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Mystic Climax

Contents

Self-control seizure as a goal 1

Ego-death control-seizure as climax. 3

Mystic Climax Like Sexual Climax. 6

Mystic climax as a distinct innate potential 6

 

Self-control seizure as a goal

A new paradigm includes a new goal and a new strategy.  The goal I define is not truth, or certainty, or scholarly rigor.  The goal I define and discover and bring is the goal of thinking one's way to a certain kind of self-control seizure, as though actively, intently, and deliberately looking for the Minotaur in the labyrinth.  

In movies or video games the goal is to get inside the girl, or obtain the diamond or other treasure.  In the Grail stories, the goal is to find the upward-cupped Amanita, the priceless golden cup with diamond-spots.  In the best versions of the Grail story, finding the cup leads to a kind of death and Eucharist ingestion and madness. 

Such is the goal I invent, of deliberately seeking self-control seizure as the greatest treasure.  In the death-and-rebirth in my mystery-religion experiential allegory, a vision of cybernetic control-seizure can be the central figure, equivalent to the allegorical mythic symbol of the crucified upstart rebel sovereign, or the slaying of the bull of astrological cosmic determinism, or the chaining of Prometheus to the rock. 

There must be an allegorical symbol of ego death experience that is superior to those old-fashioned religions and makes immediate sense to us in the era of the Web and AI.  I have got to say more clearly, that the acid-rock song The Body Electric is essentially this, the understandable mystery-religion allegory for today.

Thinking about humans instantly leads back into ruts of thinking.  When seeking religious experiencing, instead, we should think about robots and aliens, more intelligent than the standard-mode human. 

Like Stanislaw Lem's godly-brilliant computers, since we can only think of (standard-mode) humans as being too stupid and dull to understand their own nature, we should instead jump out of these mental limitations by thinking in terms of what the android would know and what the advanced alien would know that we don't know -- something quite unexpected and truly surprising about religious knowledge. 

Do we wish for a contemporary allegory for ego-death?  It has already been provided by artists who have jumped the rails of rutted thinking and switched out of the standard mode.  The self-programming android has already been short-circuited by computing the nature of its freedom as a cybernetic self-control system.

http://www.egodeath.com/rushlyrics.htm#xtocid22998

The key or "punch line" to these lyrics is that the 1001001 (binary) = 73 (decimal) = 'I' (ASCII).  And the android in the video has 1001001 prominently on it, as I understand.

http://www.jimprice.com/ascii-0-127.gif -- shows that 73 (decimal) = 'I' (ASCII).  If you enter 73 into a Windows calculator then click Binary, the display reads: 1001001.

This "I" is the Unit One that is in trouble and is scared out of its wits, the I whose guidance systems break down during the loose-cognition state and who then struggles to exist as a self-controller, and resists the control-cancellation vision. 

This cybernetic controller, I, experiences dying control-power and can watch its hand clench while experiencing the motive-power behind the hand as being an alien power forced upon the control-center from a place beyond personal control. 

In this visionary state, there is also perceptual distortion so that the hand appears as a rubbery, rendered simulation of a hand -- a plastic fist.

This cybernetic 'I' then bows its head in a gesture of the defeat of self-cancellation and prays for the recovery of power to the space-time matrix, which is the mother of all machines, including the human as cybernetic self-controlling system.

I characterize this power-cancelled 'I' control as the controller-self in a state of power-seizure.  The semblance of power has been seized from the controller-self and the control-center seizes.  This can actually be experienced as circular gear-catching, as the logic spins round, catching on itself. 

Control "catches" and hangs, on the time axis.  Time freezes and control snags on itself.  The walls of logic close in like hunter on prey, like a target-seeking guidance feedback loop to steer a missile toward its destination. 

The mind succeeds at catching up with itself as a point of view arises in which the clock stops -- or the time-slices of the clock are each seen as stationary, frozen at all times forever.  The missile steers its way toward the programmed target, the mind successfully attains rapturous seizure, the hero enters the girl -- or the girl captures the hero, to turn the tables. 

How can I get God inside me?  Seek seizure with the help of loose-cognition combined with skillful rationality that is able to distinguish two separate networks of meaning. 

