On Neuro-Occultism: Time and Consciousness

Most people walk through the world, living their lives from birth to death without ever questioning the ticking clock, the rising and setting of the sun, the pulse of the atom. Time, both friend and enemy, seems by all accounts and measures the truest of all gods, enslaving all others, with Death as its right-hand man. And yet, physicists discovered over a century ago that time is relative, that it is not as consistent and inevitable as we happen to perceive it—and in fact, if we honestly believe that time is consistent, we are deluding ourselves, because time passes at a different rate for every observer on earth, and at a different rate every day of each observers life. But that relativistic perspective is still in the domain of classical physics—in the quantum age, we discovered the veracity of ancient eastern wisdom, that everything we perceive is illusion, even the relativity of time. The one and only thing we can count on as observers is that we are conscious—if we can perceive the world, and perceive ourselves perceiving the world and ourselves, there is no question that we exist, somehow and somewhere. Everything else is a matter of opinion, and opinion is always subjective and biased, and therefore almost always wrong.

Time is a matter of perception, but consciousness exists with or without Perception. Consciousness also exists with our without Will. Consciousness is so fundamental that it can exist entirely without Ego—and it is this fundamentality of Consciousness that underlies the Rosicrucian teachings of “The Mind of the All”, or Cosmic Consciousness as the one true god.

On Neuro-Occultism: Sensory Deprivation

When going after the Neurofilter circuit (or Third Eye, if you prefer), the oldest methodology is still the best—deprive the groping, simpering, whining survival circuits of the left hemisphere and their precious Ego of the distractions of the physical senses, and they will throw up the proverbial hands of frustration and storm off, leaving the seeker free to explore the hidden mysteries. But if you give the Ego the slightest purchase, leave the slightest distraction even off in the distance, all your hard work will be for nothing. It will cling to any vision, sound, scent, taste, or sensation, whether they be manifestations of the external or internal worlds, what you may be more used to calling ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’, respectively. As much as possible, you have to recreate the Void in all aspects, and reduce yourself to a single point-particle of Ego-less consciousness.

A recent study has shown that only fifteen minutes of total sensory deprivation is required to trigger hallucinations in healthy adults, without experience in meditation, the use of psychedelic substances, or history of mental illness. In some cases, the hallucinations triggered by sensory deprivation alone have been reported to be visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, proprioceptive, equilibrioceptive, nociceptive, thermoceptive and/or chronoceptive—in other words, covering the full range of human physiological senses. Sensory deprivation alone is more potent than low doses of psilocybin or LSD, can equal the trip of a moderate dose of LSD-25, and perhaps with continued practice and meditation, can transcend the experience of even an extremely high dose of LSD, Mescaline, Psilocybin, or DMT. Thus, Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience is as valid a guide for sensory deprivation induced trips as it is for entheogenic substance induced trips.

On Neuro-Occultism: The World-Tree and the Hanged Man

All knowledge in and of the universe can be mapped onto a tree-like graph; starting with fundamental theories of particle physics emanating from the Void through the Big Bang as roots of a tree emerging from the soil into a trunk, leading up from string theory through quantum mechanics, atomic physics, and chemistry. From there, knowledge is divided into branches—classical mechanics to astrophysics to cosmology to theology and philosophy—organic chemistry to genetics to biology to evolution to anatomy to neurology to psychology and sociology—and so on. You can see all the sciences as branches off the trunk of physics–chemistry, all the humanities as leaves on those branches.

Not all the knowledge in and of the universe needs to be factual or true, as it is simply information (a novel, unpredictable communication, as defined by information theory), but it is helpful to be able to differentiate the information that is more factual from that which is less. This ability comes only with experience, and it is called wisdom. At the core of this wisdom is what in Buddhism is referred to as the Clear Light—Enlightenment—that allows you to see, however momentarily, the universal equation underlying all of existence, and thus the connectedness of all things. This graph of all the knowledge in the universe, this World Tree, is a map so essential to our understanding of the observable universe that it appears in the mythology of nearly all cultures.

On Neuro-Occultism: Development of the Nine Circuits of Consciousness

In Timothy Leary’s and Robert Anton Wilson’s versions of the Eight-Circuit model of consciousness, they both argue in favour of a developmental model of the Conscious Mind derived from the Biogenetic Law, i.e., Recapitulation Theory, that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. This is an outmoded theory that formerly joined the fields of evolutionary and developmental biology by the assertion that the individual member of any given species on Earth demonstrates in its development from embryo to adult the entire path of evolution the species of which it is a member took to reach their collective current evolutionary stage. Due to the high number of obvious oversimplifications and exceptions to the rule that became apparent over the past century, Recapitulation Theory is no longer accepted as valid in the Biological sciences. However, on the surface it seems to be an obvious truth—and for this reason it has persisted in metaphorical form in many fields intrinsically unrelated to biology.

