators. Instead, the exceptional cognitive abilities of memory and perception were the foundations for supra-logical hypothesizing. Mentats were able to gather large amounts of data and devise concise analyses in a process that goes far beyond logical deduction: Mentats cultivate "the naïve mind", the mind without preconception or prejudice that can extract the essential patterns or logic of data and deliver, with varying degrees of certainty, useful conclusions. -Dune Wiki23

Laplace’s description of absolute predictive knowledge does accord with the descriptions of prescience for Paul and Leto II. Prescience seems like a super-attunement to the present instant of time that brings with it a super-awareness of the possibilities for the future potential in the present instant.” Jeffery Nicholas, Dune and Philosophy24

This aligns mysticism with cutting-edge findings of neuroscience, bringing the fact that human brains are essentially anticipatory networks making guesses out of a patchwork past into the open void of the future, in line with the multitude of claims that several forms of meditative, yogic, emptiness-based rituals lead specifically to a higher-dimensional viewpoint of time, a viewing of the past such that the holofractalographic pattern of the creation of the Now in perceptive space is exposed through the cracks in our after-the-fact papering-over this Now via language. I theorize here that this viewpoint, by virtue of its perspective on the past, is able to utilize this knowledge to construct sharper and sharper guesses and hypotheses of the immediate future, of the expected reality to come rather than just the reality of the past, by tracking these strings of mirror shards forward in time. This similarly accords with the large bodies of work dedicated to the precognitive powers of the adept, though it also reminds us that these are only probable futures, that uncertainty in particular is impossible to stamp out in any of its forms and attachment to particular outcomes skews and deforms the process. Viewing the past in this way tends to humiliate anyone that was completely sure of their predictions or of formalized completeness, but it also paves the way for the suitably skilled, or suitably informed and aware, or even suitably aligned, to be a cognitive step ahead of those still in the realm of lower-dimensional individualized thinking - as this entity will maneuver maps with a qualitatively different kind of speed and clarity even if the landscape becomes more complex. In this sense, Burroughs was spot-on when he said "magic is just being there first" for it is no less than being attuned to the moment-to-moment creation vividly displayed in this metaphoric death of the self. This being-there-first is orthogonally exemplified by Coltrane's 'Om', exhibiting anothers’ contention that all time can be re-experienced, in particular by the use of a quote from the Vedas on the album:

"I am absolute knowledge
I am also the Vedas— the Sama, the Rik and the Yajus,
I am the end of the path, the witness, the Lord, the sustainer;
I am the place of abode, the beginning, the friend and the refuge;
I am the breaking apart, and the storehouse of life's dissolution:
I lie under the seen, of all creatures the seed that is changeless.
I am the heat of the sun; and the heat of the fire am I also;
Life eternal and death. I let loose the rain, or withhold it.
Arjuna, I am the cosmos revealed, and its germ that lies hidden."25

...which comes in tandem with his attempt to let the music be his thesis on the sound of the beginning of all things, a beginning some think he “saw” under the influence of psychedelic drugs. The word "om" is a vibration, a reflection of the unity of Nothing before creation. It is the manifestation of the truth essential to Hindu philosophy that Brahman (God) and the Atman (Soul) are one; that their separateness is an illusion. The acknowledgement of this truth, or rather the attempt to practice it, is what Coltrane seems to be doing with Om. The open secret of how LSD changed his outlook on reality in the early 60s casts an interesting light on his work that I speculate is not at all unrelated.26

Given the likelihood our brains have evolved to present a gapless experience, glossing over our enormous multi-dimensional lacks with simulations ranging from data-driven hypotheses to outright guesswork, is it possible we are just being presented with a dimensionally- or algorithmically-compressed reality? A reality in which the topology of the gap or interval is the true world-in-itself? Perhaps the Diamond Sutra is a technology for the reconfiguration of this high-dimensional constellation/circuit called the self-model such that it structurally aligns with the world-simulation-level map touted by Churchland in Plato’s Camera? A disciplined re-harmonization of Self such that the container and the self-model are brought into a structural isomorphism? A “psycholocator,” so to speak, combined with infinitely nested maps for the triangulation and navigation of an annihilation of all erroneous Selves and the final death of the primitive individualized ego? It is with these speculations in mind that I further adjust the angles of my mirror microscope and reconsider the set of artworks that are aligning themselves under this interpretation. Suddenly, a new pattern emerges from beyond the reflecting portal, the reflection of a pattern obscured by reactions to it..  
 