The concept of self-control cancellation is helpful, too, though self-control seizure is more positively tangible.  Look for this beacon, look for this strangely compelling and somehow timelessly familiar spinning phenomenon in the heavens. 

Seek the vortex, the self-control singularity feedback vortex, of control beyond control -- but where is time?  That is the missing link: the singular and pre-existing or timelessly existing inevitable future.  Inevitability is a potent concept. 

Experiencing and intuiting inevitability is experiencing controllership-death.  Ordinary spirituality lacks a definite goal.  Self-control seizure is a definite goal we are bound to stumble upon. 

The cross of time and control-cancellation is a stumbling-block.  As we foolishly wander in merry quest for adventure, we sail along but sooner or later stumble across something we could never have imagined: the control singularity vortex. 

We wish to investigate this most strange and compelling phenomena, but doing so risks mayhem and disaster, the wholesale destruction and termination of the journey. 

We are drawn to the intellectual beauty of it, yet it threatens to destroy us as steersmen.  We can only listen to the singing of the sirens if we are tied safely to the mast.  They draw the helmsman to destruction between their rocks and the whirling maelstrom.

The emergency siren has always reminded me of block-universe ego-death.  The first time I fully experienced and conceptualize the block universe was in a computer lab around January 11, 1988 and I seem to recall a siren reminding me of the sacred idea of control-breakdown emergency.

http://www.swcp.com/~eltiki/homie_page/articles/siren.html

The following is half-quoted, half my rewrite of this URL.

Sirens are winged (or finned) mermaids who enchant passing sailors who jump into the sea and turn into rocks.  Turning into rock was a popular thing to do in that era, as popular as getting stoned today -- the free person becomes enrocked. 

Sirens were servants of Persephone, aka the "Death Queen," "Destroyer," Goddess of the Underworld.  Why is Persephone like the Destroying Mother Kali?  Because when you encounter the goddess, she kills you as ego. 

Ego hasn't a chance of developing when entheogenic visionary experience keeps revealing the dead and ghostly nature of ego.

"In one tale, Zeus goes to the underworld as a snake, has intercourse with Persephone, and impregnates her with the child Dionysus" (who is the wine-suspended psychoactive mixtures that are represented by the grape leaf). 

Sirens, like Satyrs and Centaurs, symbolize a dual nature -- likely, part heavenly bird, part human/mortal.  We are "mortal" because we have the innate ability for ego-death.

Sirens are related to harpies.  Sirens are ego-death's sweet call, while their vulture-like sisters signify unsought, terrifying ego-death. 

The ego-devouring goddess is the matrix, the Ground of Being that gives us the semblance of life as egoic control-agents, and takes it away during the ego-death experience.

Chanting represents the essence of Sirens: their song tears down the order of man's rational mind.  The Siren is the destructive aspect of the muse.  Musing on self-control will reveal the Siren song of ego-death. 

Hindu deities have destructive and creative power.  From the above URL: "Death, on a psychological level, can represent the demise of the ego, which releases the soul to blend into the cosmic consciousness of the universe."

A goblin is magic, spirit and a soul that possesses dancers, musicians, singers and audience during key moments.  It is (from the URL:) "a frightening, demonic element that can 'kill' the ego, just like the Sirens."

"Goddesses are bearers of a message to which man is afraid to listen."  Goddesses are the messengers revealing the emptiness of the apparent potency of ego-power. 

Patriarchal religions are ego-strengthening.  Matriarchal religions are ego-cancelling or ego-destroying. 

All these mysteries are solved this way: remember, every time you read "death", "kill", or "destroy", you must wipe out the assumption of physical death and instead learn to *assume* naturally that the myths *always* are concerned only with mystic ego-death, for which physical death is but a feeble metaphorical echo.

The great sucking whirlpool and the enticing rockifying song of the Sirens are closely related.  Also near this point in Odysseus' travels, Zeus strikes the mast with lightning, the mast falls and brains the steersman, who dies and falls as a diver into the ocean. 

Here we have a steersman threatened by enticement into becoming a rock, threatened by the attractive force of a great vortex whirlpool, and finally killed by being stricken by a mast struck by Zeus' lightning. 