Some of the consequences involved with the application of this metaphor to Leary’s original Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness is the assumption that the higher four “post-terrestrial” circuits are intended for the future evolution of the species, have only been awakened in the minds of a few exceptional individuals, and are normally blocked on the genetic level by histones in the bulk of “larval” humanity (while my knowledge of genetics is admittedly wanting, from what I understand about histones alone makes this approach highly flawed)—for this reason psychedelic/entheogenic compounds are deemed necessary for the average individual to activate or access the higher circuits: cannabis for the neurosomatic circuit; low doses of LSD, or moderated doses of psilocybin or peyote for the neuroelectric circuit; regular doses of LSD or higher doses of psilocybin or peyote for the neurogenetic circuit; and high doses of LSD, or DMT or Ketamine to activate the psychoatomic/quantum non-local circuit. The lower terrestrial/survival circuits are, interestingly enough, all associated with known addictive narcotics, depressants, stimulants, and designer pharmaceuticals—and a propensity for addiction to one of these classes of drugs is very telling as to the imprinting of the associated circuit.

On Neuro-Occultism: Timothy Leary and the Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness

A few weeks back I was subtly reminded by our sly universe of The Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness, and the associated writings of Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary. Over the years, I’ve picked up tidbits here and there about Timothy Leary, his work, his role in the psychedelic and consciousness-expansion movement of the 1960s, and his importance as a historical figure in psychonautics and chaos magick; during my pilgrimage I took when I was 17 (that arguably has still not ended), I became more than casually acquainted with the works of many of his contemporaries, such as Burroughs, Huxley, and Castaneda, amongst other more eclectic writers of the time—that is, after all, what pointed me towards Chaos Magick. As for R.A.W., I was introduced to his works by a friend after returning to Canada from my journeys through the States, based on my interest in Chaos Magick and Thelema, but somehow I’ve managed to avoid ever reading Prometheus Rising or Quantum Psychology, despite constant reminders over the years at various occult bookshops across the country.

Since the universe’s helpful reminder to PTFA, I have read Prometheus Rising, Cosmic Trigger (volume 1), and Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson; and Info-Psychology, Change Your Brain and Your Brain Is God (both extracts from Changing My Mind Among Others), and The Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary (in the case of the latter-most, also with Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner). Needless to say my mind has been blown several times over. And for those of you familiar with Prometheus Rising—I’ve been drowning in an endless supply of quarters, and bombarded daily with synchronicity after synchronicity. I’m really glad my wife gave me an early warning that a cusp was on its way this spring, so that I could take full advantage of it and not miss any opportunities for spiritual, creative and material development.

On Neuro-Occultism: The Language of the Unconscious

In order to make much use of the concepts of Neuro-Occultism as I have presented so far, an accessible interface is necessary. In other words, we need a language that captures the essence of Neuro-Occultism and allows us to use and describe it, as well as apply it to ourselves; as normal, I will borrow freely from the fields of cognitive science—namely, psychology, neuroscience, classical and quantum computer science, software engineering, and artificial intelligence.

Interfaces vary, from the so-called natural languages through which we communicate with each other in speech, writing, and media; artistic mediums through which we communicate emotions more effectively than with words alone; the programming languages which developers use to pass instructions back and forth on a computer between users, memory, and processors; to the UI of our mobile phones or the steering wheel of a car. In software engineering, the general consensus is that the interface should be completely separate from the implementation—but it also cannot be denied that the interface inevitably influences the implementation, as much as the implementation might necessitate a particular interface in preference to another.

Tutorial: Running Hunchentoot on Webfaction

Lately I’ve been playing around with the Lisp web framework Weblocks that runs on Hunchentoot, and it seemed like time to test it in a deployment environment. There are not many web hosts that officially support Lisp, however, so short of setting up my own local server machine and getting a dedicated connection to the internet, it was not immediately obvious whether I could accomplish this.

Luckily, my hosting account from Webfaction—that I use for testing web apps under development before deploying them on my clients’ servers—allows me to install basically whatever linux software I want from source under my home directory. So I installed CLISP and SBCL on my server, followed by Quicklisp, set up a custom app (listening on port), forwarded a domain I wasn’t using for anything else, and installed Weblocks and CL-Prevalence through Quicklisp. Et voila! I didn’t even have to run Hunchentoot through Apache. If you’re looking for a powerful and flexible web host, WebFaction is definitely the way to go.

That being said, there were a few catches along the way, which some of you might like and/or need to know about up front.