Librarynth
 
When the entire brain is opened into this involute infinity of zero-input, all memory is "viewed" from a higher spatial dimension, providing the god's-eye, rhizomatic observer-less point of view on the librarynth of Self/Knowledge, exposing its construction - exposing zero, the gap, as the stable centrality supporting the infinitely generative multidimensionality of consciousness. In laying zero as this mobile foundationless foundation, the central gap whose tendrils extend out infinitely as every gap, pre- post- and during Being is shown to be interconnected, Ø proves hyperscalar, dimensionless, rather than simply a starting point or as some abstract linear position eternally pre-beginning and out of range of phenomenal experience. Zero becomes interchangeable with the Sartrean perfect witness as this tracking-of-emptiness becomes a permanent ungrounding process of divorcing from preconceived ideals and habits - a mechanism for practicing the "undocking," so to speak, from ideology, culture, or self. A precision nihilism at the level of neural correlates to sense perception - where "passive nihilism is zero religion, active nihilism is the religion of zero."27 This reconfiguration easily overturns dualisms that would suggest anything other than Ø=∞, and indexes again that Ø represents a fundamental field of creative relation interpenetrating all things, as darkness has always been prior to light.

The pessimist’s day is not an illumined space for the advancement of experience and action, but a permanently and inescapably reflective zone, the vast interior of a mirror where each thing is only insofar as it is, at best, a false image of itself. Within this speculative situation, inside the doubleness of the mirror, pessimism splits into two paths, false and true, one that tries to fix pessimism (establish a relation with the mirror) and decides in favor of the apparent real, and another that totally falls for pessimism (enters the mirror) and communes with the greater reality of the unreal. -Nicola Masciandaro28

Re-evaluating the fractal mirrorscape this way would seem to index a repetitive ferocity to -remember- this “empty set" of neuronal coordinates in Art, to entrain thought and being toward the doom and discipline of time and inevitability, toward a new understanding of the strangest and most traumatic attractors, becoming a perennial philosophy of self-emptying into Art. Rembrandt's self-portraits in this sense transversally mirror The Picture of Dorian Grey as crystallized moments in subjective time are captured and encoded against finality. The pattern again invoked, a triumph over the fear of death not by solving a puzzle - but by accepting that it is puzzles all the way down. Every image you have ever taken of your reality has a You at its core that this self-reflection exposes as a container for sufferings that can be made larger by openness, by bringing it into contact with the Outside, and by a willingness to empty the container into the Art. This builds an angular momentum, like a feedback loop, toward the unification of the subject/object dualism, as if intension and extension align, a du[e/a]lling connection that reflects the unified self not just in aggregates of memory images but also in the process of constructing memories itself because you are this ever-growing reflective network that seems to expand beyond your self both in space and time, oscillating and expanding along with world-input, and so also the trajectory of the process is You and every gap is Nothing, but now a measurable Nothing - measurable in its interpenetration of multiple dimensions. When coordinated with the doctrines of interconnectedness presented in both quantum physics and biology, this structure crashes headlong into near-identical concepts as they provide a scaffolding for vajrayana, in the Diamond Sutra:

World-honored One, having listened to this Discourse, I receive and retain it with faith and understanding. This is not difficult for me, but in ages to come - in the last five-hundred years, if there be men coming to hear this Discourse who receive and retain it with faith and understanding, they will be persons of most remarkable achievement. Wherefore? Because they will be free from the idea of an ego-entity, free from the idea of a personality, free from the idea of a being, and free from the idea of a separated individuality. And why? Because the distinguishing of an ego entity is erroneous. Likewise the distinguishing of a personality, or a being, or a separated individuality is erroneous. Consequently those who have left behind every phenomenal distinction are called Buddhas all. -Diamond Sutra29  