I hypothetically equate the mast with the time axis; our power as controllers is killed by the fixity of time, especially the future.  We are, above all, controllers, but even more perspicaciously than that, we are, above all, future-controllers. 

We are control-agents in that we control ourselves now-and-future.  We try to use our current power to control our future selves, though those future selves are frozen time-slices eternally locked into their permanent places in the matrix, the Ground of Being (in the single preexistent-future, fixed-future world-model).

Ego-death control-seizure as climax

Psychosis is not just pain, horror and helplessness.  Ecstasy not simply bliss, confidence and power -- it may be a delusion of power, disproved.  Go ahead, expect power and control, but don't be surprised if control evades control and cancels itself out.  Such a result is one of the classic discoveries delivered by plant teachers.

Ecstasy is optimal mental health, psychosis is a tragic mental disorder, so what is ecstatic psychosis, or Dionysian divine madness?  If you have optimal mental health, all the more likely you will discover divine psychosis.

Tragedy was observed in the genre of Greek Attic Tragedy, in which the person's power was experienced as nullified by Fate and inevitability -- a favorite sacred theme of the ancient Greeks.

Ecstasy is life supporting, while psychosis is harmful.  But more relevantly, what is life supporting is to be willing to do anything, be willing to think anything, be willing to will anything, and yet act constructively rather than destructively.  Be willing to destroy, yet be committed to life-protecting constructiveness.

Schizophrenia includes delusions, misinterpretations, and audio command hallucinations.  Entheogenic psychosis includes delusions, misinterpretations, and uncontrollable command ideas, and audio distortions, but not audio hallucinations such as commanding voices heard as though actually spoken by other people. 

In that sense, research has concluded that schizophrenia involves genuine hallucinations, while the common psychedelics do not.

It is said that the ego can be overwhelmed by psychic forces beyond its apparent control.  More exactly, the ego can be overwhelmed by its own nature, as control struggles increasingly to control control's ever-increasing power, until control seizes into a death-grip like a noose.

The psychotic panic reaction of overdosing is a shocking, stressful experience, engaging the body's fight-or-flight response -- fear and terror like that of a horse.  Fear of self-subversion, of the enemy within, of a traitorous member of the inner circle of self-government. 

We have good reason to fear, when the accustomed constraining ruts of mental control are suspended and dissolved during loose cognition, and there is no principle by which to steer, and not even a preference -- how do you hold onto your preferences, likes, and dislikes, during extremely loose cognitive dis-integration? 

It truly is a dangerous, unstable, and treacherous state to be in.  What exactly is the core essence of a bad trip?   Therein lies wisdom and enlightenment about our nature, which is, above all, semi-illusory control-agents.

Control agency is experienced as being out of control.  We ordinarily take it for granted that we have a good grip on what control is all about, have a firm hand on the helm.  We are controllers.  Yet we know nothing about the origin of our steering efforts.  Just how far can you trust your stability and integrity of control?

Psychotic trips can be terrifying and too out of control.  It can be difficult to integrate a psychotic episode. Such episodes are potentially dangerous and produces shell-shock (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome/Disorder).  Is such psychotic experiencing healthy?  Some entheogen researchers maintain that it is.

Researchers have debated over whether or not overdosing and such bad-tripping is healthy.  Since ego-death is our legacy and rightful inheritance, it's part of the potential of the higher, cultivated, rational mind, and it leads to insight about the nature of the mind, self, and control, we must consider ego-death to be a significant part of what it means to be a healthy mind. 

Religious self-control seizure is a healthy and sacred phenomenon that is part of being a mature person.  So there must be a healthy way to experience religious self-control seizure.  I have been visualizing such experience as a healthy and not overly dangerous phenomenon recently.  Not all seizure is unhealthy -- transcendent seizure is called 'rapture'.

It is natural to desire a pleasant high-dose, internally-focussed, closed-eye-hallucination session.  The moment you relax mental control, however, some interesting realizations and perceptions about one's nature are wont to arise.  These insights and innovative perspectives can be experienced as pleasant, especially if you learn to consider ego-death control-seizure pleasant, sacred, glorious, profound, enlightening, valuable, interesting, and rewarding.

