Friday, April 22, 2005

Tune In

by Skald

More good stuff from Robert Anton Wilson:

"The Bohm model (of Quantum Physics) seems to undermine our traditional dualism of consciousness and matter. In (this model) information permeates all localities. And information that has no locality sounds a great deal like the Hindu divinity Brahma, the Chinese concept of Tao, Aldous Huxley's Mind At Large, and The Buddha Mind of Mahayana Buddhism.

'The Buddha-Mind is not God', Buddhists continually explain, and Occidentals blink, unable to understand a religion without 'God'. But Brahma, in Vedic Hinduism, does not have any of the personality, locality, temperment, or gender of Western 'Gods' and like Buddha-Mind, seems to mean a kind of non-local implicate order, or informatin without location.

Dr. Evan Harris Walker goes further. A physicists, by the way-- he has developed a model in which 'consciousness' does not exist locally at all but only appears localized due to our errors of perception. In this model, our 'minds' do not reside in our brains but non-locally permeate and/or transcend space-time entirely. Our brains, then, merely 'tune in' this non-local consciousness (which now sounds even more like Huxley's Mind At Large). "

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That last line evokes Tim Leary's famous exhortation to 'tune in'... and it hints to me at whats going on during my own inner journeys (with salvia, mushrooms, ganga, etc.).

My best current metaphor for these ally drugs: they function like a broadband connection to Mind At Large... faster and wider access than the typical 'dial up' connection I normally have.

More information gets in. But Im still stuck with the same processors once I return to mundane consciousness. Thus the weird and wild flow of information can seem difficult to understand and can take a long time to sort out.

It could be that schizophrenics (for example) likewise have a broadband connection... only it functions without their conscious control... they may have difficulty 'tuning out' the rush of information (and thus returning to mundane consciousness). Huxley and Lang, among others, have suggested exactly that.



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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're quite right about being stuck with the same processors once you 'return'. It's always a challenge to try and document the experience for yourself - to write some kind of shorthand that will allow the you of the future to figure out what the you of the past went through & keep the lessons learned there.

AJ Hoge said...

Sitters
Definitely. Thats one thing I liked about having a "salvia circle". Three of us explored together... taking turns. When one person was out, the other two took notes on their behaviour and noted anything they said. This sometimes helped processing, though sometimes the person had no recollection of what they said... or what the words referred to.

Ive been fairly lucky, as I seem to remember most of the experience. But making sense of those memories (ie. conceptualizing them) is still not easy.