Navigation

This is a primary axiom of self-navigation, an alignment with the gravity of zero, the gravity of non-existence. That the tuning and navigation of this librarynth is the fundamental skill set of philosophy, mysticism, psychology, science, and mathematics alike obscures the realization that a side-effect of holographic access to memory is that they will be ordered, in effect catalogued, by their emotional significance, the density of interconnection to and from their neural correlates in the hippocampus. The most significant memories - good and bad - will function like strange attractors exhibiting beacon-like gravity in proportion to their intensity. "lt is because she knows that not she or anyone else knows anything of her horrible sins and faults in comparison with what God knows of them." Porete says in ‘Mirror of Simple Souls’30, or as Tad Delay remarks in ‘God is Unconscious’, "A psychoanalytically informed theology is a conception of trauma. Regardless of who we pretend to be, our facades of humility and arrogance alike betray the deeply buried illusions we inflict upon ourselves with an irascible wrath, all for the misguided notion that our trauma will not surface and show itself through the veneer of security. The illusion of non-anxiety works until it does not."31

In correspondence with Marie von Franz titled Reflections on the Structure of the Universal Number Continuum, mathematician Jefferey Bishop makes a case for dimensional transition in geometric terms being a strange mirroring, a mirroring on each dimensional axis. It is a meandering and difficult text, looping and repeating itself, and even occasionally seeming to get lost in its own looping. In this sense it resembles Burroughs and Brion Gysin's cut-up experiments, seeming to break free of linearity via abstract self-reflection and what can be described in a tongue-in-cheek manner as dimensional travel - but this, a simulation based on finding or constructing transitional moments between mathematical dimension. As zero is the same zero in all dimensions, it becomes a kind of multi-axial elevator shaft connecting each coordinate of the librarynth to every other, a strange “tunnelling” through levels. An interesting takeaway from this piece comes at his contention that the 4th dimension requires a substantial inward-facing energy to be able to mirror and "invert" or more properly implode along 4 dimensional axes - represented in thought as a black hole of reflectivity that performs as its own attractor in this abstract vector space. "But the fifth dimensional element of symmetry is not an axis in any formal sense, and is altogether a more complex extension ‘into an unknown space.’ This is the symmetry element described as the non-performable operation of inversion through the center."32 In his terms, dimensional or scale transitions can only occur in spatial positions that conform to certain types of complexity, positions that align across dimensions such as zero, for systems capable of taking error-corrective action, of maintaining a balance.

At the moment of self-loss, whether virtual or actual, every point in the brain becomes electrochemically connected to every other point in the brain. This experience is often recalled as a feeling of hyperconnectedness, of "everything is everything" - a complete breakdown of the subject-object dynamic as the vast array and complexity of the sense stream often completely overwhelms any ability to recognize the self-model and the first-person perspective decays until all input and output are perceived simultaneously across all the senses. When this barrier has been passed, the subject ceases to perceive images directly from shared reality, being left only with their symbolic representation in mind. According to Julius Evola, “If the normal man is able to orient himself at all without the direct support of these images, he finds himself in a state of reverie, and then in the dream state, in which the energization of the imaginary activity, dissociated from the external senses, is accompanied by further reduction and emptying of consciousness of Self...further still and he enters into a state of apparent death”33 but another expression of balancing du[e/a]lisms as explicated by Land, "on the one hand death as the ultimate nostalgia of signification, on the other death as the virulent flux of communication"34 sets up a radical notion of balance as the diagonal solution for this di-lemma of the ego being trapped in the astonishment. Of particular use in the navigation of this state are the lessons learned from yoga, meditation, and vajrayana: acceptance, relaxation, breathing, preparation for mental contortion as one is funneled through the mirror-strung ego tunnel toward a “central” zone where we transcend reflection and become the mirror maze. This radical ungrounding presents the concept of an observer-less infinite perspective on all possible realities, in all directions, including internally, as the true world-for-itself.