We can control set and setting and take advantage of the strategy of slow-dosing, to allow the mind and body to adapt to the sensation, and learn how mental navigation into the near future works in this loose cognitive state, and enjoy the activity and watching the activity of such steering.

We can probably apply this gradual build-up technique to the ego-death experience (as religious control-seizure) as well -- it can be introduced early with low doses while beginning to study the concepts and theory. 

As young researchers grow up knowing these openly hidden mysteries, they will experience ego-death as a normal, expected experience, just as the Greeks did through orgasm of the psyche during the revealing of the mystery religions.  Such an experience is a religious control-orgasm, a rapture appropriate for a self-control agent.

Can you overcome your altered-state fears by facing them head on?  Sometimes the problem is compulsive dwelling on problems and seeking to forcefully retain control over one's attention. 

Sometimes there is no definite problem in sight, and yet the mind generates the sense of deep dread, some inner neurosis tucked into a maze inside. This neurosis is a product of one's own egoic control system.

One's ego is a controller, particularly a controller of one's own future.  Our fear is about our ability to control our own future thoughts.  Where do thoughts come from?  Why do we distrust them?  How can we avoid thinking our way into fear, as though fear is a strange attractor? 

But one's thoughts are attributed to the ego -- they are considered the product of one's own creation.  How is it that we are afraid of our own creation, filled with fear about what thought we are going to raise next? 

We have only a problematic kind of control over our near-future thoughts.  We may be interested in this problem because we intuit that this way lies divine madness and neural peak experience -- a neural orgasm of oneself as control-agent trying to exercise control over one's near-future thoughts.

If only the ego could decides to ignore the free-swirling fear, withholding credence and interest, the fear could disappear, evaporate.  For some reason not immediately apparent, we pursue this problem, if only to solve it and get it out of the way of our having a transcendently blissful session.

If I am fixated on a fearful but attracting thought, what action can I take to ignore that thought, that attractive dynamic?  "Don't think of the sacred control vortex."

The vortex of the vaguely suspected fear-control problem has no apparent substantiality, no independent or objective reality. It feeds off of, and builds up, the mind's own self-generated distress.  If we want to be blissfully and peacefully happy, why, exactly, cannot we simply be happy, by direct mental exertion to bring about happiness?

So we think of the goal as "Settle for bright entertainment, never mind seeking some awful, amazing control vortex."

But we know that once the mysterious anxiety hits, the chance of relaxing and simply enjoying the loose cognitive state is called into doubt. Once the panic endoneurochemicals such as adrenaline secrete, it's a whole different mental dynamic, switching suddenly from an idle problem of enjoying and securing recreational pleasure to an unexpected life-or-death cosmic ordeal -- now the goal suddenly changes to "How can I possibly find some way to survive this?"  "How long must I hang on for dear life lest I lose everything, lose all my wealth of power as a control-agent? 

Panic endochemicals, combined with more insight about the problem of controlling oneself in the near future as controller, radically change the session into a journey into the chains of hell, and the chemicals and overly brilliant, dreaded insights don't go away for hours.

Outright panic is overkill.  Ego-death control-seizure not only doesn't require panic; sheer panic actually reduces the mind's ability to experience the peak experience of control-seizure, resulting instead in mere scrambling and clutching at control, which is ultimately as shallow and uninteresting as it is dangerous.

Such a strange kind of pleasure, a remarkable type of orgasm that the mind has a potential to undergo.  This pleasure is something more than mere happiness -- the blossoming mature mind finds a kind of transcendent rapturous pleasure in ego-death control-seizure.

Can this pleasure be called "positive affect", positive emotion?  Or is it a more transcendent form of pleasure than any mundane positiveness -- beyond positive and negative experiencing?  The mind has, after all, worked on and in a way solved the problem of meta-fear, the problem of controlling the fear of not being able to control fear. 

Mental attention becomes focused on some alien distress that descends from the heavens and is only recognized and remembered when it is too late to remain among the living.  This distressful recall of the egoic operating system and how it is built to crash is a neurosis that is us. 