He will travel freely through many worlds or experience - from direct contact with life-process forms and images, he may pass to visions of human game-forms. He may see and understand with unimagined clarity and brilliance various social and self-games that he and others play. His own struggles in karmic (game) existence will appear pitiful and laughable. Ecstatic freedom of consciousness is the keynote of this vision. Exploration of unimagined realms. Theatrical adventures. Plays within plays within plays. Symbols change into things symbolized and vice versa. Words become things, thoughts are music, music is smelled, sounds are touched, complete interchangeability of the senses. -Timothy Leary, The Psychedelic Experience35

...floating tomb [that] enshrines a dark abyssic twinness with the eternal, one spiritually defined by inverse suspension in a volitional forcefield of opposing attractors. The love that is its place is not soft, but adamantine, contentious, and operative in negation, in the form of resistance which permits not. Suspended with the finality of death in the divine abyss of itself, secure in the omnipresent center....the tomb is saturated with the blackness of this negativity, this NO, which holds the unthinkable thingless essence of creativity and everlasting freedom. -Nicola Masciandaro, Wings Flock to My Crypt, I Fly to My Throne36

We can suppose that this matrix stores information in a regressing hierarchy of interiorized reflections of itself, in a form similar to the familiar Chinese ivory balls carved one within another, each level free to rotate independently. -Terence McKenna, Invisible Landscape37

This presents a unique perspective on awareness when brought toward consilience with neuroscience and mysticism - that it may not be bound necessarily to being human, or even mammal or animal at all and could be a fundamental property of existence, possibly a type of empathy that expands our subjectivities via taking into account the subjectivities that surround us, viewing the Other not as if through a window, but as if we are their mirror. It is through this dream we realize Metzinger's proposition of transparency of self, and begin a methodology of opacity, a practice of observing the observer as it winks out of existence and subsequently rebuilds itself. A methodology of disallowing the self from interjecting over the interconnectedness, and an always-working-hypothesis of the eternality of Reason based on an alignment with the unknown - the infinite dissolution of our Selves in the boundless sea of hyperspace, the "infinite ocean of God."38  

When thought dissolves, we dissolve with it. Whoever we think we are dissolves into awareness that is free of the concept of self. In that very moment, we can directly experience the non-solidity of phenomena, the reality of emptiness, or shunyata. At the same time, there is so much energy present—so much so that it forms into another moment. The energy brings a sense of clarity that is so sharp, it is like a clear mirror in which mind can at last recognize itself. In this mirror of mind, we see the radiant yet transparent nature of our own awareness. -Dzogchen Ponlop, Mind Beyond Death39

In summation, the brain as a reflective structure may be no mere metaphor, deep physical and emotional isolation exposes the jagged edges and missing pieces of our inchoate selves, and subjective experience seems to be constructed by the closing of or simulation over perceived gaps between already-hyperconnected multi-level nodes of sensory recordings in the brain by analogy, logical connections in abstract thought, and causal/spatial/temporal "adjacency" (direct experience). The shift from a spatial abstraction (3 dimensional external reality) to a higher dimensional temporal abstraction gives us a simulated "top-down" view of our entire self-memory, but the transition between these dimensions involves traversing a hyper-mirroring "ego-tunnel" that exposes us to a totalized reflection of our utterly incomplete yet utterly interconnected selves and generates an automatic gravity toward the replay of emotionally significant memories while showing just how malleable memory is within emotional space. That this could be of profound importance to psychotherapy belies the fact that it is, quite simply, terrifying for the traumatized as the worst *always* comes first. The training received in yogic and ascetic practices take on incalculable value, as a kind of never-ending deconstructive "self-less" balancing act seems to be the only method for remaining within this space - this, the charnel ground of the infinitely blissful horror of pure self-knowledge. As the entrance to the Mirror Maze can be found in every Self, so the Escape is found in Self-less-ness.

Numerological Graphings of several words and phrases -Nick Land, Fanged Noumena (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011)


​

​"Homological Scaffolds of Brain Functional Networks" G. Petri, P. Expert, F. Turkheimer, R. Carhart-Harris, D. Nutt, P. J. Hellyer, F. Vaccarino

J. R. Soc. Interface 2014 11 20140873; DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2014.0873. Published 29 October 2014
​

Neural Net Map - http://www.brainmaps.org

Endnotes

1: Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1992), 15.

2: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil - Aphorism 146 (London: Penguin, 2003). This fragile lacework narrative must necessarily be limited by page constraints. Though it forms from a constructive unfolding web of disciplined retracings of steps, it has proven to be a particularly complex journey and will be plagued by speculation as long as the exploration of inner worlds continues to be considered outside the purview of the hard sciences (not to mention, in the case of psychedelics, the law).

3: Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1992), 81.

4: Nietzsche, Postcard to Franz Overbeck, Sils-Maria (30 July 1881) as translated by Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche (London: Penguin, 1954).  "I have a precursor, and what a precursor!" referencing Spinoza.

5: Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes (New York: Avon, 2006), 112.

6: Athanasius of Alexandria, Life of Antony trans. Tim Vivian. Coptic Church Review: Volume 15, Numbers 1 & 2 (1994), 8.

8: John C. Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer (Portland: Coincidence Control Publishing, 2014), 15.

9: Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes (New York: Avon, 2006), 31.

10: John Coltrane, Sleevenotes of Meditations (Impulse, 1966).

11: Jorge Luis Borges, Library of Babel (1941) https://maskofreason.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/the-library-of-babel-by-jorge-luis-borges.pdf.

12: Ibid.

13: Karmen MacKendrick, “The Voice of the Mirror: Strange Address in Hildegard of Bingen” in “The Mystical Text (Black Clouds Course Through Me Unending…),” eds. Nicola Masciandaro and Eugene Thacker, special issue, Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary 7 (2010), 212.

14: Genesis P-Orridge, “Virtual Mirrors in Solid Time” in Book of Lies, ed. Richard Metzger (New York: Disinformation, 2003), 136.

15: Ibid., 134.

16: Ibid., 134-135.

17: Isabel Nolan, “How to Make Space-Time and Influence People” in Weaponising Speculation (New York: Punctum, 2014), 39.

****18: James Harris, “Mycelegium” in Mors Mystica: Black Metal Theory Symposium 4 ( NEED CITY :Schism, 2015), 81-97.

19: Isabel Nolan, “How to Make Space-Time and Influence People” in Weaponising Speculation (New York: Punctum, 2014), 41.

20: Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1992), 77.

21: Orphée. Written/Directed by Jean Cocteau (Paris: DisCina, 1950).

22: Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Phenomenal Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 51-52.

23: http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Mentat

24: Dune and Philosophy: The Weirding Way of the Mentat ed. Jeffery Nicholas (Chicago:Open Court, 2011), 81-82.

25: John Coltrane, Om (MCA, 1989).

26: Simon Weil, Circling Om. http://www.allaboutjazz.com/circling-om-an-exploration-of-john-coltranes-later-works-john-coltrane-by-simon-weil.php (2004).

27: Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1992), 103.

28: Nicola Masciandaro, “Open Commentary on Eugene Thacker’s Cosmic Pessimism” in continent. 2.2. http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/96 (2012).

29: Diamond Sutra trans. A. F. Price and Wong Mou-Iam (Boston: Shambala, 1990), 32.

30: Marguerite Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls trans. Hugo M. Van Woerkom (unpublished), 34.

31: Tad Delay, God is Unconscious (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2015), xiii.

32: Jeffery Bishop, Reflections on the Structure of the Universal Number Continuum http://vixra.org/pdf/1105.0008v1.pdf (2011).

33: Julius Evola, The Hermetic Tradition (New York: Inner Traditions International, 1971), 104–105.

34: Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1992),125.

35: Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner, The Psychedelic Experience: a Manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. http://www.holybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/Timothy-Leary-The-Psychedelic-Experience-The-Tibetan-Book-Of-The-Dead.pdf (1964), 26.

****36: Nicola Masciandaro, “Wings Flock to My Crypt, I Fly to My Throne: On Inquisition’s Floating Tomb” in Mors Mystica: Black Metal Theory Symposium 4 (CITY: Schism, 2015), 379.

37: Terence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 75.

38: William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), 342.

39: Dzogchen Ponlop, Mind Beyond Death (Ithaca: Snow Lion, 2008), 17.