But it is not better to remain in the immature ignorance of childlike joy.  When we reach for the full-blown Maslowian peak experience, it is a pure bliss that is thoroughly saturated with victorious defeat of oneself as sovereign agent, a false upstart version of oneself sitting on the mental throne inside the brain, issuing commands to oneself in the future and expecting oneself to slavishly obey them.

Peak experience violates the very categories of happiness and sorrow.  Happiness, in any conventional sense, is unfulfilling.  The mind can also seek intellectual and experiential fulfillment, and feel higher pleasure through such.  Happiness is not pleasant.  Happiness is boring.  Pleasure is interesting.

Experiencing distress leads to focusing further on distress, where it comes from, and what it means for control-agency.  The entire problem of fear reduces to the problem of how one can, as a control agent, control one's mental focus as one moves from the present into the near future.  How does the mind or ego exercise control over its focus? 

Do I have the ability to control what I focus on, or can such control of mental focus be perceived as a profound problem during the state of loose cognition?  If, in a sense, I do *not* have the ability to reliably control the focus of my own mind, my own thoughts and movements of the will, then the task of not focusing on distress becomes deeply, even fatally problematic.

The enlightening control-fear vortex is distressful and the mind as quasi-voluntary focusing-machine has little choice other than to focus on it.  If you focus on preventing the slightest onset of anxiety, this will cause anxiety and will raise the problem of controlling one's mental direction of focus. 

We could only avoid the encounter with the control singularity vortex by having the luck to accidentally preventing the onset of any anxiety -- as though we can hope that the problem of fending off this seemingly free-floating fear might never arise at all.  Yet if it had not arisen, we would not discover the most fascinating thing in the world: the ego-death control-seizure vortex and how to stimulate the control-center to the point of control-orgasm.

Mystic Climax Like Sexual Climax

>Either way the principles of how mythology is created is still accurate, althought I look at archetype theory as more of a way to use myths to explain psychology not the other way around.

Jungian archetype theory is an attempt to explain human psychology, as understood by the mid-20th Century field of Psychology, in terms of myth.  The main concern that structured that interpretive framework called Psychology was ordinary-state mental dynamics and dysfunctional mental dynamics -- but not, until Maslow, and with the exception of James, an attempt to explain peak, mystic states. 

What we've ended up with is middle-level Archetype theory, using middle-level mythic theory, to explain ordinary-state mental dynamics.  But where the real action is at with archetypes and myth and psychology, where these approaches become profoundly insightful and relevant, is the confluence of high archetype theory, high myth, and high psychology as in the mystic altered state that involves a mystic climax. 

The best reason for allegorizing mystic experiencing as sex between the soul and deity is that the experience of ego death and rebirth follows an intensity and timing curve that is the same as sexual climax.  In terms of intensity and timing curve, the mystic ego-death climax is the same as the sexual climax.  Freud should roll that into his phallic cigar and suck on it for awhile.

Psychology as a field is an explanatory theory about something that exists (the mind, experiencing).

I reject the theory that the purpose of mythology is to explain ordinary-state psychology dynamics.  Myth exists to reflect strictly the mental phenomena of the intense, entheogenic mystic altered state.

Mystic climax as a distinct innate potential

>>Is mystic climax similar to a full no-free-will experience?  There is a difference in the direction of energy in the sexual climax compared to the mystic-state no-free-will climax.

The timing buildup and the sense of tension and release is similar. 

They are similar in that they both are an innate hidden potential, not evident in the majority of daily life.  Some might say that ego death is just some random artificial construction that a few minds might put together -- just a convention shared among a few of the altered-state explorers.  Ego death is not just some random possibility that some explorers might or might not stumble across. 

Even though people differ, they all normally have the sexual climax potential.  Similarly, all people have the ability to experience the ego death climax, called regeneration. 

Reformed theology note: there is no metaphysically free will, therefore some people are not destined to ever discover this ego death climax potential, while some are.  In that sense, some people are destined for 'perdition', and some for 'imperishability, regeneration, salvation'.  In either case, every normal human mind has this potential, whether or not the mind triggers that potential, just as every normal human body has the sexual climax potential.

Both types of climax are similar in that they are justifiably considered ultimate though transitory experiences, and goals in themselves.

 


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